He lets go.
The absence of contact registers as a specific kind of cold—not temperature but vacancy, the negative space where his hand was, imprinted on my palm like a photograph.
"Movement," he says.
I look at the target building.
A car pulls into the loading dock—a dark SUV, late model, windows blacked out. The headlights die. A figure exits the driver's side. Average build. Dark jacket. He moves to the entrance and punches a code into a keypad I can barely see from this distance.
A second figure exits the passenger side.
Taller. Heavier. He walks with the rolling gait of a man whose knees have absorbed decades of hard ground, and somethingabout the silhouette—the specific hunch of the shoulders, the way the left hand stays in the jacket pocket while the right swings free—triggers a recognition response so deep in my nervous system that it bypasses cognition entirely and arrives as a physical sensation.
I know that walk.
The figure passes under the security light, and the illumination catches his face for two seconds—long enough.
The jaw, heavy and squared. The broken capillaries across the nose. The white hair, thick, combed back from a forehead lined with decades of loyalty and silence.
Seamus Maguire.
My father's oldest friend. My godfather. The man who held me at my christening and taught me to tie my shoes and sat at our kitchen table every Sunday for the first fifteen years of my life eating my mother's soda bread and telling stories about the old country that made Rory laugh so hard he'd choke on his milk.
Uncle Seamus.
"Killian." Alessandro's voice is a blade in the dark. "Do you know him?"
I can't speak. My throat has sealed. The recognition is still cascading through my system—memory after memory detonating in sequence like charges set along a demolition line. Seamus at the pub. Seamus at my mother's funeral. Seamus pressing a fifty-euro note into my hand on my eighteenth birthday and saying,You're the future of this family, boy. Don't let anyone tell you different.
Seamus walking into a building to meet a Russian lieutenant.
The SUV's first figure reappears in the loading dock entrance. He lights a cigarette, and the flare of the lighter illuminates sharp Slavic features, a shaved head, a tattoo on the neck that I've seen in intelligence photos. A lieutenant. Middle management. The kind of man who doesn't make decisions but facilitates them.
Seamus Maguire, my godfather, is meeting with the enemy that is trying to destroy my family.
The betrayal is a blade between my ribs—not sharp, not clean, but serrated, and it goes in slow.
"Killian." Alessandro's voice again. Closer. His hand is on my forearm. The contact is grounding—five points of pressure, deliberate, the same intentional touch he used on the handshake. "Killian, look at me. We need to leave. We have the intel. We need to?—"
The red dot appears on his chest.
Small. Steady. Laser-precise.
A circle of light no bigger than a dime, sitting on the left side of his sternum, directly over the heart—the Kevlar would catch the round, but the placement tells me the shooter isn't aiming for the vest. The shooter is aiming for the gap. The two-inch window between the vest panel and the armhole where the fabric thins and the plate doesn't cover.
"Don't move." My voice comes out flat. Mechanical. The grief over Seamus vaporizes, replaced by something older and faster—the operational wiring that takes over when the threat is immediate and the person beside me is in the crosshairs.
Alessandro follows my gaze. Sees the dot. His breath catches—a single, involuntary hitch—and then his body goes still with the discipline of a man who has been trained to freeze when targeted.
The dot holds steady on his chest.
Someone is watching us. Someone who knew we'd be here, at this location, at this hour. Someone who has been three steps ahead of us since the first coin was placed in a dead man's mouth.
My hand moves to the Glock on my hip.
No. Too slow. If I draw, the shooter fires.
The dot doesn't waver.
