Chapter 23
CILLIAN
Ihand Saoirse to my mother and Maeve in the sacristy while staff strip the torn hem from her dress and wrap her in a coat. She catches my wrist before I turn away, and her eyes hold mine with the same focus she carried into my office and into gunfire.
“Don’t let him run twice,” she murmurs.
I shake my head and keep my eyes rooted on her. “I won’t.”
She replies with a wry smile first. “And don’t do something stupid to prove a point.”
I look at her stomach. “I’m long past points.”
Maeve snorts and pins Saoirse’s hair back from her face. “That answer was almost romantic. Go hunt him before you start sounding soft.”
The lower house sits under the old kitchens, stone walls, no windows, one stair in and one out.
Gavin is in the second room when I walk in, wrists tied to the chair, cheek swelling, shirt cut open where Conall checked for wires.
Nikolas stands by the table with a tablet and a paper map, and Declan leans against the wall pretending he is not enjoying himself.
Gavin lifts his head and smiles through blood. “Bride leave you already?”
I sit opposite him. “You brought men to my wedding and lost them before they cleared the chapel. Patrick used to hire better.”
Nikolas places the recovered phone on the table. “Location pin sent to one of the shooters, then deleted. Quarry district. Two structures. Fuel buys tied to one of Patrick’s dead shell firms.”
Gavin looks away too quickly.
Declan smiles. “Timing.”
I keep my voice flat. “Give me the site, the fallback route, and the men inside, and this gets shorter.”
He spits at the floor. “You’ll do what you want anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll keep my breath.”
I stand, move behind him, and brace both hands on the chair back so he can hear me without seeing my face. “Patrick is already moving. Nikolas has his fuel line, I have your phone, and the men you came with are dead. He sent you here to die while he packed a car.”
His shoulders twitch.
I step back into view. “Conall.”
Conall drags in the wounded pantry man and drops him to his knees beside Gavin. The boy is shaking before I ask a question.
“Who briefed you?”
“Gavin.”
Gavin lunges against the ties. “Shut up.”
“Rally point after the chapel?” I say to the boy.
“Layby by the old mill, then split convoy. If the inside team failed, we move to Red Briar.”
Gavin goes still, and that tells me more than the words.
Declan taps the map. “Old quarry house.”
Nikolas is already on comms. “I’ll move road teams and lock the back lanes.”
I turn to Gavin. “You’re riding with us.”
He narrows his eyes. “Why?”
“So if Patrick runs, I can show him what his best man looks like when he fails.”
By the time we come back up, the courtyard is controlled.
Bodies are under tarps, medics work two of ours near the gate, and the chapel doors are shut again.
Saoirse waits under the side entrance in my mother’s coat, Maeve beside her, a shooter at the steps.
She should be inside. She knows better and waits anyway.
“We have a location,” I tell her.
“Red Briar,” she says at once.
I stop. “How?”
“Gavin used to call quarry runs that. He liked naming places.”
I hate how much of him she still has to remember.
“We move now,” I say. “You stay here with Mam and Maeve. Nikolas is doubling the perimeter.”
Her eyes search mine. “You think Patrick is there.”
“I think he was there an hour ago.”
“And if he runs?”
“Then I chase.”
She steps closer and grips my forearm under the coat sleeve. “Bring him to me if you can.”
It is not a plea. It is a decision.
I look at her belly beneath the coat, then at her face. “If I bring him back breathing, the last call is yours.”
Maeve goes still, but she says nothing.
We run the coast road in two black SUVs and a bike scout, no lights and no noise, only speed and comms. Conall drives, I ride front with a rifle across my knees, and Gavin is cuffed in back between Murphy and Sten. Every bump strips a little more bravado off him.
Nikolas updates through the earpiece while his team swings inland to cut the back roads. “Drone feed is patchy in the wind. Heat at Red Briar main house is light, maybe five. Machine shed has one vehicle warm and another cooling.”
“Any external eyes?”
“Possible watcher on the east berm.”
“Assume man.”
Red Briar sits in an old quarry cut, a site office expanded into a hideout, flat roof, dark floodlights, lower windows lit. Too lit for a place under pressure and too quiet for a clean pullout. Patrick left a welcome.
Our flank pair drops the watcher with suppressed shots before he can call in. No alarm from the house. Either they did not hear it or they want us closer.
We breach the rear utility door on Conall’s count.
One man rises from a chair near the boiler and dies before his pistol clears the table.
Conall takes another in the corridor as he reaches for a radio.
We push toward the front office and hit the first trap, wire across the hall tied to a rack loaded with gear and fuel tins.
It crashes hard and loud, buying the men in front a few seconds.
Patrick still thinks in delays.
I vault the rack and cut left into the office. Empty chairs. Maps torn down. Cash box open. Two plates still warm. Back door swinging.
“Rear yard!”
We hit the yard as a Land Rover tears out of the machine shed lane, fishtails, clips the gate post, and straightens for the conveyor road. I see the driver for half a second through the windshield, older, gray at the temples, mouth set.
Patrick.
A month ago, this chase would have ended in one of his blind alleys.
He still had payroll then, still had men willing to lie for him, still had clean plates, warm safe houses, and enough fear in the city to make witnesses look at their shoes.
I did not go at him with a headline or a grand declaration after the lobby attack. I went at his systems.
Week one, I took money. Nikolas and I mapped the shells he was still using after the lobby hit, then I called in every debt he forgot I was carrying.
A banker in Dublin froze two accounts tied to road aggregate contracts after I put a customs fraud file on his desk.
A broker in Cork lost his appetite for Patrick’s cash when Declan sent him photos of his second ledger and the woman he kept hidden from his wife.
We squeezed three payment routes in six days, and Patrick missed payroll again.
Week two, I took movement. I leaned on port supervisors he thought were neutral, and I replaced one with a man whose son I paid through engineering school.
I pushed inspections onto trucks linked to his fronts, delayed ferries by hours at a time, and had a haulage insurer flag one contractor for repeated documentation faults.
Men who live on speed start panicking when they have to wait.
Panicked drivers talk. Panicked managers cut corners.
We listened, and then we mapped who they called when routes failed.
Week three, I took confidence. We fed him small wins, a shipment he thought slipped through, a courier he thought stayed clean, a house he thought remained dark.
Every one carried a tag, a watcher, or a quiet hand already turned.
When he tried to replace losses with hired crews, he overpaid and still got boys who made noise instead of professionals who finish jobs.
He started burning reserve cash and calling it expansion.
The city noticed the difference before he did.
Week four, I cut his voice. We lifted one relay man, then another, and neither disappeared loudly enough to warn the rest. Nikolas spoofed two burner chains and let Patrick talk to ghosts for two days while we followed the real runner carrying printouts between fallback sites.
One priest he used for messages refused him after my mother paid for the roof repair Patrick had promised and never delivered.
One doctor stopped writing scripts after Saoirse gave me the names tied to her mother’s lies.
By the time tonight came, Patrick was not running an organization.
He was running memory, anger, and a shrinking circle of men who feared me almost as much as they feared him.
He sent his best man to my wedding and came to Red Briar with leftovers and traps built from scrap.
That is why he is driving his own car. That is why he is shooting one-handed instead of sitting behind three layers of loyal men.
He is not a king in retreat. He is a cornered operator trying to outrun the sound of his own collapse.
And even now, with the road breaking under us and rounds hitting our hood, he cannot stop trying to teach the old lesson.
Delay. Confuse. Split attention. Bleed the chase.
He taught that method to half the men who worked for him, and I learned it watching from the other side for years.
Tonight, I return it with interest, and every turn he takes only closes one more gate behind him.
He is still dangerous, and that is the only reason I respect the chase at all, but respect is not mercy, and tonight I did not come to negotiate with ruins, ghosts, or excuses.
I fire twice and crack the glass, but he keeps moving.
The chase turns ugly at once. Quarry roads are broken tarmac, blind mounds, loose gravel, and sudden drops, and Patrick drives like a man who already accepted death and only cares who pays with him.
Conall throws our SUV around the first bend so hard, Murphy slams Gavin into the door, and Sten hangs out the rear window to watch the ridge.
“Nikolas, he’s on conveyor road heading north cut.”
“We’re moving.”
Patrick kills his lights at the next rise and vanishes. Conall swears, but I catch a flick of brake light low and left at the water pit road.
“Left. Now.”
Conall yanks the wheel, and we drop onto the pit shelf road, black water on one side and broken guard posts on the other. Patrick fires one-handed out the window. Rounds crack across our hood and spider Conall’s side of the windshield.
“He’s still got form,” Conall says.
“Put us on him.”
Ahead, the shelf splits. Patrick feints high, then dives low into the conveyor cut. Conall follows without asking.
“Contact left,” Sten shouts.
Patrick left a tail team in the cut. Rounds hammer the rear quarter and pop one tire. Conall fights the skid, Murphy returns fire through the side window, and Gavin laughs into the gag Murphy shoved in his mouth five minutes earlier.
I lean out, fire toward the flashes, and one light drops. The Rover vanishes under the conveyor shadow.
“We lose him here, we lose him,” Conall says.
“Then don’t.”
He floors it on the blown tire and drags us through the cut. We burst into the old weigh station yard and find a fuel tanker parked sideways across half the exit. Patrick’s Rover slips through the gap and climbs for the north ridge. An SUV will not fit.
“Out,” Conall barks.
We hit the ground running. Patrick bails before the crest and cuts across broken concrete toward the conveyor stairs. Smart. He knows Nikolas will net the vehicle.
I sprint after him with Conall on my right and Murphy two steps behind. Patrick moves well for his age, not fast in a straight line but efficient, firing over his shoulder whenever he buys a second. One round punches the railing near my hand as I hit the stairs.
“Patrick,” I shout. “You’re out of road.”
“You said that ten years ago,” he throws back.
The catwalk shudders under our weight. Wind drives grit through the steel and the old structure groans around us. He kicks a crate into our path, Conall takes it in the thigh and stumbles, and Patrick cuts into the old control room at the end of the sorting platform.
I hit the door a second behind him.
Broken glass. Dead monitors. Open panels. Patrick at the far window trying to force it with one hand and holding a pistol in the other.
“Done,” I say.
He turns and fires. I move right, the shot tears into a panel, and Conall comes through low.
Patrick pivots toward him, and I close the distance, catch his gun wrist, and drive him into the console.
The pistol goes off into the ceiling. He is filthy in the clinch, thumb for my eye, knee for my groin, elbow for my ribs, and he reaches for a boot knife when Conall strips the gun.
I grab his knife wrist and take the blade across my palm. Pain flashes hot. I punch him in the throat, then the gut, and Conall slams him face-first onto the console and wrenches both arms behind him.
“Cuffs,” I say.
Steel clicks shut.
Nikolas appears in the doorway with two men. “Perimeter secure. Two runners down by the ridge. This is the last one moving.”
Patrick coughs, spits blood, and still manages a smile. “You think catching me ends what I built?”
“No,” I say, wrapping my bleeding hand in the cloth Conall throws me. “Killing the story does.”
He looks at me through blood and sweat and says the one thing he still thinks can reach me. “Then let the girl do it.”
I hold his stare for a second, then nod. “Exactly.”
We drag him down the stairs and into the yard. Gavin is on his knees by the tanker with Sten behind him, and when he sees Patrick in cuffs, his face goes gray. Patrick stops dead for the first time all night.
“Gavin,” he says.
Gavin gives him a broken laugh. “Told you he’d get lucky.”
Patrick’s expression closes like a door.
We load them into separate restraints in the rear SUV and turn back for the coast. The convoy runs dark until the house lights come into view, perimeter doubled, chapel dark except for work lamps where men clear glass from the floor we were married on an hour earlier.
Saoirse is in the drawing room when we bring them in, changed into one of Maeve’s dresses, hair re-pinned, face pale and composed. Maeve stands at her shoulder. My mother sits by the hearth with the priest, and Declan waits by the door with his arms folded.
Saoirse looks at Gavin first, then Patrick.
Nothing in her face moves.
I cross to her and let her see the fresh bandage on my hand before I speak. “We got him.”
Her eyes flick to my hand, then back to mine. I turn, and Murphy shoves Patrick one step into the center of the room, chains tight, boots leaving quarry mud on my mother’s floor. Gavin stays back with Sten, suddenly small without his swagger.
Patrick lifts his chin and tries to summon the old voice. “Daughter.”
Maeve’s hand comes down on the chair back hard enough to creak wood. Saoirse does not flinch.
I move to her side and keep my voice low, for her and for everyone listening.
“He’s yours now,” I say. “Tell me what you want done.”