Conquer (Kings of St. Augustine’s #3)

Chapter 1

Dervla

The second shot goes wide and smashes into wood somewhere above us.

Cormac’s body covers mine, hard and solid, one arm braced over my head as another crack splits the air. The thing that hits me the most is that no one is panicking. They are just getting up and moving with speed towards the exits.

“Just any other day at St. Aug’s,” I mutter with an eyeroll. “Get off me,” I add to Cormac.

“Not a chance,” is his reply.

Another shot goes off. Then another. Not a spray. Deliberate. Spaced. Controlled.

Execution, not panic.

My cheek is pressed to the polished wood of the dais.

Padraig’s blood runs in a thin dark line past the leg of the chair that was apparently mine for all of twenty seconds before somebody decided to redecorate the place.

The fact that I’m convinced that shot was meant for me, is not something I wish to dwell on.

Not yet, anyway.

Add it to the growing pile of shit I will process later, when I have a fucking minute.

“Cormac,” I say. “I need to move.”

“When it stops.”

“It hasn’t stopped in thirty seconds, and we can’t stay on this floor forever.”

A pause. Then another shot, further away this time. The acoustics of the hall make it hard to pinpoint.

Padraig’s blood has reached the toe of my boot.

“Okay,” Cormac says, and shifts his weight off me in one controlled movement. Not upright. Low, pulling me with him, one hand clamped around my wrist. “Stay down.”

I stay down.

We move in a crouch behind the line of Board chairs. Most of the hall has cleared.

Declan is at the far end of the dais, crouched behind the podium with his back to the wall, gun out, eyes cutting across the upper gallery.

Aidan is between the dais and the first row of seating, low and moving.

He has one hand pressed to the floor, pushing up just enough to see above the edge.

Efficient. Already planning something I’ll probably object to.

No sign of Gallagher. No sign of Whitmore, which is more interesting.

Silence falls, and we wait.

“Have they finished?” I ask after a minute or so.

“I’d say so. They didn’t get you. Again.”

“Making a habit of that.”

“Padraig was fucking unlucky,” Aidan says, straightening up and walking over to the dead body.

“Or I was fucking lucky,” I mutter. “That was meant to be my head.”

Aidan crouches beside Padraig’s body and studies the entry wound with the clinical detachment of a man who has seen this before. “Back of the skull. Angled down. Gallery shot.”

Declan is already moving towards the far wall, head tilted back, scanning the upper tier.

“Gone. Whoever it was, they were out before the third echo.” He lifts his hand to one of Séamus’ men who apparently ran straight that way when the shots were fired.

“They trusted us to keep you safe,” Declan says with a snort. “I’m almost impressed.”

“You should be,” I say, standing up and brushing off my dusty hands. “Padraig wasn’t the target. He just had the misfortune of standing in front of me at the wrong moment.”

“We need to move,” Aidan says. “Right now.”

“Where?” I ask, scanning the hall. The exits are clear. St. Augustine’s has clearly trained their students well for exactly this kind of morning. File out, don’t run, don’t ask questions. Institutional muscle memory for violence.

Cormac is already moving towards the side door behind the dais. He’s about to say something when Whitmore marches back into the hall with a thunderous expression. “Miss Callaghan! My office. Now!”

“Okay, well, I guess that’s the ‘where’ taken care of,” I mutter and, with an eyeroll, head down the steps and towards Whitmore.

“This is the last straw,” he says, which causes me to snicker once before his belligerent glare stops me. “You are nothing but a liability to this institution. Your father would be ashamed of you!” He turns on his heel and strides off while I stand there, momentarily shaken.

“Did he really just say that?” Cormac asks.

“He did,” Aidan grits out. “And now I’m going to kill him.”

“No,” I say, holding up a shaking hand. “Not yet.”

“Not yet,” he repeats and falls into step beside me as I force myself to move.

We follow Whitmore to his office in complete, simmering silence. Every second that passes, I get angrier.

As soon as we are inside, before the door is even closed, I say, my voice ice-cold, “How dare you say that to me? How dare you presume to know anything about how my father would feel?”

Whitmore doesn’t flinch. That’s the worst part. He faces me with the composed expression of a man who has said worse things to worse people and slept perfectly well after.

“I dare,” he says, “because I knew your father considerably longer than you did. And I dare because you have just turned the main assembly hall into a crime scene.”

“Someone shot a man,” I say. “I didn’t pull the trigger.”

“No. You simply created the conditions.”

“That’s an extraordinary stretch of logic from a man who has been running those conditions since before I arrived.”

He moves behind his desk and sits down with the deliberate calm of someone who uses furniture as armour. “Sit down, Miss Callaghan.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Then stand there and listen.” He folds his hands on the desk.

“Padraig Nestor is dead on the floor of my hall. From shooters who were on the grounds because of you. Your grandfather’s men are on my arse.

Again. You have claimed a Board seat in front of the entire student body and staff without consultation, without process, and without the authority to do so. ”

The room sits in a very particular kind of quiet. The kind that comes after a sentence lands badly and nobody is willing to be the first to admit it.

I let it breathe for a moment.

“The seat was my father’s,” I say. “I stood up and claimed it out loud, which is apparently the one thing nobody here has had the spine to do since he died.”

Whitmore’s jaw tightens. “The process—”

“The process is whatever the Board decides it is, and the Board just watched me sit down without moving a muscle to stop me. A Board, I might add, you are not on.” I tilt my head.

“So, which process are we talking about? The written one, or the one you invented to keep that seat empty until someone you approved of could fill it?”

Aidan makes a quiet sound behind me that isn’t quite approval but is close enough.

Whitmore’s composure holds, but something shifts behind his eyes. Something that looks almost like recalculation.

“You are your father’s daughter,” he says finally.

“Yes.” I hold his gaze. “I am.”

The silence stretches between us, tight.

“A man is dead,” he says again, quieter this time. Almost to himself.

“A man who walked up to me on that dais and told me I wasn’t getting away with it,” I say. “Which suggests he knew exactly what I was doing and wanted it stopped. It raises the very interesting question of who told him to stop it.”

Whitmore says nothing.

“Was it you?” I ask.

“Don’t be absurd.”

“I’m not being absurd. I’m being direct.

There’s a difference, and I suspect you know it.

” I take one step closer to his desk. “Padraig Nestor got shot in the back of the head because he was standing in front of me. Someone planned it, and someone either wanted me dead or wanted Padraig dead and was happy to let it look like collateral.” I pause.

“Or someone wanted Padraig dead and wanted me standing right next to him when it happened.”

Whitmore’s expression doesn’t crack. It hardens. “Ask yourself this, Miss Callaghan. You were escorted onto these premises by your grandfather’s men. Where were they when the shooting happened? They didn’t rush to your defence.”

“They rushed to the shooter,” I say with a frown, because what is he getting at?

“Quite,” he says, sitting back. “Odd, don’t you think, seeing as you are supposedly some messiah here to rule us all.”

“Excuse me?” I say, moving forward, glowering at him, but he doesn’t flinch. “What did you just say?”

“You heard me. You also know I’m not a fucking idiot, Miss Callaghan. How do you think I became Vice-Chancellor of this institution? By being a mild and meek academic with a love for teaching young adults?”

I narrow my eyes. “Right. Of course. You are part of this.” Wow, way to underestimate the arsehole who, admittedly, looks like a mild and meek academic. The guys have gone still, so I know I’m not the only one who has just been blindsided. “You work for Séamus.”

“Hmm,” he says. “You’re catching on slower than one would’ve hoped.”

The sentence lands like a stone dropped in still water.

I stare at him for a long moment.

Whitmore’s mouth curves slightly. Not triumph. Something older than that. Relief, maybe, at finally being seen.

“How long?” I ask.

“Since before you were born,” he says.

I drag a hand through my hair, which does nothing for the bun and everything for my frustration. “So everything. The gauntlet. Bringing me here in the first place. That was all—”

“Facilitated,” he says. “Yes.”

“On Séamus’ orders.”

“On a chain of orders that eventually leads back to your grandfather, yes. As most things do.”

“Why didn’t Dad want me here then? Why did he block me if Séamus’ orders were for me to be here?”

Whitmore’s expression shifts. Something almost human flickers across it before he banks it back down.

“Your father,” he says carefully, “was not operating against Séamus’ wishes when he blocked your application.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It makes perfect sense if you understand what your father was actually doing. Cillian didn’t block you because he wanted to keep you away from this world. He blocked you because he wanted to delay your arrival until he had finished building what he was building.”

I go very still.

“What he was building,” I say with extreme caution. I don’t trust this fucker as far as I can throw him.