He turns his head. Sweat runs down his temple, dripping onto his shoulder.
His eyes find me. The green is vivid against the flush of exertion. For a second, there is a flicker of something in his gaze—memory. The kitchen. The knife. The taste of me.
He shuts it down instantly. The mask slides back into place.
"My expertise," he says, his voice rough. "In what? Breaking things? Drinking? Disappointing my father?"
"Linguistics."
He releases the bag. It swings gently between us. He reaches for a towel on the bench and drags it across his face. The motion exposes the full landscape of his torso—the scarring across his ribs, the bruise on his flank that's fading to green, the density of a body that has been hit and healed and hit again so many times the tissue has developed its own topography.
"You want my help with linguistics," he repeats, lowering the towel. He looks skeptical. "Did you run out of Sudoku puzzles?"
"I want your help with a cipher."
I hold up Marco's phone.
His expression shifts. The gym bravado drops away, replaced by the sharp, operational focus I saw at the warehouse. He crosses the room. He takes the phone. His fingers are taped and damp, and they brush mine during the transfer.
The contact sends a spark through my nervous system that I refuse to acknowledge.
"Marco's phone?" he asks.
"Hidden partition. Encrypted file. Forty-seven kilobytes. I've run every standard decryption protocol. The cipher isn't mathematical. It's linguistic."
"What language?"
"Irish. But not modern standardized Irish. The phonetic structure suggests a regional dialect—archaic, compressed,possibly oral-tradition-based. It doesn't match any database I have access to."
He looks at the screen. He scrolls through the gibberish.
His brow furrows. Not confusion. Recognition.
He laughs.
It’s a low, incredulous sound that bounces off the walls of the small room.
"This isn't a code," he says. "It'sBéarlagair na Saor."
"Translate."
"The Language of the Craftsmen. It's a cant—a secret trade language, probably five hundred years old. My grandfather used it. His father used it. It's not Irish. It's a constructed jargon built on an Irish substrate, used by stonemasons and tradesmen to communicate without the English landlords understanding."
He scrolls further, his eyes scanning the text. His expression has shifted into something I haven't seen before—a kind of reverence. The expression of a man handling an artifact from his own history.
"The Kavanagh clan adopted it three generations ago as an internal cipher," he says quietly. "Only family members learn it. It's never been written down in any formal system. You learn it by ear, from your father or your uncle."
"Until now," I say.
"Until now." His expression darkens. The reverence curdles into something harder. "Which means whoever encrypted this file either is a Kavanagh or had access to someone who is."
"How many people speak it?"
"Fluently? Enough to write a cipher?" He stops. He counts on his fingers. "Seven. Including me. Including Rory. Including Da. My cousins in Boston... maybe."
The number hangs in the air. Seven suspects. One of them—or someone close to them—planted a message on a dead Falcone driver's phone.
"Can you read it?" I ask.
