Chapter 10
Cormac
Iwatch Dervla lower the phone like she wants to put it through the wall and can’t decide which wall deserves it most.
The room is too full. Too hot with people, guns, rainwater, theories, dead men. She looks wrung out and razor-sharp at once, which is usually when she gets most dangerous.
“Right,” Declan says. “That was a load of cheer.”
“No shit,” I mutter.
Roisin is already pacing the hearth, one hand pressed to her mouth for half a second before she drops it again. “The Romans,” she says. “I’ve never heard that name.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “It sounds internal by design.”
I keep my eyes on Dervla.
She’s gone still, and I know she’s forcing every moving part in her head into rows. Her fingers flex once against her thigh. “Okay, so we have a murderous lover of my dad, a half-sister that everyone thought was rotten and isn’t and a band of dickheads who think they own the world.”
“Pretty sure Séamus will put that band of dickheads in their place,” I remark. “Anyone else hungry?” I rise, not waiting for an answer.
“I should get back to Gallagher,” Roisin says. “He’ll need help dealing with the Gardaí.”
I nod to her as I pass. She says something else to Dervla, but I don’t hear it as I aim for the kitchen.
I close the door. I need some peace and quiet away from this mess.
I move around the kitchen and pull out the ingredients for chicken curry.
I set to work, chopping, frying, not thinking.
Oil spits in the pan, and I turn the heat down before it starts a fire I can’t be arsed with.
Knife. Board. Onion. Garlic. Simple things. They stay where you put them. They do what they’re meant to do. No hidden cells. No dead Vice-Chancellors. No long-lost relatives phoning up to rewrite the fucking family tree.
I cube the chicken and drop it into the pan. It hisses hard.
The kitchen door opens behind me, then shuts softly.
I know her steps now. I know the exact pace of her when she is angry, when she is pretending she isn’t, when she wants something, when she’s trying not to ask for it.
“You cooking or threatening the vegetables?” Dervla asks.
“Bit of both.”
I don’t turn straight away. I stir the chicken, add the onions, and let them take the heat. She doesn’t speak again for a second, and that tells me more than if she had launched into another rant.
When I do look at her, she’s standing with her back to the door, coat off now, bruises stark on her face, hair still damp in places from the shower and the run through the rain. She looks tired enough to drop and too wired to manage it.
She drags a chair out at the kitchen table and drops into it, elbows on the wood, watching me. I go back to the pan. Coconut milk. Paste. Stock. The motions settle something in me, even if the day won’t.
I stir the sauce and taste it. Needs salt. I add it. Behind me, the chair creaks softly as she shifts.
“You didn’t ask why I ducked your cover in the records room,” she says.
“I know why.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah.” I turn and look at her properly.
“Because if you stand still long enough, everyone else starts making decisions for you. Because your dad’s dead, your mum’s dead, half your family are manipulative bastards, and every time someone tells you to wait, or stay here, or get down or don’t do something stupid, it kills off another part of you that is clinging on for dear life. ”
Her eyes lift to mine.
For a second, she says nothing. Then she gives one short nod. “Yeah.”
I turn the heat lower and face her fully, wiping my hands on a tea towel. “So no, I’m not asking. I already know.”
“I told Declan I loved him earlier,” she says, catching me off guard. “After he said it first.”
“Did you mean it?”
She snickers. “Yes, I meant it. I love you too.”
“Do you?”
She studies me across the table, and something in her face eases. Not all the way. Dervla does nothing all the way unless she’s charging into danger or an argument.
“Yes,” she says again, quieter this time. “I do.”
The answer lands harder than I expect.
I look back at the hob because if I keep staring at her, I might drag her out of that chair and forget the rest of the world exists for a while. Tempting. Badly timed. Standard for us.
“Good,” I say.
“Good?” she repeats.
I shrug one shoulder and stir the sauce. “What do you want, a fucking speech?”
“Maybe a little one.”
I snort. “I love you too. Ever since I carved your name into my arm. You are difficult. Violent. Stubborn. You attract bullets, conspiracies, and power struggles like some sort of cursed heiress magnet.”
“Thanks. I want your name on me. Yours, Declan and Aidan’s. I want to be yours inside and out.”
I smirk at her. “You’re just full of surprises right now, aren’t you?” It hits somewhere low and brutal. Territorial. Primitive. A dark, ugly kind of devotion that has been living under my skin, waiting for permission to stop pretending it is anything else.
“You sure you’re not in the middle of a breakdown?”
Her eyes narrow. “Quite sure.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
I study her face. Bruised cheek, split lip. Grey-green eyes that look tired enough to break and hard enough to stab anyone who tries to comfort her wrong. She doesn’t look hysterical. She doesn’t look reckless either.
She looks decided.
That is always worse.
I move away from the cooker and brace my hands on the table. “Say it again.”
Her chin lifts. “I want your names on me. Yours. Declan’s. Aidan’s. I want it visible enough that nobody gets to misunderstand what I am to you and what you are to me.”
The words land like a punch to the chest.
Not because they scare me.
Because they don’t.
“How visible?”
“Well, not across my forehead if that’s what you’re asking,” she snickers. “But not at the base of my spine either, where nobody can see them.”
“Damn straight nobody will see them there, or they will lose their eyeballs,”
“So romantic.”
The curry simmers behind me, low and steady. The house mutters around us. Rain at the windows. Voices in another room, dull through the wall. Everything feels suspended on a blade edge, and here she is talking about marks that don’t wash off.
I turn and put the rice on to boil.
Claiming.
I know what that means to me. I know what it would mean in our world. Not jewellery. Not sweet words. A line cut into skin and kept there.
Mine. Ours. Her choice.
“I’m in,” I say as if there was any doubt. “My choice.”
“Okay,” she says warily. “Where?”
“Down the middle of your tits. My name, right there, so when I titty fuck you, I’ll come all over it.”
“Nice,” she says. “The tits are yours.”
“Thanks,” I say with a grin and go back to cooking.
We settle into a nice little domestic scene for a few moments before she asks, “Where did you learn to cook?”
“My mum.”
“The one I take after with my stubbornness?” she asks. I can hear the smile in her voice.
“That very one. She is a chef at a top restaurant in Dublin.”
“No way?”
“Yeah,” I say with a laugh. “Fun, huh?”
“Very,” she says.
I glance over my shoulder. She has one elbow on the table now, chin in hand, looking at me like this is the first normal conversation we’ve had. Probably is.
It lands like something I’d have sneered at in another man.
“She taught me when I was about twelve,” I say. “Said if I was going to be an angry little bastard, I could at least learn to feed myself properly.”
Dervla snorts. “Wise woman.”
“She is.” I stir the sauce again and check the rice. “Dad was shite in the kitchen. Burned water once.”
“That feels physically impossible.”
“You’d think.” I shrug. “Apparently not.”
For a few seconds, it is just that. Steam is lifting off the pan. The low clink of the spoon. She’s watching me. I’m pretending I’m not too aware of her watching me.
“Was?”
“He died when I was fourteen. No big deal.” I shrug, not really wanting to go down that road.
She gets it and drops it. No false platitudes, no fake sympathy or worse, fake empathy. She has her own shit to deal with; I don’t need her taking mine as well.
“Food’s ready,” I say.
She gets up before I can plate it and comes to the counter beside me.
“I can manage,” I say.
“I’m helping anyway.”
She reaches for the bowls from the drying rack overhead, and I have to stop myself from putting a hand on her waist and keeping her there.
Everything with her feels one breath away from becoming something else.
A fight. A kiss. A vow. A body on a floor with blood around it. Normal doesn’t stay normal for long.
I spoon rice into four bowls and then add the curry over the top. She puts them on the table, then goes back for cutlery. “Aidan! Declan! Food!” she calls out.
Declan appears first. Aidan is right behind him.
“Smells decent,” Declan says, dropping into a chair.
“High praise,” I reply.
Aidan sits last and looks at Dervla before he looks at the bowl in front of him. “Any more mysterious calls while we were out of the room for thirty seconds?”
“Not yet,” she says. “Give it time.”
“Don’t,” Declan mutters. “If another secret relative calls during dinner, I’m setting the table on fire.”
I sit down with my bowl and start eating because talking about disaster is easier when there’s food in front of me. The curry is good. Hot enough to bite. Normal enough to almost pass for a real meal in a real house on a real evening where nobody has been shot in an office or unmasked as a traitor.
For a minute, there is only cutlery, breathing, and the low tap of rain against the windows.
Then Aidan says, “We need to decide what we do if Siobhán contacts you.”
Dervla swallows. “She will.”
“You sound certain.”
“I am. She killed Whitmore and shot at us. That is not the kind of woman who lets loose ends walk.”
Aidan nods once. “Exactly. So when she does, we don’t answer emotionally. We answer usefully.”
“Meaning you do not go charging off to meet her alone because she says your dad’s name in the right tone,” I say.
“I know that.”
“You say that,” I reply, “but your entire personality suggests otherwise.”
She glares at me. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” She sighs. “But you’re right to question me. A few weeks ago, I’d have run straight towards her. I’m not used to having… this.”
“What is this?” I ask with a soft smirk.
“This relationship. People I care about and consider,” she mumbles into her curry.
The admission sits in the middle of the table like something that fell out of her pocket by accident.
Declan looks at her with an expression I’ve never seen on his face before. Aidan looks at her the way he looks at everything, like he’s pricing it. I keep eating.
“Don’t all look so touched. It’s weird,” she says.
Declan snorts. “God forbid we acknowledge you’ve developed emotional range.”
“I’ve always had emotional range.”
“Yeah. Murder, spite, and stubbornness.”
“Those are excellent emotions.”
I glance up. “You forgot pride.”
She grins at me. “See? He gets me.”
I go back to my curry. Aidan sets his spoon down.
“You are not wrong, Dervla. You are not used to having people to factor in. That changes decision-making. It should. It has changed the way we do things as well. Before now, we’d have killed first and asked questions later.
This doesn’t work here. You understand that, right?
You need the answers to those questions. ”
Everyone goes quiet.
“I get it. And I appreciate it,” she says slowly, quietly. “You have changed your behaviour for me, and while I would never advocate for trying to change someone, I need you all to know that I understand what this costs you.”
I set my spoon down and take her free hand.
She means it. No performance. No angle. Just the truth, out in the open where it has no business being.
It lands somewhere I don’t examine.
“That was almost sweet. You feeling ill?”
“Shut the fuck up.” She holds my gaze a second longer, then looks down at her bowl. The table settles. Nobody reaches for more words than they need.
Aidan finishes first. He wipes his mouth, sets the napkin down, and sits back.
“We still need a plan.”
“We have one,” Declan says. “Siobhán calls, we stall her, track her, make her regret being born.”
“That’s a rough framework,” Aidan says. “Not a plan.”
“It’s a good fucking framework.”
I keep eating. They’re both right and I’m not refereeing. Not now. I need a moment of peace after everything, and I’m pretty sure Dervla does too.