And then we step out of the car together.
11
CILLIAN
Iopen the door and step inside first, and she follows without hesitation, her heels soft against the wood floor as the door shuts behind us. I pinch my nostrils and appreciatively inhale the nostalgic, familiar scents of old paper and the briny sea. The hallway is narrow but warm, framed photographs lining the walls in neat rows that tell a history without shouting it. I hang my jacket on the hook beside the door and gesture for her to come in further, and she takes in the space with a careful sweep of her eyes.
“We’ll wait in the study,” I tell her, and she nods.
The study sits at the back of the house facing the water, and I push the door open to let her in first this time. The room is simple, dark shelves built into the walls, a leather sofa opposite two armchairs, a heavy desk near the window. Books are everywhere, well worn, very read, and equally loved.
She moves toward the shelves without being told, her fingers grazing the spines like she’s cataloguing them, and I watch her as I cross the room and stop near the window. The harborstretches out beyond the glass, boats rocking lightly against their moorings, gulls circling above the water in slow loops.
“You grew up with this view,” she says quietly, pulling a book from the shelf.
“Yes.”
She opens it without asking and settles into one of the armchairs, crossing her legs neatly as she scans the first page. I glance at the cover before she turns it fully away from me.Old World Families. Italian syndicates. American commissions. Structures built on blood and contracts.
“You reading for fun?” I ask.
She glances up briefly. “Curiosity.”
I turn back to the window.
They call me the devil of the docks.
I’ve heard it enough times that it doesn’t register anymore, but sometimes I wonder how I became that person, how a boy who watched his father unload crates at dawn grew into a man whose name is spoken in whispers across half the port.
It didn’t happen overnight.
My father ran distribution for this side of the harbor when the old crews still operated without structure, and he believed in loyalty more than leverage. He trusted men who shouldn’t have been trusted. He shook hands instead of tightening contracts. He thought honor would protect him.
It didn’t.
The first wave of synthetic imports hit the city when I was seventeen, and nobody understood what they were yet. New product. Cheap. Fast. Stronger than anything moving before. The older men saw margin. The younger ones saw opportunity.
My father saw risk.
He refused to distribute it through our lanes, and that refusal marked him as weak in the eyes of men who preferred profit to caution. The shipments moved anyway, just not through us, and the neighborhoods near the docks started to change within months. Overdoses climbed. Fights escalated. Families who’d survived generations of rough trade started burying sons.
Fentanyl.
I say the word rarely. It tastes foul.
My father called it poison before anyone else did, and he tried to shut it out of our corridors. That made him an obstacle.
He was killed in what the papers called a territorial dispute, and the official story pinned it on a splinter crew looking to expand their stake. I knew better. The move was too clean, the replacement distributors already lined up before the funeral.
Patrick O’Callaghan.
The name surfaced later through whispers and quiet confirmations, through men who spoke only after enough drink or enough fear. He’d pushed the synthetic lines into Dublin under shell carriers and proxy crews, and he’d offered partnership to those willing to move it. My father declined.
That was his mistake.
By the time I took control of our lanes, the damage was already visible. Entire blocks hollowed out. Mothers waiting outside clinics with faces drawn thin. The product was cheaper than whiskey and twice as deadly.
I shut it down where I could, burned shipments that came near our gates, made examples of men who tried to move it through my crews. That’s when the name stuck. Devil of the docks. Ruthless. Unforgiving.
