The Enforcer's Enemy

Five minutes, a table, and a man who has already used three of them crying. *You've got five minutes to convince me not to break your fingers.* The back room smells of stale cigar smoke and the lemony polish somebody's mother used on this furniture thirty years ago. One bulb on a cord, throwing a jaundiced yellow that makes the man opposite look waxy and old. O'Neill keeps his hands flat on the table, palms down, scarred knuckles white against the wood grain. The silver cross under his shirt presses cold against his sternum, a reminder he never asked for and cannot take off, the chain always catching slightly on his collar. *I don't have the cash, Mr. O'Neill. I swear on my mother's grave.* *Your mother's in a nursing home in Easton.* He did the homework the night before, out of a file Donal dropped on his desk with a smirk he has wanted to remove from that face since the day they met. Luca is the one thing in this organisation nobody assigned him, and that is exactly the problem. He has done this job for eleven years and been good at it for ten, and the difference between those two numbers is the year he spent working out that being good at it and being owned by it are the same sentence said twice. What follows: a man who stopped him when nobody else would, a cage two people share, a scar beneath a good suit, a sacrifice he did not agree to, a sparring session that goes further than it should, a dinner table laid as a trap, and a bullet paid for in advance. *We change the champion.* *How?* *By proving Donal's a traitor. By showing the ledger entries, the pin, the testimony.* He has to decide whether a man who is technically his rival, practically his responsibility and legally somebody else's property is worth the only thing he has never gambled, which is the protection of a family that has never once asked him what he wanted.