The deadbolt turns with a heavyclunk.
The studio door opens. Rory Kavanagh walks in.
He is carrying a messenger bag and two brown paper sacks. He brings an energy into the room that vibrates at a frequency incompatible with the quiet morning we’ve been occupying.
"I brought food," he announces. "Real food. Eggs, bread, butter. Also the entire financial architecture of the Russian shell company network, but we'll get to that after breakfast."
He sets the bags on the counter. He pulls out a carton of eggs, a loaf of sourdough, a brick of salted butter. His hands move with the same fluid dexterity I've seen in his brother—the Kavanagh kinetic signature, all economy and precision. But where Killian's hands are built for impact, Rory's are built for detail. Forger's hands.
Killian straightens off the counter. I see the wince he suppresses, the micro-adjustment in his posture as the stitches pull.
He reaches out. His hand lands on the back of Rory's neck. He presses his forehead against his brother’s.
Rory leans into it. For two seconds, they exist in a space that predates the war and the marriage and the bodies in the bar. A private language of touch.
Then Rory pulls back. He punches Killian's uninjured shoulder.
"You scared the shit out of me, Kill. Twenty-four hours. No contact. Brennan was ready to mobilize every soldier in the district."
"Brennan doesn't know where we are."
"Brennan doesn't know anything. I told him you were handling something off-grid and to hold the line." Rory’s eyes shift to me.
The assessment is quick. Surgical. He takes in the stolen car parked outside, the blood on my trousers, the stubble on my jaw. His gaze drops to my neck, where the collar of the t-shirt he lent me dips low enough to reveal the bite mark.
He doesn't comment. But his mouth twitches.
"Eggs?" he says.
We eat.
Rory scrambles eggs on the camping stove with a competence that suggests this is a routine. The artist who lives in a factory and cooks breakfast on a burner. The eggs are good. The toast is hot. We eat standing at the counter because the only table in the studio is the drafting table, and I am not eating off a surface I just scrubbed down with turpentine.
After the food, Rory clears the counter. He opens his messenger bag and extracts a laptop. It is covered in stickers—band logos, political slogans, a hand-drawn reaper in green ink.
He opens it. The screen lights up with a cascade of data.
"I didn't just hide," Rory says. He angles the screen so we can see. "You gave me the shell company names from the wire transfers. I spent the last sixteen hours running them through every database I could access."
"Define access," I say.
"SEC filing archives. FinCEN suspicious activity reports. Three offshore banking portals." He grins. It is Killian’s grin, sharp and dangerous. "And the internal accounting system of a Russian-linked import company in Brighton Beach. Their firewall was insulting."
I look at the screen.
The data is dense. Hundreds of transactions flowing through a web of shell companies—LLCs registered in Delaware, holding companies in the Caymans, pass-through entities in Cyprus.
I recognize the pattern. It is the layering stage of a sophisticated laundering operation. Designed to obscure the origin of funds through complexity.
I pull a stool over. I sit down.
"Walk me through the structure."
Rory taps a key. A visual map appears—nodes and connections, color-coded by jurisdiction.
"The money starts here," he says, pointing to a cluster of cash-intensive businesses. Laundromats. Car washes. Construction firms. "It flows up through the shell network, consolidating at each layer until it reaches a single holding company registered in Liechtenstein."
"Volkov Capital Partners," I read.
