Chapter 15
Aidan
Lifting my bag higher on my shoulder, I glance at Cormac and then knock with a smirk.
Moments later, the door opens, and Dervla is staring at us with a look of confusion before she spots the bags.
She holds her hand up and tries to slam the door. “No.”
I jam it with my foot, and she struggles uselessly. I push it back open and take a step forward, into the doorway. “Yes.”
“You and your fucking one-word sentences,” she growls and turns to face Declan, who is sauntering out of the kitchen, shirtless, jeans on but undone, hair mussed, holding a cup of coffee and looking like he won the Euro Millions.
“You absolute traitor,” she hisses at him.
Declan takes a sip of his coffee. “It’s not betrayal. It’s protection.”
I step inside, and Cormac follows, shouldering past Dervla with the casual inevitability of a man who has already decided where he’s sleeping tonight, and it’s on her bed. She makes a sound that’s somewhere between a snarl and a screech, and it does things to me that would concern a therapist.
“Get out,” she says. “All of you. Now.”
“Can’t.” I set my bag down by the stairs as Cormac closes the door and slides the deadbolt across, while I survey the hallway, which is more of an entrance hall than a corridor.
Georgian proportions. High ceilings. Original cornicing.
Her father had taste. “Troy knows where you live. He’s already come to your door once.
Declan staying was a start, but one man isn’t a security plan.
It’s a sleepover. Besides, I hear the garden is a mess. ”
“This isn’t a security plan either. This is an invasion. And what? You fancy yourself as a gardener?”
“I’m good with a hoe,” I say, my smirk widening as I see her eyes blaze with fury at the double entendre.
“Out,” she repeats, but the heat is already losing its edge.
She knows she can’t physically remove three of us, and reaching for her blade over a housing dispute would be an overreaction even by her standards.
She’s calculating. I can see it happening behind those stormy eyes: the cost of fighting this versus the cost of allowing it, and which one leaves her with more leverage.
“There are four bedrooms,” Declan says from the kitchen doorway. “The other three are empty anyway. We’ll take those.”
“You’ve already picked out rooms?” She whips around to glare at him. “How long have you been planning this?”
“Since the night before last.”
“This wasn’t the plan.”
“Plans evolve.”
She makes that sound again, the snarl-screech. Cormac grins at me behind her back.
I move past her into the house properly and take it in. The hallway is grander than I expected from the outside. Dark wood panelling on the lower half of the walls, original plaster above, a staircase that curves up to the first landing.
The ground floor is a sitting room to the left, another to the right, a kitchen at the back, and a smaller room beyond the stairs that looks like it was once a study.
“Here’s how this works,” I say, turning back to Dervla, who is standing in the middle of her hallway with her arms crossed and murder in her eyes.
She’s in an oversized t-shirt and shorts, bare legs, bare feet, and her hair is loose around her shoulders, and I make a point of not noticing any of that because now is not the time.
“Declan stays because he’s already here.
Cormac and I move into the other two rooms. We contribute to bills, food, and upkeep.
We don’t interfere with your schedule, your investigation, or your personal space. ”
“How generous of you, letting me keep my personal space in my own house.”
“We’re not asking permission, Dervla. We’re informing you.”
“And if I call the Garda and have you removed?”
“Then you’ll spend tonight alone in a house that Troy Kavanagh knows better than you do, with a hand that still can’t grip a blade properly, and no one between you and whatever he, or someone else, even, decides to try next.” I hold her gaze. “I don’t think you’ll make that call.”
She doesn’t blink. I don’t blink. The hallway is a standoff, and both of us know that the person who breaks eye contact first concedes the argument.
“You’re paying rent,” she says.
“Agreed.”
“And bills. All of them. Including the Wi-Fi.”
“Noted.”
“And if any of you leave the toilet seat up, I will nail it down and charge you for the damage.”
“You have your own bathroom,” Declan points out. “In your room.”
“Not. Negotiable,” she grits out.
Cormac snorts. She ignores him.
“And this is temporary,” she adds. “Until the Troy situation is resolved. After that, you’re out.”
“Understood.”
She holds my stare for one more second, then shakes her head and turns back toward the kitchen. “I’m making more coffee. If any of you touch my mug, I’ll know, and there will be consequences.”
Cormac is already heading for the stairs with his bag over his shoulder, and I pick up my bag and follow as she mutters about arseholes and storms off to the kitchen.
We head upstairs. The first floor has four doors off a wide landing.
The main bedroom is probably at the front, door closed.
The remaining three rooms are at intervals along the corridor.
Cormac pushes open the first one and finds a double bed, a wardrobe, and a window that overlooks the back garden. He dumps his bag on the bed.
“This one.”
I take the next room. It’s smaller but has a desk under the window and a view of the front garden and the street beyond.
Better sightlines. I can see the driveway, the pavement, the gate, and anyone approaching the house from either direction.
I set my bag down and stand at the window for a moment, recording the angles the same way I record everything.
It would be better if we could move into the townhouse my family owns on the other side of campus.
It’s bigger, more secure with electric gates, intercoms and cams, but there is no way in hell I would get her to move there.
This is a concession that has cost her and will likely cost us.
But it will do. For now. Troy isn’t getting his filthy hands on her again, I will make sure of it.
Turning from the window, I head back downstairs. Cormac is already in the kitchen, sipping coffee while Dervla pointedly ignores him. Declan is making scrambled eggs and toast. Three men, one woman, and a kitchen that suddenly feels smaller than its proportions should allow.
“Right,” I say from the doorway. “The garden.”
Dervla turns. “What about it?”
“It’s overgrown. The back wall has a blind spot where someone could climb over without being seen from the house. The trees on the east side provide cover all the way to the boundary. If Troy or anyone else wanted a back entrance, you’ve given them one.”
“So, you actually do want to garden.”
“I want to clear sightlines. Gardening is a side effect.”
“You’re insane. All of you.”
“You’ve said that before. It hasn’t stopped being true.”
She stares at me, then at Cormac, then toward Declan.
The fight has gone out of her. Not the anger.
The anger is permanent, structural, the foundation on which she’s built her entire personality.
But the resistance to our presence is softening into something more like resigned irritation, which is the best I’m going to get, and I’ll take it.
“Fine,” she says. “There are tools in the shed. Try not to kill each other.”
Outside, the garden is worse than it looked from the kitchen window.
Whatever maintenance Cillian Callaghan paid for stopped when he died, and two months of neglect in an Irish spring has turned it into a jungle.
The grass is knee-high in places. The borders are choked with weeds.
The stone wall at the back is half-hidden by moss so thick it’s practically made from it now, and the east side is a mass of brambles that would provide cover for an army, let alone one dickhead with a grudge.
Cormac finds the shed, a sturdy affair in the back corner, and pulls out a lawnmower, a pair of shears, and a scythe that looks like it belongs in a horror film.
“Dibs on the scythe,” he says.
“Put that down before you take someone’s head off.”
“That’s the idea.”
I allow it. It’s a worthy weapon in his hands if someone is trying to get past him to Dervla.
We get to work under the warm sun. Cormac attacks the brambles on the east boundary with the shears and a level of aggression that suggests he’s imagining each branch is one of Troy’s limbs.
Declan takes the lawnmower and starts cutting systematic strips from the back wall toward the house.
I clear the moss from the boundary wall, pulling it away in thick, wet clumps that reveal the stonework beneath. The wall is solid. Good.
The morning heats up as we work. April has decided to cooperate, the sun pushing through high cloud and turning the garden into something that steams gently as the dew evaporates.
I strip my shirt off after twenty minutes, and Cormac does the same ten minutes later because Cormac will take any excuse to be shirtless.
Declan was already shirtless, so we might as well join him.
The work is good. Simple. Physical in a way that doesn’t require strategy or calculation.
My hands are dirty, my shoulders are burning, and the wall is emerging from the moss like a thing resurrected, and there’s a satisfaction in that which I haven’t felt since the last time I did something useful with my hands instead of my head.
Cormac has cleared a ten-foot section of the east boundary and is standing back to admire his work. It’s honest, and it’s therapeutic.
We’re not going anywhere. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not until Troy is dealt with, the Board seat is decided, and her father’s murderer has been dragged into the light.
She’ll fight it. She’ll resent it. She’ll threaten us with her blade and her temper and that filthy, gorgeous mouth.
And every morning, there’ll be coffee waiting, because Declan will make it, and food in the fridge, because Cormac eats like a horse and shops accordingly, and the garden will be clear, the perimeter safe, and the house that belonged to her dead father will start to feel like something else.
Like hers.
Like ours.