For a moment, she is brilliant—elbows sharp, footwork flawless, drawing blood from the wiry one with a knife she must have kept in her boot.
But the bigger man catches her at the shoulder, slams her back against the hood, and drives his fist into her ribs with a sickening sound.
I do not scream.
I do not run far.
Another pair of hands grabs me from the hedgerow.
I thrash, land a kick, but it does nothing.
A cloth presses to my face—sharp with chemicals—and the world pulls inward like a closing eye.
The last thing I hear is Lena's voice, breathless and furious, shouting my name like a curse.
Then silence.
15
RUAIRÍ
The port contractors take up two-thirds of the boardroom.
It's not meant for bodies, this space—it's meant for documents, for spreadsheets and diagrams and the backwash from cheap percolator coffee.
The contractors are all ex-military, every last one, so when I walk in they stand and go still, like they've been waiting since last week.
Fiachra sits at my left, arms folded, eyes on the door, playing at being bored but ready to kill if I so much as nod.
The first hour is routine—review of shipping manifests, inspection logs, discrepancy between the digital manifests and the actual barcode tallies.
The contractors try to talk in code, but they're bad at it.
I don't interrupt, just let the conversation circle and spiral, a bath drain of jargon and plausible deniability.
Every ten minutes, someone—always the youngest—glances up at the mirrored glass and wonders if it's one-way.
I don't tell them it's a moot point.
My phone vibrates in my pocket, the haptic signature of an in-house call.
I ignore it.
Fiachra sees me do it and raises one brow, just a hair.
I'm tempted to grin, but the next vibrationis different—two short, one long, the urgent pattern that gets through even if you're in the middle of church, confession, or a council session.
I slide the phone up, don't bother to hide it.
The message is a single line, all caps?—
TARGET LOST.
POSSIBLE BREACH.
I don't need to read it twice.
I stand, the chair scraping a chord across the tiles, and the contractors all go silent.
