Maybe he's right, but I've lived longer than any of the men who used to mock my version of progress.
What bothers me most about the Connollys isn't their appetite for mayhem or their willingness to torch half a block just to make a point.
It's that they don't care about the game.
They don't play to win.
They play to erase the board.
You can't predict that.
You can only prepare for the moment it finally matters.
Keira, though—she's something else.
She isn't a fighter, not in the way my brothers mean it, but she's survived things they wouldn't dare name out loud.
She has her father's sense for risk, her mother's indifference to pain, and something else, something I can't catalog.
In her first week here, she mapped every exit in the house, broke the library lockjust to prove it could be done, and talked her way past three levels of staff without anyone remembering her face or her name.
Fiachra wanted her watched, but I knew there was no point.
If she wanted to leave, she'd already be gone.
But lately something's changed.
Not colder, exactly, just more careful.
She avoids eye contact, and when she speaks, it's like she's rehearsing for an audience that doesn't exist.
The only time I see her alive is when she's alone, reading her dead father's journals or standing at the window like she's waiting for the city to burn.
I know that look.
It's the same one I used to see in the mirror, the week before my old man died and left me with nothing but an office full of ghosts.
I head for the kitchen.
The night staff have left a bottle of Redbreast on the counter, along with a single glass, a deliberate show of respect.
I pour two fingers, neat, and carry it back to the ops wing.
The room is as I left it—quiet, but alive with the static of information.
I sit, swirl the whiskey, watch the surface go still.
The house isn't just a house.
It's a test.
Every day, it resets, and every night, you have to earn your right to wake up in it again.
I drink, let the fire settle in my gut, and scan the logs from my tablet, scrolling past hours of nothing—a staffer microwaving soup at 15:18, Gorman's soft-shoe patrol, the half-minute pause when Mullins ducked into the pantry for a smoke.
I skip to the afternoon, when Keira left her study and circled the ground floor twice, moving room to room like she was counting escape hatches.
She never looks up at the cameras, but she never walks into a blind spot, either.
