My chest does something I don't have a name for. Not relief. Not guilt. Something between the two that sits heavy and doesn't shift.
"Where?" I ask.
"M6. West of Ballinasloe." His voice is flat. Factual. The voice he uses when he's reporting numbers. "It was quick."
"And the body?"
"It will never be found."
I think about Reilan in the back of the car. Thinking he was going to the airport. Thinking he was getting out. Thinking that Aoife had saved him, and the worst was over.
I think about Aoife asleep upstairs with tear tracks still drying on her face.
"She can't know."
Matty's gaze doesn't waver. "She won't."
"Not ever."
"I know."
I need a minute. I need to sit with the fact that I just had my fiancée's brother killed, and I don't feel what I should feel. I don't feel remorse. I don't feel sick. I feel the cold certainty that this was the only move left on the board, and I made it, and now it's done.
Reilan fed Viktor intelligence that got people killed. He orchestrated the hit at the contract signing. He got Dillon O'Rourke shot. He put Aoife in the crosshairs of the Bratva, and then he stood in the same room as her and pretended he was protecting her.
I couldn't let him walk. It doesn't matter what I said to Aoife. It doesn't matter what she begged for. A man who knows your operation inside and out, who has a direct line to Viktor Tarasov, who's proven he'll sell you out when it suits him, that man doesn't get on a plane and disappear. He gets on a plane and lands somewhere and picks up a phone and starts talking. And then people die.
I know what that makes me. A liar. A man who looked her in the face and promised something he had no intention of delivering.
I'll carry that.
Matty slides his phone across the table. I pick it up and scan the screen. Encrypted messages, timestamps, location pings. He's already scrubbed everything that needs scrubbing.
"Car?" I ask.
"Burned. Shell in a quarry outside Loughrea."
I set the phone down. Look at my brother. This kid, whom everyone wrote off as the quiet one, the fragile one, the one they needed to watch in case he went the way our father went. He coordinated an execution on a motorway and cleaned it up, and his hands aren't shaking.
"You good?" I ask.
He picks up the cold tea. Takes a sip. Sets it down.
"I'm good."
I nod. That's enough. We don't need to talk about it. We don't need to process it or examine it or sit with our feelings about it. Reilan is dead. The mole is gone. Now we deal with what comes next.
"Viktor," I say.
Matty's expression shifts. Something sharper behind the blankness.
"Viktor has resources we can't match on our own. Russian money. Local contractors. Whatever muscle he can pull fromthe continent." Matty turns the phone back toward himself. "And now that Reilan's gone, Viktor loses his eyes inside our operation. He'll know something's wrong. His response will be to hit us hard before we can consolidate."
"We can't take him alone," I say.
"No."
Both of us know what that means.
