By the time I get back to the house, the afternoon has gone yellow and dim.
The drive is lined with Crowley loyalists, faces new and old, and each one nods as I pass, but there's an edge to it, like they're all waiting for the same bad news to finally drop.
I find Keira in the east library.
She sits with her back to the room, a book open in her lap, but her eyes are not on the page.
The light comes in slantwise, turning the dust into sheets of gold, and it outlines her in a way that makes her look smaller than she is.
She does not look up when I enter.
After pouring a glass of whiskey from the cart, I leanagainst the radiator.
For a minute I just watch her, the way her hair falls over one eye, the way she lifts her chin every time she turns a page as if bracing for a punch.
The book is upside down.
I say, "Your father's accounts were worse than anyone let on."
She closes the book, but not all the way.
"Define worse."
"Offshore. Leveraged. He owed to every syndicate between here and the Hague. The only reason they didn't take the house is that no one wanted to deal with the bodies it would leave behind."
She turns a page with deliberate care.
"And now?"
"Now it's Crowley," I say, but not unkindly.
"What's left are a few shell companies barely keeping up the illusion of legitimacy, but behind them, the real weight sits in what never got shut down—Wexford, where someone's still funneling containers under Donnelly licenses, and Red Moss, which was supposed to be off the books for good, is suddenly showing up again in supply logs routed through the old network."
Her eyes soften for a moment, enough to make me feel a stab of regret.
It must be damning, knowing that she had no chance from the start.
I did not marry her out of sentiment, nor out of some loyalty to a dead man's bloodline, but because the Italians were circling for control of the southern routes and the O'Duinns had already begun pressing into Wexford with enough quiet aggression to suggest they thought no one would stop them.
They weren't after Keira herself.
They were after what was still embedded in the Donnelly legacy—dormant smuggling routes, ghost account numbers, and old offshore clearances that had never been fully shut down.
Red Moss was part of it, yes, but not the whole.
They wanted the shell companies, the pre-cleared docks, the port permissions still valid in Wexford andWaterford, the informal pacts with customs officers and the discreet airstrip her father once used when things got too hot in Dublin.
What she didn't know—what I didn't know until recently—was that even after the Donnellys fell, no one fully cleaned up the mess.
Some of those assets were still alive on paper, waiting for someone with just enough legitimacy to reclaim them.
The Italians tried first, pushing through an old contact in Cork.
The O'Duinns came next, testing the waters through Boyle and a former Donnelly driver.
But neither could fully claim the system because the paperwork, the name, the bloodline—it all ran through her.
So I married her to shut the door, to hold the rights myself, and to make it clear that whatever was left of the Donnelly empire was no longer unclaimed.
