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Rian’s forty-one. My righthand. He’s run the day-to-day for four years. Rian doesn’t ask how you’re feeling. He asks what you need and when. Then makes shit happen.

Then there’s Finn. Thirty-four, red hair, big grin, our mother’s despair. When something needs doing that can’t be undone, Finn’s on it. His first question is always, who. Never, why.

“Dec.” Aidan. “How’s married life?”

“Did she really wear white?” Finn. “Heard she wore fucking white. In there. I think I’m in love.”

I growl, “Finn.”

He chuckles. “Shutting up.”

“Somebody’s watching her.”

Dead silence.

I lay it all out.

“Callaghan, then.”

Eamon Callaghan. I’ve known that snake since we were six years old. His father and mine split the business between them forty years ago and shook on it. He sent my mother fucking flowers when I got sentenced. And the same month I went inside, he started moving on my territory. I let it go. For four years. A dock here, a contract there. I told Rian to hold the line and not start a war I couldn’t finish from a cell. But now there’s a car outside my wife’s window. And I’m starting to wonder about a lot of things.

“Boss,” Brady, one of our main guys, clears his throat. “With respect. We don’t know who’s in that car. We move on Callaghan without being sure; it’s an act of war. Maybe we put eyes on it a few days first. Watch the watcher…”

I don’t raise my voice. I drop it. Low enough that he has to stop talking to hear me. Over by the door, Cillian’s shoulders go tight.

“If I told you there’s a man parked outside your house for two nights, looking up at the window where your daughters sleep… how many days would you spend watching the watcher?”

I hear him swallow.

“I asked you a question.”

“None, boss.”

I don’t say anything.

“Sorry, boss.”

“Rian.”

“Here.”

“Someone on her, round the clock. Your best. She’s not to see them, she’s not to know, and nobody gets within twenty feet of her they can’t vouch for. Same on her family.”

“She’ll want to know,” Aidan says, quiet. “That kind of woman, Dec…”

I interrupt him, “She’ll be alive to be angry about it.”

He makes a small sound that means it’s your funeral, and he’s probably right.

“Aidan. Tommy Brennan’s in the ICU at County. Two men on that door, day and night, so clean the nurses think they’re family. Nobody finishes that job.”

There’s a pause while all three of my brothers work out that I just told them to protect the man whose testimony put me in here.

“Fuck me,” Finn says.

“Somebody wanted him dead who wasn’t us. I want to know what he says if he lives. Finn.”

“Yeah?”