Chapter 9
Aidan
She hisses at us like a fucking pissed-off snake. She bares her teeth, narrows those stormy eyes, and hisses before spinning on her heel and striding off in the opposite direction, her boots jingling like she’s daring the world to follow the sound.
Cormac makes a noise in his throat that’s halfway between a laugh and a growl. “She’s warming up to us.”
Declan’s eyebrows lift. “Did she just make snake noises at us?”
“Progress,” Cormac says with a dark smile. “Yesterday she wouldn’t even acknowledge we exist.”
I don’t respond. I’m watching her walk. The way she moves tells me things she doesn’t know she’s sharing.
She’s favouring her right side still. The gloves are covering the damage, but the hand is stiff inside them, and she’s holding her bag strap with her left.
Her shoulders are squared, chin up, ponytail swinging with each step.
She looks like a woman who has somewhere to be and would gut anyone who slowed her down.
She’s also walking directly toward the south cloister, which is a dead end unless she knows about the cut-through behind the old chapel offices, and she doesn’t.
She’s been here one day. She doesn’t know the shortcuts yet.
She doesn’t know which paths loop back, which ones dead-end, and which ones lead to the kind of corners where conversations happen that no one else hears.
I do.
The Apex text arrived at eight-fourteen this morning. I should resent her for it.
Any other opponent, I would.
But with her, the loss tastes like heat—like the universe finally gave me something worth taking seriously. Something I can’t buy, threaten, or outwait.
It makes me want to smile.
It also makes me want to put my hand around her throat and ask her—quietly—if she understands what she’s started.
I processed the loss in the first sixty seconds: the fury, my admiration, the strategy, the recalibration.
Everything after that has been waiting. I’m good at waiting.
I’ve been doing it my entire life, sitting in rooms with men twice my age, watching them make moves they think are clever while I notice every weakness for later use.
Patience isn’t a virtue. It’s a weapon, and I’ve sharpened mine to a point.
But something about watching her walk away from me, again, for the third time since I met her, is testing the edge of my patience in a way I wasn’t expecting.
“Stay here,” I say.
Cormac straightens. “What are you going to do?”
“Talk to her.”
“Last time you said that, you meant it. This time, you don’t.”
He knows me too well. I ignore him and walk.
I know the south cloister better than I know my own house.
I was six years old the first time my father brought me through it, his hand on the back of my neck, steering me toward some alumni dinner where I was expected to sit, be quiet, and absorb how power moved through a room.
I’ve used this route a hundred times since.
The archway leads into a narrow corridor with vaulted ceilings and stone walls that swallow sound.
It bends left after twenty metres and dead-ends at a locked gate that leads to the old chapel offices.
The gate hasn’t been opened in years. It’s a trap if you don’t know the layout, and she doesn’t.
I take the parallel corridor, the one that runs behind the east wall, and come out ahead of her.
She rounds the corner and finds me leaning against the locked gate.
She stops. The bells on her boots go silent.
“You’re joking,” she says.
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“You look like a man who’s about to get stabbed for being in my way.”
“Try it, pixie. I’ve been dying for a show.”
Her hand twitches toward her back, toward the blade tucked at the base of her spine.
She doesn’t draw it. Not yet. But the instinct is there, coiled and ready, and the fact that she’s restraining it tells me she’s smarter than she is impulsive.
Good. Impulsive people are easy. Smart ones are interesting.
“Move,” she says.
“Not until we talk. I received a text telling me that my Apex position, the one I earned, has been reassigned to someone who’s been on this campus for less than twenty-four hours.”
She goes still. Not the kind of still that comes from surprise. The kind that comes from a predator recognising that it’s walked into another predator’s territory and is calculating the cost of the next step.
“Congratulations, by the way,” I say, and move forward. “You should be proud.”
“Are you here to whinge about your bruised ego? Because I’ve got better things to do.”
“I’m here to make sure you understand what you’ve taken.”
“I didn’t take anything. The Board gave it to me.”
“And that doesn’t make you suspicious?”
That lands. I see it in the way her weight shifts, the micro-adjustment in her stance. She’d been thinking the same thing. She just didn’t expect me to say it out loud.
I smile and close the distance between us. Three strides. She doesn’t back up, which means she’s braver than she is sensible, or she’s decided that retreating from me would cost her more than standing her ground.
She’s right about that.
I’m in her space now. Close enough that I can see the faint shadows under her eyes from a night that was longer than it should have been. Close enough to smell her: soap, something floral and enticing.
“Apex isn’t a title,” I tell her. “It’s a leash. You are now the most exposed person at this university, and you’re about to walk into a room where every person wants something from you, and not one of them will tell you what it is.”
“And you will?”
“I’ll tell you more than they will.”
“That’s a low bar.”
“It’s the only bar you’ve got.”
Her jaw tightens. The blade comes out.
She’s fast. Even with her left hand, even at a bad angle, she gets the steel clear of her waistband and up between us in under a second. The tip stops a centimetre from my throat, and I feel the cold of it before I feel anything else.
I don’t step back. Instead, I step forward and hear her muted gasp when she makes me bleed.
I look down at her over the edge of her own blade and let the silence stretch until it’s unbearable.
I wrap my hand around her wrist, which is holding the knife to my throat.
My grip is firm enough that she can’t slash without me controlling the angle.
Her eyes flare. “If you’re going to pull a knife on a man, be prepared to use it, pixie. ”
She tightens her grip, but I do the job for her. I drag it down the side of my neck, seeing her eyes widen at the sight of the blood welling up.
I tighten my grip and push her arm to the side, slowly, using my size against her.
The blade descends from my throat to my chest, and I keep pushing, walking her backwards until her shoulders hit the stone wall.
I pin her wrist against the wall beside her head, the blade still in her hand but pointed at the sky.
She doesn’t struggle. She goes rigid, every muscle locked, vibrating with the kind of controlled fury that’s more dangerous than thrashing would be. Her free hand comes up and shoves against my chest, hard, but I’m braced for it, and I don’t move. She shoves again. Same result.
“Let go of me.”
“When I’m finished.”
“You’re finished now.”
“I’m finished when you’ve heard what I have to say.
” I lean down, close, too close, until I can feel the heat of her breathing against my jaw.
“You came here to find out who killed your father. Don’t look surprised.
Everyone knows, and anyone who says they don’t is lying.
You came here for revenge, and you walked straight into the Board’s hands, because revenge makes people predictable, and predictable people are easy to control.
They gave you Apex because it puts you exactly where they can see you.
Every meeting, every decision, every interaction you have from now on will be monitored, catalogued, and used.
You’re not the player, Dervla. You’re the piece. ”
Her breathing has changed. Faster. Shallower. Her chest rises and falls against mine where my body is pressed to hers, and I can feel the hammer of her pulse through my grip on her wrist. She’s furious. She’s also listening.
“Unless,” I say.
“Unless what?”
“Unless you have someone who knows the board. Who’s sat in that room for three years. Who knows every member’s weakness, every alliance, every skeleton in every cupboard. Someone who’s already lost his position and has nothing left to gain by playing nice.”
“You want an alliance,” she says, and the contempt in her voice could strip paint. “Again.”
“I want you to survive long enough to be useful.”
Her knee comes up. Fast. But I’ve been expecting it since I pinned her, and my thigh blocks it, slamming between her legs and trapping her against the wall.
The impact forces a sound out of her, sharp and involuntary, and her body arches against mine in a way that has nothing to do with escape and everything to do with the contact.
We both freeze.
Her eyes snap to mine. Wide. Furious. Beneath the fury is something she can’t disguise, no matter how hard she tries, because her pussy is pressed against my thigh, and I can feel the heat of her through two layers of fabric, and she knows I can feel it.
“Get off me,” she whispers, and it’s the quietest thing she’s said since I met her.
I hold for one more second. Not to make a point.
Because I want her to remember this. The wall against her back.
My hand on her wrist. The blade she can’t use and the anger she can’t fake.
I want this imprinted so deep that every time she walks into that Board meeting, she feels me here, and she knows that whatever she faces in that room, I’ve already faced it, and I didn’t break.
I release her wrist and step back.
She doesn’t move. She stays against the wall, breathing hard, the blade hanging loose in her hand.
Her eyes are locked on mine, and the expression on her face is one I haven’t seen before.
Not fury. Not fear. Something in between that doesn’t have a name yet, something that’s still being forged in the heat of what just happened.
“One o’clock,” I say. “Room 12.”
She just stares at me with those unreadable eyes while a thin trickle of my blood runs down her blade.
“Stay out of my way, O’Connell,” she says.
“Not a chance, Callaghan.”
I turn and walk back through the corridor. I don’t look back. I don’t need to. I can hear her breathing behind me, ragged and furious, and I can hear the moment she pushes off the wall and walks in the other direction, her bells jingling with every step.
Cormac and Declan are waiting where I left them. Cormac takes one look at my throat and raises an eyebrow.
“Went well, then,” he says.
I press my thumb against the cut and feel the sting, and with a slow smile, walk toward the Hennessy Building, because I want to be near Room 12 before she gets there.
I want to see her when she walks up to it, and when she leaves, she will see me.
I want her to know that no matter what the Board gave her, this is still my ground, and she’s standing on it because I allow it.
For now.