Chapter 14
Dervla
Isleep for twelve hours straight.
No dining room. No crystal decanter. No morning light catching the blood on the mahogany. Just black, heavy nothing, and when my alarm pulls me up at seven, I lie still for a full minute, confused by the absence of dread that usually greets me when I open my eyes.
Then I hear movement downstairs.
Declan.
The memory of yesterday reassembles itself in pieces.
I sit up and flex my right hand. The swelling is down.
Not gone, but manageable, a dull ache instead of the screaming fire it was yesterday.
Progress. More ice. More painkillers. Another week or two and I’ll have enough of a grip back.
I’ll need it, because the list of people I want to hit is getting longer by the hour.
I pull on joggers and a hoodie and head downstairs. The hallway smells like toast. The blankets on the sofa are folded in a neat stack on one arm, and his boots are by the door, which means he’s still here.
He’s in the kitchen. Standing at the counter with his back to me, buttering toast with the efficiency of a man who’s made breakfast in other people’s kitchens before. The kettle has just boiled. Two mugs are out.
“Morning,” he says, without turning around.
“You’re still here.”
“I said I’d be gone before you woke up if you wanted. You didn’t specify.”
“I’m specifying now. Get out.”
He turns and slides a mug across the counter toward me. “After coffee.”
I take the mug because it’s there and I’m not awake enough to fight about hot liquid, and because he’s made it exactly right again–like the tea–and the petty annoyance of that is becoming a familiar, almost comforting irritation.
We drink in silence. He eats his toast. I eat mine because he made two plates, and the alternative is admitting I’m hungry to a man I didn’t invite over.
“I’ve got lectures until three,” I say.
“I know your timetable.”
“Of course you do. Because that’s not creepy at all.”
“It’s practical. I have Economics at ten, and a seminar at two. Different buildings. But I’ll be on campus.”
“I don’t need you on campus.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
This is what he does. He states facts that sound neutral and lands them like chess pieces, each one nudging the board a fraction closer to whatever configuration he’s been building in his head.
But now the information is there, planted: he’ll be nearby, and if I need him, the distance is measurable.
He’s not offering protection. He’s offering proximity and letting me decide what to do with it.
I hate how good he is at this.
“Go,” I say. “I need to shower, and you need to not be here when I do.”
He rinses his mug, sets it on the draining board, and picks up his jacket from the back of the chair. At the kitchen door, he stops.
“Change the locks today,” he says. “I know a locksmith on campus. He’s reliable and discreet.”
“Fine.”
“And ice the hand again after your shower. Ten minutes.”
“Fine.”
“And—”
“Declan. Go.”
He goes. The front door clicks shut behind him, and the house is mine again, and the silence that fills it is different from the silence of last night. This morning it’s just quiet. Ordinary. The kind of quiet that means nothing has gone wrong yet.
I shower with the water as hot as I can stand it. The heat loosens my shoulders and softens the ache in my head from too much sleep. I stand under the spray and let myself think about nothing, which is a luxury I haven’t had since Dad died.
Then I think about Declan making toast in my kitchen, and the luxury is over. I dry off and get dressed quickly before grabbing more ice for my hand while I practice my left-handed grip on Henrietta.
When ten minutes are up, I leave the house and cross campus, waiting for Troy to jump out at me. But this time I will gut him like a fish, and I don’t care who sees me. I won’t let him get his hands on me again.
My first lecture, Criminal Law with Gallagher, is at nine. I arrive early, take a seat near the back, and pull out my phone to record the lecture. Roisin is three rows ahead. She doesn’t look at me.
Gallagher sweeps in and launches straight into a lecture on conspiracy law. The mechanics of joint enterprise, the legal threshold for complicity, the point at which knowledge becomes participation. He’s clinical about it, dismantling case law with the same precision he used on criminal liability.
But today, something grips me.
“The question of conspiracy,” he says, pacing the front of the room, “is not merely who committed the act. It is who knew. Who facilitated. Who benefited. The law does not require that every conspirator hold the knife. It requires only that they understood a knife would be held and did nothing to prevent it.”
He lets that sit. The room is quiet.
“The most dangerous conspirator,” he continues, “is the one who never touches the weapon. Who never enters the room. Who constructs the conditions under which violence becomes inevitable, and then stands back and watches it happen with clean hands and a clear conscience.”
His gaze sweeps the lecture hall. It lands on me for a fraction of a second.
I hang on every word. Not because I need notes for the exam, but because Gallagher just described, in precise legal language, the kind of person who could order a man killed at his own dining table and never leave a fingerprint.
I pull out my notebook and clumsily start making notes with my left hand in shorthand that will probably take me ages to decipher later. But something tells me this is vital and Gallagher knows it.
After the lecture, I catch Roisin in the corridor.
“Coffee?” I say.
She raises an eyebrow. “You’re asking me?”
“Don’t make it weird.”
We head for the courtyard by the old fountain.
It’s quieter here, the foot traffic thinning as the paths narrow between buildings.
The fountain hasn’t worked in years, the basin clogged with leaves and rainwater, but the stone wall around it is wide enough to sit on, and the archways on either side provide enough sightlines that I can see anyone approaching before they’re close enough to matter.
We sit on the wall, the stone warm enough. The morning is bright and warm, and the cobblestones are still damp from overnight rain. I wrap my hands around my mug and watch the steam rise.
“Gallagher’s lecture,” I say. “Conspiracy. Joint enterprise. The one who never touches the weapon.”
“It’s Criminal Law. That’s the syllabus.”
“It’s also a roadmap for how you’d kill a man and get away with it.”
Roisin sips her coffee. Her expression gives me nothing. “You think Gallagher was sending you a message?”
“I think Gallagher doesn’t say anything without a reason. He looked at me during that section.”
“He looks at everyone.”
“Not the way he looked at me.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “What are you asking me, Dervla?”
“I’m asking if anyone on the Board had a reason to want my father dead?”
The question lies between us like a stone in still water. Roisin doesn’t flinch, but something shifts behind her eyes, a recalculation, a reassessment of how much I know and how fast I’m moving.
“That’s a dangerous question,” she says.
“I’m a dangerous person.”
“You’re a person with a target on her back, a fucked hand, and three days’ experience at this university. Dangerous is ambitious.”
“Answer the question.”
She sets her mug down. “Your father’s seat has been empty for eight weeks.
In four weeks, the challenge opens. Two weeks after that, it must be filled.
Seven seats, six occupied. Every person on that Board has an opinion about who should fill the seventh, and not all of those opinions are compatible. ”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I can give you right now.” She stands and walks away, her rings catching the light, and I sit on the wall with my cold coffee and no answers.
I pull the campus map from my bag and flip it over, using the blank side. With my left hand, I start writing. Names. Dates. The Board members. The connections between them, the gaps, the questions that keep multiplying.
Dad’s file is under my mattress. Tonight, I’m pulling it out and starting again from the beginning.
I walk away from the fountain, across the courtyard, and out through the archway on the south side.
The corridor beyond leads to the Fitzgerald Building, where English Lit starts in twenty minutes.
The stone is cooler here, the vaulted ceiling trapping the chill, and my footsteps echo in a way that makes me hyperaware of the fact that I’m alone.
I’m not afraid. I’m thinking.
Dad was the tiebreaker. Someone needed that balance shifted.
Someone needed the quorum broken, or a specific decision blocked, or a new voice in that seventh seat who would vote the way they wanted.
Killing him achieved all three at once: it removed the obstacle, created the vacancy, and opened a race for the replacement that would consume everyone’s attention while the real play happened in the background.
The question isn’t just who killed him. It’s why.
I need the Board minutes. The agenda. Whatever was on the table in the weeks before his death. That information exists somewhere in this university, and I’m going to find it.
I cross the quad, cutting between groups of students who part without knowing they’re doing it. My Apex status is starting to precede me. People glance, step aside, pretend they weren’t looking. It’s useful and uncomfortable in equal measure.
The lecture hall is on the first floor. I take the stairs, my knee twinging, and push through the door with a minute to spare. I take a seat near the back.
Dr Keogh arrives and launches into Paradise Lost, Book Two, with the same ferocity as last time. Satan’s war council. The politics of Hell. The debate among the fallen angels about whether to wage open war or pursue subtler forms of revenge.