Chapter 16
Dervla
Standing at the kitchen sink with a mug I’ve already rinsed twice, despite having a fully functioning dishwasher, I look out of the window at three shirtless men manhandling my garden into some sort of order that my dad would be impressed by.
Nothing to see here. Nothing at all.
Except there is, and I can’t stop looking.
Cormac is built like something carved rather than grown, every muscle defined under sun-warmed skin that’s already sheened with sweat.
He swings the shears in wide, brutal arcs, and each time the blades connect with a bramble, the muscles across his back flex in a way that makes my mouth go dry.
He’s not working. He’s waging a private war on the east boundary, and the brambles are losing.
Aidan is leaner, harder, the definition in his shoulders and arms coming from something more precise.
He strips the moss from the boundary wall with his bare hands, methodical and relentless, and I watch his forearms flex with each pull and hate myself for noticing.
He’s infuriating. He showed up at my door with a bag, a smirk, and an unwavering certainty that I’d let him stay, and the worst part is that he was right.
Declan is the one I can’t look at without my skin going hot, because I know what those hands feel like, and what that chest looks like when it’s pressed against mine, and the sound he makes when he’s inside me, and the fact that all of that happened last night in the very kitchen I’m standing in is making it extremely difficult to maintain the fiction that I’m angry about any of this.
I am angry. I’m furious that three men I don’t know and are, on paper, at least, my rivals, have installed themselves in my house like I want them here.
I’m furious that Declan orchestrated this without asking.
I’m furious that Aidan walked in and started dictating terms as if my home was a boardroom and I was the agenda.
But.
I’m also standing in a house with new locks and three people between me and the front door, and the knot that’s been sitting in my stomach since Troy put his hands on me has loosened by a fraction. Not gone. Just loosened.
I set the mug down and lean against the counter, arms crossed, watching them through the glass.
Troy is a problem. A manageable one. He’s vicious but not clever, persistent but not strategic.
He’ll come again, and when he does, he’ll find a house that’s no longer empty and a garden with clear sightlines and a boundary wall that isn’t hiding anything.
He’ll find four people instead of one, and even Troy is smart enough to know those odds aren’t in his favour, even if he brings back up.
But Troy isn’t what keeps me awake.
Someone killed my father. Someone sat in a room, or made a phone call, or gave a nod, and my dad ended up dead at his own table with a bullet in his skull and a glass of whiskey he never got to drink.
Someone did that to create a vacancy. To put a seat in play.
To shift the balance of a Board that controls more than just this university.
I don’t have proof of that. Not yet. But that is why I’m here.
That and to rip this institution apart at the seams.
And here’s the thing that has nestled inside my head, and I can’t shift it. If they killed my dad for the seat, and I go after the seat, what stops them from killing me?
Nothing, that’s what.
The fact that Aidan has insinuated he wants that seat makes this even more fucking stupid. He could be a Trojan horse, sent here to murder me in my sleep.
The thought moves through me like cold water, and I shiver despite the sun pouring through the glass. My arms tighten across my chest. Outside, Cormac laughs at something Aidan says, the sound carrying through the open window, and the normality of it feels like a lie draped over something terrible.
But there is something about the way he is moving around my garden that screams the opposite.
I don’t know who they are. The killer. The conspirator.
The one who never holds the knife. They’re somewhere in the architecture of this university, embedded in the Board or adjacent to it, patient and invisible, and they’ve been watching the vacancy they created like a farmer watches a field he’s just ploughed. Waiting to see what grows.
What’s growing is me.
I press my hands against the counter and breathe. In. Out. The way I breathed when Troy had my wrists, and in the gauntlet when the walls pressed in. Steady. Controlled. Fear is information, not instruction. It tells you where the danger is. It doesn’t tell you to run.
I’m not running.
But I need to be smarter. Faster. I need those Board minutes.
I need to know what was on the table before Dad died, what vote he would have cast, what decision someone might’ve paid to prevent.
The answer is in this university, in a filing cabinet, a server or a safe that someone thinks is secure, and I’m going to find it.
The shiver passes. The sun is warm on my face through the glass.
Cormac is hacking at a particularly stubborn root.
Declan is pushing the lawnmower in neat, precise lines.
Aidan is pulling the last of the moss from the top of the wall, and the three of them look like something from a calendar that a nun would confiscate, and I’m disgusted with myself for thinking it.
I need to focus on something else.
I open the fridge and assess the damage. Eggs, bacon, bread, butter, cheese, tomatoes, and a bag of apples, a pack of chicken breasts for one, so that won’t go very far until they decide to cough up and buy some groceries.
I pull out what I need and start making sandwiches.
BLTs. I drop the bacon into the pan. Sizzling fat fills the kitchen with a smell other than coffee for the first time since I moved in.
The domesticity jars me. I freeze, spatula in hand, staring at the strips curling in the heat, and wonder when exactly my life became this.
Three weeks ago, I was alone in our empty house, planning my arrival at a university that had already rejected me once.
I had a file, a blade, and a dead man’s name.
Now I’m making BLTs for three men who’ve moved into my spare rooms, one of whom I fucked like a woman possessed last night, another who bled on my blade two days ago, and a third who told me he’d kill for me in a courtyard while I had my hand around his throat.
This is not normal. None of this is normal. Yet standing here, flipping bacon while the sun comes through the window and three idiots tear up my garden, it feels closer to normal than anything has in eight weeks.
I stack the sandwiches on a plate, cut them into triangles because I’m not a savage, and carry the plate outside to the garden table. The table is old wrought iron, but it’s sturdy, and there are four chairs around it.
I grab a cloth from the kitchen and clean the chairs off. Then I go back in for three glasses and a jug of water, because I’m not running a bar service, and they can drink water and like it.
“Food,” I say from one of the chairs, I’ve pulled further away from the rest. Nothing more. No invitation. No warmth. Just a statement of fact that sustenance exists and is available.
Three heads turn. Cormac drops the shears instantly and crosses the garden in about four strides, reaching for a sandwich before his arse hits the chair.
Declan turns off the lawnmower and wipes his hands on his jeans.
Aidan takes his time, brushing dirt from his hands, pulling his shirt from where it’s been hanging on the shed door and slinging it over his shoulder without putting it on.
Strategic. Even his approach to lunch is strategic.
They sit. They eat. Cormac inhales three sandwiches in the time it takes me to eat one. Declan eats steadily, methodically. Aidan eats one sandwich with the deliberate enjoyment of a man who appreciates that someone made food for him and intends to acknowledge it without saying so.
“These are good,” Cormac says, mouth full.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
“Yes, Mum.”
I glare. He grins. It’s the same grin he gave me in the courtyard yesterday, wide and real and stupid, and I look away before it can do anything to my face that resembles a smile.
The garden looks different already. The east boundary is clear, the brambles piled in a heap that Cormac will probably want to set on fire later.
The grass is short and even where Declan’s been, a patchwork of fresh-cut green that makes the un-mown sections look even wilder by comparison.
The back wall has emerged from its moss blanket, the grey stone warming in the sun.
It looks like someone lives here and cares about it.
I sit back in my chair, legs crossed, mug in hand, watching them eat, and the thought that surfaces is one I push down immediately because it’s dangerous, premature, and based on nothing solid.
But it’s there.
Maybe this is what safety feels like when you stop fighting it.
I don’t say it out loud, because speaking it would make it real.
But a part of me—the part that still remembers being someone’s daughter, not someone’s weapon—wants to sit here until the sun goes down and let the world be simple.
Food. Work. Warmth.
Men who look dangerous and act like my door is their responsibility.
It’s not peace.
It’s a ceasefire.
And I’m greedy enough to want it anyway.