Chapter 25
Dervla
Taking a moment to enjoy Declan in all his fucking fury, I smile. Aidan comes crashing through the doors and skids to a dead stop when he sees the scene in front of him.
“You okay?” he asks.
I nod. “You?”
“I’ll live.”
“Where’s Cormac?”
“Busy making somebody regret being born, I hope,” he says.
As if summoned by violence, Cormac appears in the doorway a second later, rain on his jacket, blood on one side of his face that is definitely not all his. His chest rises hard once. Twice. His eyes find me first.
“I’m fine,” I say before he can ask.
His stare flicks over me, anyway, checking for holes. “Good.”
Then he sees Brendan properly.
Something dark settles over his face.
Brendan’s expression shifts for the first time since he walked in here all polished and perverse. Not fear exactly. Recognition. He knows what Cormac is. A man like Brendan would. He catalogues weapons in human form the same way he catalogues bloodlines.
“Excellent,” Brendan says, voice strained now under the pain. “All three.”
I nearly laugh. “You sound pleased.”
“I sound interested,” he replies. “Cillian always did have an eye for useful violence around his daughter.”
Declan slams him into the wall again. Hard enough that Brendan’s head cracks stone.
“You are one sentence away from losing your teeth,” Declan says.
“What the hell is going on here?” Cormac asks. “Why isn’t he dead yet?”
“Because he started talking about breeding like I’m fucking livestock,” I say, keeping my gun on Brendan’s chest. “Apparently, murdering me was only one option. The other was forcing a dynasty out of my cunt. And the most disgusting part is, he thought I’d agree to it.
He thought that if he threatened you three, I’d give in and agree, so he’d leave you alone.
The thing he doesn’t get is I know you. I know none of you is dying today. ”
Cormac goes very still.
Aidan’s face empties in a way that is worse than rage. Declan already has Brendan by the front of his coat, but now all three of them look like murder has become a sacred duty.
Brendan breathes through his mouth, blood at one corner of it, his shoulder soaked red.
Cormac crosses the space and punches him so hard his head snaps sideways. “Look at her again, and I’ll tear your jaw off first.”
“Killing me is a mistake. It won’t change anything. The course is set.”
“If you die, then no one is coming to breed me,” I spit out.
“How wrong you are,” Brendan says. “Even now, you don’t realise what your blood holds.”
Fury spikes my blood hot. I walk up to him and place the gun in the middle of his forehead.
“I do know. It holds Callaghan, Colthurst and ó Briain. That makes me a triple threat to you. Your arrogance is what gets you killed today. You think I’ll fall in line for power?
You don’t know the first thing about me. You can shove the power up your arse.”
That seems to hurt him more than the violence.
Good.
“Now you know me,” I state and pull the trigger.
Brendan’s skull jerks back against the stone.
For one second, everything goes quiet inside me.
Then he drops.
His body hits the chapel floor with a heavy, graceless thud, one arm trapped under him, blood spreading fast beneath his coat. His eyes are open. Empty.
“Done,” I say, though my voice comes out flatter than I expect.
Nobody answers straight away.
Declan lets go of the dead fabric in his fist and takes one step back from the body.
Silence descends.
No one says a word until the chapel doors crash open and Séamus strides in, coat billowing behind him, at least six men at his back and my dad.
Séamus’ eyes sweep over the chapel and land on Brendan. “I see,” he says. “Well done, girl.”
“Don’t ‘girl’ me,” I state. “You are late to the party, and I took care of this myself.”
Séamus looks entirely too pleased with himself for a man who has arrived after the gunshots.
My father does not look at Brendan first.
He looks at me.
That is worse.
“You don’t get to look relieved,” I say to him before he can open his mouth. “You’ve done enough.”
His expression hardens, then shutters. “Understood.”
“No,” I snap. “I don’t think you do.”
“Dervla,” Aidan says quietly, not as a warning, more as a check.
I take one breath and drag my eyes off my father before I do something stupid and emotionally satisfying.
Aidan steps closer to me, not touching, just there. Solid. Cormac and Declan hold either side of the room like the threat has not ended because maybe it fucking hasn’t.
“Did I just become the head of the Romans?” I ask into the silence.
“You did,” Séamus confirms.
“Good. Then that means I get to blow this shit up from the inside. Who’s with me?”
“Well, all of us, obviously,” Dad says. “That’s what this entire thing was about.”
“You shut up. I don’t want to hear anything come out of your mouth until I tell you it’s okay to talk.”
He nods grimly.
“What are you going to do?” Aidan asks.
“Use that hard drive in the way it was intended. To destroy every fucking thing these fuckers touched.”
“All in one go?” Séamus asks.
“All in one go.”
“That will be… destructive.”
“That’s kind of the point, isn’t it?” I say and stride past them to push out into the growing night, stepping over dead men on my way to God only knows where. Just not here. Rain hits my face hard enough to sting.
I keep walking because if I stop, I might turn around and put another bullet into Brendan’s corpse just to make a point. The campus is darkening by the second, the sky low and bruised above the old stone, and my pulse is still running too fast to pass for human.
“Dervla,” my father says.
I stop so abruptly that my heel skids on wet stone. I turn slowly and point the gun at his chest.
Everyone halts.
Séamus’ men go still. Aidan, Cormac and Declan spread without making a show of it, instinct putting them where they can get between me and everybody else if this detonates properly.
My father looks at the gun, then at me.
“Do not,” I say, my voice sharp enough to cut skin, “come after me speaking like you still get to summon me with my name.”
He nods once. “All right.”
“No. Not all right.” My hand is steady. That annoys me. I want to be shaking. I want him to see what he did. “You let me bury you.”
Nobody speaks.
Rain taps off stone and fabric and old graves.
“You let me stand over dirt and talk to a box with somebody else in it.” My throat burns. “You let me grieve you while you hid underground, planning my life for me.”
His face tightens. “I know.”
“Stop saying that. You do not know. You made a choice. I paid for it.”
“I did, and I’d do it again.”
“Well, isn’t that great?”
“There is a kill switch. In Whitmore’s office,” he says, which stops the next hurtful words that were going to tumble out of my mouth. “It’s what Troy was after when he killed Whitmore, but Siobhán interrupted him.”
“A kill switch for what?” Aidan asks before I can, coming closer.
“Everything,” Dad says, eyes still on me. “Every bank account, every corporation, every network, every asset that has financial backing and is tied to the Romans will be burned in one go.”
“If you had that, why didn’t you use it?” I ask, more intrigued than mad right now.
“Whitmore had only just finished constructing it before Troy shot him. Siobhán was on her way to make sure it was all hooked up, and she intercepted Troy.”
“So that’s why you were here then,” I say bitterly. “To flick the switch, not to come clean with me.”
“Yes.”
“Fuck you,” I spit.
“Deserved,” he says.
I nearly shoot him for that alone.
“We need to get to that switch,” Dad says.
I keep the gun on him for one more beat. Two. Then I lower it because he is right about one thing, and that pisses me off almost as much as the rest of him.
“This conversation is not over,” I tell Dad.
“Yes,” he says. “It is.”
I clench my fist and nearly punch him. Only Declan’s fist over mine stops me.
I turn and start walking back towards Admin without waiting for agreement, ignoring the dead bodies strewn all over the campus.
My three men fall in around me at once. Protective.
Armed. Bloody. Mine. Séamus and his men follow behind with my father somewhere in the middle, which feels wrong on a structural level.
He should not be behind me. He should not be anywhere.
“What happens after we flip the switch?” I grit out.
“It’s not as simple as a light switch,” Dad uses the same tone as me. “More like a switchboard.”
“Whatever,” I grouse. “What happens after we flip the switchboard?”
“Everyone connected to the Romans goes boom,” he says, pushing past me, phone out and dialling someone.
“I don’t mean that. I mean, with me, with this place, the fucking Romans.”
“You do what you were born for,” Dad states and then says into the phone. “It’s me. Let us in.”
“Rule this place?”
“Rule this place and recruit the future generation of the ó Briain crime family.”
“That’s what all of this is about? Creating a recruiting ground?”
“It’s what it’s always been about. The violence, the burning, that’s the way you get control and stay in control,” Séamus says.
The front doors of the Admin building are thrown open, revealing Gallagher and Roisin. Roisin gives Dad a vicious glare but then flings her arms around him.
He squeezes her once and then lets her go. She steps back, her composure back in place.
Tears prick my eyes.
That’s what I should’ve done.
Instead, I’ve yelled at him, sworn at him, told him to fuck off and pulled a gun on him.
“Brendan Murphy is dead. I shot him,” I say, pushing past them all to enter the building. “Oh, and while we’ve been chasing our tails like dicks in the wind, Dad and Whitmore had a kill switch built in Whitmore’s office that could’ve ended this days ago.”
“What?” Roisin asks, following me up the stairs.
“Don’t ask. I don’t know.” I’m pissed off with her, even though it’s not her fault.
Roisin catches my arm before I hit the office door. “I’m asking anyway. What exactly did he say?”
“That Whitmore finished building something in the office before Troy shot him. Something that can gut the Romans financially.” I wrench the door open harder than necessary. “Apparently, we were all just one hidden mechanism away from saving ourselves a lot of fucking time.”
The office is too full too fast. Men, weapons, rain-damp coats, old secrets. My office. My father steps in last, and I hate that he still moves like he belongs wherever he stands.
“Some of you leave. It’s too much,” I say and turn my back.
Gallagher shuts the door once the key people are in. Me. Roisin. Gallagher. Séamus. My father. Aidan, Cormac, Declan. The room feels too small for all the violence in it.
“Talk,” I say to my father. “Start with why this couldn’t be done before Brendan Murphy decided that a nice chat in the chapel about breeding with me was the best course of action.”
Dad growls but says nothing about that. “It’s not ready,” he says, moving towards a filing cabinet in the corner and pulling open the bottom drawer.
He reaches up, and then the bookcase next to it moves aside.
“Not entirely ready. The set-up is complete. Kavanagh thought the kill switch was operational. It’s not. ”
Séamus holds something out, and Dad takes it.
The hard drive.
“This needs connecting so that all the information in here is downloaded into the system.”
“So the system is ready to fire off its shit, but didn’t have the information?” I ask, intrigued despite my anger.
“Exactly,” Dad says. “Whitmore built the architecture. The drive supplies the targets.”
Roisin stares at the hidden cavity behind the shifted bookcase. “Fucking hell.”
Inside is a recessed metal panel set into the wall.
Not old. It is not in keeping with the rest of the office either.
It looks wrong here, modern steel buried in polished wood and dead men’s paperwork.
A small screen sits dark above a bank of toggles and ports.
Whitmore really did build a fucking doomsday machine in his office.
“And all this time,” I say, very evenly, “you let me run around campus stabbing people while this was in the wall.”
Dad plugs the hard drive into a port under the screen. “It wasn’t ready. That’s why I needed you to buy time. Things accelerated. Romans were watching you in Dublin. I needed you here when I needed you here.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“So you got Siobhán to shoot your body double to get me here to what? Protect me?”
“Yes.”
I laugh once. It comes out murderous.
“Protect you and have you protect yourself by stepping up. You shot and killed the head of the Romans. That takes balls of steel, Dervla. I’m fucking proud of you.”
“Shut up,” I grumble, but I can’t help the shot of warm and fuzzy that spikes my blood.
“You are very stubborn,” he says, connecting the hard drive to a power source. “Just like your grandmother.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
I look at Roisin, who is staring at me. She chews her lip and then blurts out, “I’m sorry.”
I frown at her. “For what, specifically? Lying to me this entire time?”
“For that, and for setting Eoin on you in Dublin. Your dad had nothing to do with that. It was me trying to force your hand, to get you at least back at home if not here.”
I scoff and shake my head. “Of course, because why not?”
“You are the hinge. The rest of us are circling your orbit. I’m a bit of a control freak. I needed to see you actually doing something.”
“That’s your excuse?”
She nods. “I don’t expect you to forgive me.”
“Oh, you shut up as well,” I snap. I close my eyes and breathe in deeply. When I exhale, I open my eyes. “You know what? It’s fine. I can’t go around in circles of anger and frustration anymore. I’m done. I’m over all of this bullshit.”
“Sorry to break up the touching talk, but we are ready,” Dad says, flicking a switch that makes the light on the hard drive flash like crazy.