I feel nothing.
Their ghosts are spent, their leverage bankrupt.
I sit in the chair, which creaks under my weight.
I roll it back and put my boots up on the desk.
The city is framed in the window—rooftops, cranes, the sprawl of future real estate projects stitched together by the dark thread of the river.
Below, headlights tangle in the roundabouts like mating insects.
I watch for a minute, timing the patterns, then turn to the wall safe.
It's already ajar.
Inside rests a single folder marked in red.
I pull it free and flip through the pages.
Every asset, every debt, every account payable and receivable.
The Donnellys still control the eastern port routes, but only barely.
Their finances are shot through with holes—bad loans, over-leveraged holdings, whole subsidiary companies that exist only to prop up someone's mistress.
I make a mental tally, then close the folder and toss it onto the desk.
The only thing of value left is the name, and even that is depreciating.
I light a cigarette and blow the smoke out the window, watching it disappear into the chill.
I never smoked untilSarajevo, but after you've watched a man lose his jaw to a grenade, nicotine is the least of your worries.
The point of this marriage is not blood or even loyalty.
It's leverage.
The Donnellys are spent but their connections, if properly exploited, will buy me the one thing I can't acquire by force—legitimacy.
The police, the Customs officials, the soft-handed politicians who pretend to despise us but crave our favors.
Keira is the key to all of it, the only Donnelly left worth anything, and even she is more symbol than substance.
She could die tomorrow, and the city would forget her by Christmas.
But alive, in my household, she opens a thousand doors.
I finish the cigarette, crush the filter, and toss it into an empty whiskey glass.
I hear footsteps in the hallway.
I tense, but the rhythm is wrong for an ambush.
It's the woman from the poker room, a clipboard in one hand and a phone in the other.
"They want you downstairs," she says.
"Your brother's here."
