Chapter 13
Declan
The booth’s pleather cushion creaks as I shift my weight, angling my body away from the table behind me.
I lift my coffee mug—lukewarm now—and take a slow sip, letting the ceramic rim hide my expression.
Through the gap between the booth and the wall, Troy’s reflection wavers in the dining hall window glass, his shoulders hunched forward as he leans in toward his three companions.
My textbooks remain untouched, perfect props arranged in a neat stack.
“You should’ve seen her face,” Troy says. He’s not whispering. He’s not even trying to be discreet. He’s performing. Leaning back in his chair, pint in hand, grinning like he’s just scored the winning try. “Had her right there on her own doorstep. Both wrists. She couldn’t do a fucking thing.”
Doyle laughs. “Did she cry?”
“Nah. Tried to front it out. Tough girl act. But I had the bad hand, and she knew it. You could see it in her eyes. Pure agony.”
“She’s nothing without them. Catch her alone, and she’s just a girl with a dead dad and a chip on her shoulder.”
My jaw hurts from how hard I’m clenching it. I can feel the anger building in my chest. If I don’t get it under control, I’m going to do something stupid.
I don’t stand up. I don’t turn around. I don’t put my fist through the back of Troy Kavanagh’s skull, which is what every nerve in my body is screaming at me to do.
Because Vice-Chancellor Whitmore has just walked into the dining hall.
He moves through the room with that oily, proprietary stride, nodding at students who’d rather he didn’t acknowledge them. His gaze sweeps the space, noticing faces, and I watch it land on Troy’s table for a fraction of a second before moving on.
If I stand up now, Whitmore will see me. He’ll see me moving toward Troy’s table. Whatever Troy just admitted about targeting Dervla’s hand, I can’t act on it while the Vice-Chancellor is in the room watching the chessboard.
But I can get up and leave, so I can make sure Dervla is okay.
I cross the campus and stride over the road. The evening light is fading, and the streetlamps are flickering on in their usual patchy sequence.
Standing outside her door, I knock. Three raps. Firm. Unhurried.
After a few seconds, the door opens four inches, and her eye appears before the blade does.
She sees it’s me, and her eyes narrow, but the door opens wider.
She’s changed: joggers, a loose t-shirt that drowns her, bare feet on the wood floor.
Her right hand is out of the glove, and she’s icing it, which is good.
Troy’s fingerprints are bruised into her left wrist. Dark. Ugly. Unmistakable.
“What do you want?” she asks.
“To see if you’re okay.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re icing your hand, and there are bruises on your wrist that weren’t there this morning.”
She looks down at her left wrist like she’s only just noticed the marks. She hasn’t. She’s known they were there since the moment Troy’s fingers left them. But acknowledging them to me costs her something, and she’s deciding whether to pay it.
“Come in, then,” she says, in a tone that suggests she’d rather invite in a plague of locusts. “Stop looming on my doorstep. One stalker today is enough.”
I step inside. She leads me to the kitchen, and the familiarity of it hits me harder than it should. Last night I finger fucked her in here, until she came all over my hand.
Neither of us mentions it.
She sits at the table and puts the ice bag back on her hand. I lean against the counter, keeping the width of the kitchen between us, because crowding her right now would be the wrong move.
“Troy was in the dining hall,” I say. “Bragging. I was in the booth behind him.”
Her jaw tightens. “Of course he was.”
“He was telling his mates he had you on your doorstep. Both wrists. Said you couldn’t do anything.”
“He’s not wrong. I couldn’t.” She says it flatly, without self-pity. A statement of fact, filed and categorised. “He grabbed my right first. I went for Henrietta with my left, and he caught that too. Blocked my knee as well. I was stuck.”
“Henrietta?”
“My blade.”
“So you stood there and took it.”
“What else was I going to do? Headbutt him and hope for the best?”
“Some people would have.”
“Some people are idiots.” She adjusts the ice. “He wanted a reaction. A scream, a flinch, something he could take back to his mates and feel big about. I didn’t give him one. That’s the only win I had available, so I took it.”
The precision of her analysis, delivered while she’s sitting in her kitchen with bruises on her wrist and a hand that’s been wrenched twice in two days, makes something shift in my blood.
Something close to recognition. She fights the way I think: with whatever tool is available, even if the only tool left is silence.
“How bad is the hand?” I ask.
She holds it up, turning it slowly. “Better than it looks. The swelling’s come down since I’ve been icing it. He squeezed hard enough to piss me off, but the tape held. Your tape,” she adds, like the admission is being extracted under duress.
“That’s the closest thing to a thank you I’ll ever get from you, isn’t it?”
“Don’t push it.”
I fill the kettle and flick it on. She watches me do it with an expression that’s half irritation, half something she won’t name.
“You don’t live here,” she says.
“I’m making tea.”
“You’re making yourself at home.”
“I’m boiling water. It’s not a property claim.”
“It is when you do it without asking.”
“Would you have said yes if I’d asked?”
She pauses. “Probably.”
“Then I saved us both thirty seconds.”
The ghost of something crosses her face.
Not a smile. The muscle memory of one, suppressed before it can fully form.
She’s too tired and too sore to maintain the full hostility, and the cracks are showing in small, human ways: the bare feet, the oversized t-shirt, the fact that she’s letting me stand in her kitchen and boil her kettle for the second time in two days.
I make the tea. Two mugs. Strong, two sugars in hers because I remembered from last time, black in mine. I set hers on the table within reach of her left hand and take mine back to the counter.
She sips. Doesn’t comment on the sugar. Which means I got it right, and she’s annoyed about that, too.
“He said something about my dad,” she says, after a while. Her voice is quieter now. Not fragile. Stripped back. “Called him my dead dad. On my own doorstep. Outside the house that was his.”
I don’t respond. She doesn’t need me to.
“I nearly pulled Henrietta for that. Not for the hand. Not for the wrists. For that. And if he’d said it inside, where no one could see, I would have opened him up.” She looks at me steadily. “I want you to know that. I chose not to because there was a witness. Not because I’m better than it.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because the way you three look at me sometimes, like I’m something to be handled, something breakable that needs managing, it makes me want to set things on fire.”
“You’re not breakable. If you were, Troy would have what he wanted, and you’d be somewhere crying about it instead of sitting here drinking tea and being furious.”
“I’m always furious. It’s my default setting.”
“I know that too.”
She looks at me over the rim of her mug, and the look goes on a beat too long. The silence between us is the kind that has weight. Not hostile. Not comfortable either. Charged, in the way when the air thickens and the pressure drops, and you can feel it on your skin.
She looks away first.
“He’ll come back,” I say.
“Probably.”
“He lived here. He knows this house.”
“I know.”
“I’m staying tonight.”
She puts the mug down. “Declan.”
“One night. The sofa. I won’t touch the thermostat, I won’t go upstairs, and I’ll be gone before you wake up if that’s what you want. But Troy is stupid enough to try something twice, and your hand isn’t healed enough to stop him if he does.”
“I could change the locks.”
“You could. Will you do it tonight?”
Silence.
“I don’t need you here,” she says, but the edge has dulled.
The resistance is still there, structural and load bearing, but the fight behind it has burned down to embers.
She’s exhausted. She’s hurt. And she’s smart enough to know that I’m right about Troy, even if admitting it feels like handing me a piece of herself she’d rather keep.
“One night,” she says eventually when I don’t say anything else. “And if you snore, I’ll smother you in your sleep.”
“Fair terms.”
She finishes her tea and stands. At the door to the kitchen, she stops with her back to me. “There are blankets in the hall cupboard. Food in the cupboards if you’re hungry.”
“Thanks.”
She disappears up the stairs. I hear each step, slower than the last, the creak of her bedroom door, and then the soft click of it closing.
I find the blankets. The sofa is old and deep, and it’s not comfortable, but I’ve slept in worse places for worse reasons. I pull off my boots, stretch out, and flick the TV on low.
The house settles around me. Old wood, old stone, the quiet groans of a building that’s been standing for two hundred years and will stand for two hundred more. Her footsteps creak once above me as she gets into bed, and then silence.
No one is coming to this door tonight. Not while I’m here.
And tomorrow, I’ll tell Aidan and Cormac that the sofa is shit, the kettle is slow, the garden needs work, and the woman upstairs sleeps with a blade under her pillow.
They’ll understand what I’m not saying, which is that I’m not leaving, and they should probably start packing.
But that’s tomorrow.
Tonight, the house is still, and she is safe, and that’s enough.