He stares at the screen. His lips move silently, working through the phonetic substitutions, the archaic grammar, the compressed syntax of a language designed to be spoken in whispers.
"It's a location," he says. His voice has changed. Quieter. The humor is gone. "An address. Industrial district, south side. Near the old smelting plant."
"And?"
"And a word I haven't heard since my grandfather was alive."
"What word?"
"Cruinniú." He looks at me. "A gathering. A meeting of principals. Someone was organizing a sit-down—off the books, outside both families' networks—and they hid the invitation on your driver's phone using a language only my bloodline speaks."
The implications cascade through my mind.
Someone inside the Kavanagh organization is communicating with the people who killed Marco. They used a Falcone device as a dead drop.
"When?" I ask.
"There's no date. Just the location and the word. It could be standing—a recurring meeting point. Or it could be tonight."
"Then we surveil it."
"With what resources?" Killian asks. He hands the phone back to me. "Your men will be recognized south of the river immediately. A Falcone surveillance team in the industrial district stands out like a flare. My men... I can't trust them. Not until I know who speaks the cant."
He sits on the weight bench. He starts to unwrap the tape from his hands. He uses his teeth to pull the end loose, a motion that is entirely practical and entirely distracting.
"This needs to be us," he says. "Just us."
I look at him. "A Falcone and a Kavanagh conducting joint surveillance in contested territory."
"A husband and a husband," he corrects.
The word lands differently than it has before. Less like a shackle. More like a credential.
"Nobody in either organization expects us to operate as a unit," he continues, unwinding the bloody tape from his knuckles. "They think we hate each other. They think we’re at war in our own house. Which makes us the only asset the enemy hasn't accounted for."
He’s right.
The realization settles with the weight of structural inevitability. Every resource available to us—Falcone intelligence, Kavanagh muscle, financial networks, street networks—has been mappedand anticipated by an adversary who has demonstrated intimate knowledge of both families' operational signatures. Ties. Coins. Dialects. They know us.
They don't know us asus.
They don't know that the forced marriage produced an anomaly: two men who speak different languages of the same war, who see different spectrums of the same threat, who can read a crime scene and a balance sheet and a five-hundred-year-old trade cant.
I look at Killian. The sweat is drying on his skin. He looks dangerous. Capable.
"We go tonight," I say.
"We go tonight," he agrees. He balls up the tape and tosses it into the corner. He stands up, looming over me. "I'll drive. My car. It blends in better than your armored limos."
"Agreed."
"And Alessandro?"
"Yes?"
"If we find them... if we find the people who killed your man and threatened my brother..."
"We kill them," I finish.
