Chapter 11
Cormac
Troy gives me a filthy glare, and I smile, sticking my middle finger up at him.
He looks away first. Knew he would. He always does.
“Byrne!” Coach Ramsey barks at me. “What the fuck was that today?”
I glance over as I yank open my locker. “Winning?”
Ramsey stalks over in his tracksuit, red-faced and pissed off. Ex-rugby pro, built thick, nose broken at least twice, voice permanently set to shout. “Don’t get smart with me. You dropped O’Shea on his fucking head.”
“I dropped him on the mat.”
“You dropped him after I called it.”
I pull on my jeans and don’t bother pretending to be sorry. “He kept coming.”
Ramsey gets right in my face. “And that gives you permission to ignore me?”
“It gives me permission to finish what he started.”
Around us, half the locker room goes quiet without making a show of it. Everyone loves it when someone else is being torn apart by authority. Saves them for a minute.
Ramsey stares at me, waiting for me to blink first. He’ll be waiting a while. “You’ve been off all morning,” he says. “Distracted. Aggressive even for you. I don’t give a shit what girl, grudge, or ego problem is crawling around in your head. You leave it outside my training hall.”
I slam my locker door shut. “Finished?”
“No. You’ll run laps every fucking lesson this week if you can’t get your head out of your arse.”
A laugh breaks from somewhere near the benches. Troy, obviously. I turn my head slowly and catch him trying to hide his grin.
Ramsey sees it too. “You got something to say, Kavanagh?”
Troy lifts both hands. “Not me, Coach.”
Coward.
Ramsey points at me again. “Got it?”
“Got it.”
He storms off to terrorise someone else, and the room starts moving again, voices rising, lockers slamming, lads pretending they weren’t listening to every word.
I drag a black tee over my head and sit on the bench long enough to pull socks on and shove my feet into my boots.
My ribs complain when I bend. O’Shea hit harder than usual before I put him down. I barely noticed at the time.
Now I do.
I stand and grab my leather jacket from the hook, and I start for the door, and Troy makes the mistake of getting there at the same time.
He stops when he sees I’m not moving around him.
“Problem?” he asks, trying for bored and landing on twitchy.
“Yeah,” I say. “You’re in my way.”
A few of the lads go quiet again. Not silent. Just quiet enough to hear if a fist connects with cartilage.
Troy glances at the lads around us and then back at me. “Then walk around.”
I smile. Not nicely. “You’ve got two seconds to decide whether you’re stupid or suicidal.”
His jaw ticks. I give him an extra second because Ramsey is probably still lurking while he’s berating someone else close by. It’s his default setting.
But then Troy steps aside. I push past him without another word. The corridor outside the training hall is cooler, quieter, and it doesn’t contain Troy. Better already.
I’m halfway to the side exit when I hear a woman’s laugh carry from the courtyard.
Not just any laugh.
Her laugh.
It stops me dead.
I cut right instead of heading out and move toward the sound. Stepping into the archway, I find her by the low stone wall near the old fountain.
Dervla stands with one hand wrapped around an iced coffee, the other tucked near her side, guarded even when she looks casual. Roisin is beside her, saying something dry enough to make Dervla’s mouth twitch.
It’s an interesting dynamic. Roisin is part of the Board who initiated her last night, and now they’re chatting like they’re old friends. It’s something to watch because I don’t trust Roisin as far as I can throw her.
Okay, that would probably be quite far, but I definitely don’t trust her. I don’t trust anyone on the Board. They are like a cult with their secret meetings and power over everyone’s lives, not just at St. Aug’s but beyond.
I lean against the archway and watch until I decide to announce myself.
Dervla’s body language with Roisin is different from the rigid, bladed stance she wears around us. Her shoulders are lower. Her weight is on one hip. She’s almost relaxed, which pisses me off in a way I’m not prepared to examine.
Roisin spots me first. Her gaze flicks to the archway, takes me in, and returns to Dervla without missing a beat, but she says something that makes Dervla turn.
Those grey-green eyes find mine, and the relaxation vanishes.
The shoulders come up. The jaw sets. The fingers tighten around her coffee cup.
She goes from almost-human to full predator in under a second, and the transformation does something to me that would make Ramsey’s lecture about distraction look prophetic.
Roisin murmurs something and walks away. She knows when a space is about to become unsafe.
Dervla doesn’t walk away. She probably should. But that’s what attracts me to her. She stands her ground by the fountain and watches me approach with the expression of someone deciding whether to run or bite.
“Enjoying the company of vipers,” I ask.
“Don’t say that word.”
“What? Vipers? You scared, or something?”
Her eyes narrow to slits.
I stop in front of her. Close. Close enough that she has to tilt her head back to meet my eyes, and I can see the pulse jumping in her throat.
She doesn’t step back.
That tells me she is either brave or stupid.
Nothing about her screams stupidity.
“What do you want, Cormac?”
I like the way she says my name. Hard consonants. Like she’s biting down on each syllable and spitting it at me.
“I want to know why you’re sitting out here drinking coffee with a Board member like you’re at a fucking garden party, when half the campus is working out how to knock you off your shiny new perch.”
“Maybe because I’m not afraid of half the campus.”
“You should be. None of them fight clean.”
“Neither do I.”
“Yeah?” I look at her hand. The glove covers most of it, but the fingers are stiff, and she’s holding the coffee with her left. “How’s the thumb?”
Something shifts in her expression. Not much. A tightening around her eyes that tells me I’ve touched a nerve she thought was hidden. “Fine.”
“It’s not fine. You can barely grip.”
“I can grip well enough.”
“To hold a blade? To throw a punch? To stop someone twice your size from dragging you somewhere you don’t want to go?”
She says nothing. Her jaw works.
“That’s what I thought.” I reach out and take the coffee from her left hand. She lets me, which surprises us both. I take a long swig. It’s too sweet and too cold. “You drink this shite?”
“Give that back.”
“Come and get it.”
Her nostrils flare. She reaches for the cup, and I hold it above my head, out of her range.
It’s childish. It’s deliberate. I want to see what she does when she can’t solve a problem with a blade or a threat.
I want to see what she’s like when the weapon is stripped away, and all that’s left is her body against mine.
She doesn’t jump for it. She doesn’t swear at me. She steps forward and drives her left fist into my bruised ribs.
The pain is blinding. A white flash that locks every muscle in my torso. The coffee cup drops from my hand and smashes on the cobblestones. I double over, not all the way, but enough that she could knee me in the face if she wanted to.
She doesn’t. She waits.
She’s not swinging to impress anyone.
She’s swinging because she means it.
That’s the difference between the girls who flirt with danger and the ones who are it.
My ribs scream, and my mouth splits into that feral smile because—finally—someone hit me like I’m not a weapon on a shelf.
Like I’m a man who can take it.
I straighten up. It takes longer than it should because O’Shea did real damage in training, and she just hit the exact same spot. My breath is ragged. My ribs are screaming. And I’m smiling. I can feel it splitting my face, wide and feral and completely involuntary.
“You hit hard for a girl,” I say.
“Don’t you dare.”
“Hit me again. Maybe I’ll learn.”
Something flickers across her face. Confusion, maybe. She expected rage. She expected retaliation. She didn’t expect me to enjoy it. That’s the thing about me. Pain and pleasure live in the same room in my head, and I stopped trying to separate them a long time ago.
“You’re crazy,” she says.
“Probably. But you’re the one who punched a man in the ribs instead of walking away, so we’re in the same postcode.”
“I’m nothing like you.”
“No? You’re standing in a courtyard having a conversation with a man who just smiled when you hit him. Normal people don’t do this. Normal people don’t come to this university. You and I are the same kind of wrong, Dervla. The only difference is I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.”
She’s breathing harder. I can see it in the rise and fall of her chest, the way her nostrils flare with each inhale.
She’s not afraid. She’s vibrating. That energy I felt watching her crawl out of the earth last night, the wild, cornered, don’t-you-dare-help-me fury, it’s right here, right under her skin, and it’s calling to something in me that I usually only let out when I’m fighting.
“Walk away,” she says. “Last chance.”
“I’ve never taken a last chance in my life. Wouldn’t know what to do with one.”
“Then you’re an idiot.”
“And you’re stalling.”
I move. Not slowly. I close the gap between us in one step and grab her.
Both hands, her hips, lifting her off the ground before she can process what’s happening.
She’s lighter than I expected. Her back hits the stone wall beside the fountain with enough force to knock a grunt out of her, and then I’m there, holding her up, her feet off the ground, her face level with mine for the first time since we met.
Eye to eye. Nowhere to hide.
Her left hand grabs my throat. Not squeezing. Holding. A warning that she could crush my windpipe if she decided to, and the knowledge that she’s strong enough to make it hurt sends a rush of blood south that I couldn’t stop if I tried.
“Put me down,” she says. Her voice is steady. Her hand is not.
“No.”
“Put me the fuck down, Cormac.”
There it is again. My name in her mouth. She can’t say it without tasting something she doesn’t want to like.
“Not yet.” My fingers dig into her hips, keeping her pinned.
Her legs are on either side of my body, and I can feel the heat of her thighs against my aching ribs.
“I need you to listen to something, and you won’t listen unless I make you, because you’re the most stubborn fucking woman I’ve ever met; you’d give my mother a run for her money. ”
“If this is another alliance pitch, I swear to God—”
“It’s not. Fuck the alliance. Fuck the politics. This is just me.”
Her grip tightens on my throat. Just a fraction. Enough that my next breath is shallow.
“Troy is going to come for you,” I say. “Not openly. He’s too much of a coward for that. He’ll come at you sideways, when you’re alone, when you’re tired, when that hand hasn’t healed. He’ll bring his mates, because he can’t do anything by himself, and when he does, I need you to know something.”
“What?”
“That I will break every bone in every body he brings. I will dismantle them in front of him, and then I will dismantle him, and I will do it slowly enough that he understands it’s personal.” My voice is low, steady, and I mean every word so completely that it aches.
“What?” she rasps.
“When you crawled out of the ground last night, when you dislocated your own thumb to get out of those cuffs, something in my chest that I thought was dead told me that if anyone touches you, I’ll kill them.”
The silence that follows is thick enough to choke on.
Her hand on my throat loosens. Her breathing has changed. The fury is still there, but it’s moved aside to make room for something else, something raw that she’s trying to shove back down even as it climbs up her face.
“You don’t know me,” she whispers.
“I know enough.”
“You know nothing.”
“I’ve known you my whole life,” I say. The words are out before I can stop them, pulled from somewhere deep and stupid and honest that I usually keep locked.
“Every fight I’ve ever been in, every time I took a hit and came up smiling, every time someone looked at me and saw a weapon instead of a person.
You’re the first person who looked at me and saw both. ”
Her eyes are wet. She blinks, and it’s gone, sealed away so fast it might never have been there. Her hand drops from my throat.
“Put me down,” she says. Quiet. Not angry.
I lower her carefully, knowing there is a crowd of onlookers to see how this ends. Sadly for them, and me, it ends with her walking away from me. Her feet touch the ground, and she sways for half a second before locking her knees. I keep my hands on her hips until she’s steady, and then I let go.
She straightens her top. Brushes off her jeans. Pushes a loose strand of hair behind her ear with her left hand, because her right is still too fucked to manage even that. She doesn’t look at me.
“Cormac.”
“Yeah.”
She looks up. Her eyes are dry, hard, and furious, but underneath, there is something that hits me like a crowbar to the sternum.
“If Troy comes for me, I’ll handle him myself.” She pauses. “But if he brings his friends, you can have the leftovers.”
My mouth curves into something genuine. Not the calculated smirk I offer in the locker room, not the knife-edge smile I deploy when I need someone afraid.
This is different—a rare, unguarded expression that reveals more than I typically allow, but in this moment, strategic advantage seems less important than honesty.
“Deal,” I say.
She picks up her bag from where it dropped, slings it over her shoulder, and walks away. Her boots jingle with every step, and I stand there, watching her go, pressing my hand against my screaming ribs where she hit me.
I’ll bruise there. Over the bruise O’Shea left, which is already over older bruises from older fights. Layers of damage, one on top of the other, each one a memory of someone who tried to break me and couldn’t.
Hers is the only one I want to keep.