“Back in a minute,” I say to Siobhan, and she waves me off with a smile that is tired and ferociously proud.
I set my glass on the bar and turn to check on Liam, who is currently making a small fort out of napkins under the table where the band has stashed their cases. He is safe with two handlers I trust and one man who looks like a tourist and is absolutely not. I exhale. I reach for a glass of water. I taste citrus and sugar, then a bitter thread that doesn’t belong, and my mouth tells me to be smarter but the thought arrives late. The room narrows and widens in the same breath. The trio smears into a single long note. The ceiling drifts.
“Hey,” I say to no one, to everyone. “That’s not?—”
The floor moves four inches to the left. The lights twin themselves. I blink. A hand with a white cuff touches my elbow and guides me toward a small set of doors by the service bar, the ones that look like they open onto a closet but breathe conditioned air.
“Elevator,” the cuff says, pleasant and professional. “Press. Photos downstairs.”
“I have a… son,” I hear myself say, careful around the corners of words so I don’t trip.
“We’ll be two minutes,” the cuff says.
The elevator doors part on a hush. The car is lined in brushed steel that throws our reflections back in long strips. I see the corner of my crown in the mirror, just before everything slides out of frame.
The second cocktail tips over on the bar and nobody notices.
28
DECLAN
The rooftop tastes like congratulations and snow. I am three conversations deep, sponsor, city councilman, a chef from Cork with good hands, and I am still watching her in every reflection. Aoife moves through praise like she was born to do it, head up, shoulders loose, the crown Liam put on her sitting crooked because it refuses to obey physics.
The hour is wrong for a child. I catch the detail lead’s eye and tilt my chin toward the window where Liam is teaching a bodyguard how to fold a napkin into a fox. He reads me fast and keys his mic.
“Nanny and car now,” I say, low enough that only the men who need to hear it will move. “Two vehicles. Second sits on the bumper. Nanny in back with him. Fox song on the radio, mint sweets in the paper bag, the shark blanket, windows up, heads down. East then south, no stops. Call when he is in his bed.”
The nanny appears with a soft voice and a bag that crackles like comfort. Liam argues without heat and yields to the blanket and the promise of music and sugar. A man takes point to the private lift, another walks behind, and the last faces outward so the doors close on the boy and the song and the people paid tomake sure he does not learn fear the way some children learn phonics.
I look back to the bar to find Aoife because I have trained myself to keep her inside the circle of my sight. She is not at the bar. Not by the band. Not by the windows.
“Where is she?” I ask one of her staff, already moving.
“Bathroom,” the girl says, eyes sliding away. “She put her drink down there.”
Her purse is still by the bar. Her phone sits next to it like a sleeping animal. The paper crown tilts on the counter and turns the hour cruel.
I do not raise my voice. “Clear the roof.”
The word travels and my men move. Music stutters, heaters hum too loud, and the crowd thins under polite excuses and the scent of gossip. A hotel manager appears, ready to protest, then sees my face and finds the sense not to.
“Private elevator?” I ask the bartender, already scanning.
He nods toward a staff alcove. Doors closed. No keypad outside. Staff only.
“Evan,” I say to the man with the tourist face. “Floor by floor.”
We ride the public car down. Security meets us because money is quick. I show them my quick. Radios crackle. Every floor is swept. My men move past carts and dark conference rooms. Nothing. The private lift sits at the end of a staff corridor like a secret that never learned how to behave.
The night manager keys the panel and shows me the log. The car went down four minutes ago. It stopped at B2, then the service level. It has not returned.
We take the stairs. Carpet gives way to concrete. Air cools. A corridor angles toward the service exit.
“Cameras,” I say.
“Some,” the manager admits. “Not enough.”
The feeds show what I already know. Aoife walking beside Siobhan, steady until she is not, her hand brushing the door frame like she wants the building to steady her. Siobhan’s arm is at her elbow, guiding, not grabbing. A friend’s gesture. That is what makes it work.
