Chapter 17
Dervla
Iwake to the sound of footsteps on the landing outside my bedroom.
I grab my blade before my brain catches up, and I leap out of bed. My right hand is stiff but functional enough to grip the door handle. I open my bedroom door without a sound and step onto the landing.
The house is dark. The only light is the thin orange glow of the streetlamp seeping through the hallway window.
A shadow moves on the landing. My blade comes up.
“It’s me.” Declan’s voice. Barely a breath. He’s standing outside his room in joggers and nothing else, and his body is angled toward the staircase, every line of him taut and alert.
Another door opens. Cormac materialises from the room at the end, and he’s holding the short iron bar from the garden shed. He brought it inside. Of course he did.
A creak from downstairs makes my gaze snap back to Declan as Aidan moves into view, making me jump. He points downstairs.
I nod.
Someone is inside my house.
Aidan moves like smoke, and in the dark, he’s almost invisible. He’s dressed, fully dressed, boots and all, which means he wasn’t sleeping. He was waiting.
He holds up one hand. Flat. Stay.
Below us, a floorboard creaks again. The footsteps are careful, measured, the tread of someone who hasn’t lived here, so doesn’t know which floorboards creak and which don’t. Rules out Troy. I doubt he is capable of orchestrating a midnight break-in.
Aidan descends the stairs. Each step is placed with the precision of a man who does know which boards creak, and which don’t, and the fact that he’s mapped my staircase in under a day is both reassuring and terrifying.
Cormac follows. Less precise but no less silent, his bare feet absorbing the sound. The iron bar hangs loose in his right hand.
Declan stays with me on the landing, a wicked-looking curved knife in his hand. His hand finds my arm and he shakes his head as he moves off. I follow, because fuck that.
Creeping down right behind him, I hear him huff in annoyance, but he doesn’t try to physically stop me.
At the bottom of the stairs, we huddle in the dark. The study door's open. Aidan slides against the wall next to it, barely breathing. Cormac takes the other side, gripping the iron bar so tight his knuckles go white.
The man bursts out fast. My eyes lock on his knife—serrated steel, long enough to gut me in one swipe. Black clothes, black mask. Cold eyes find me instantly. Target locked.
He moves toward me, silent and deadly.
I freeze. Not from fear. I recognise what he is. The upward angle of the blade is ready to rip through my stomach. This fucker kills people for money, and right now, I'm just meat to him.
Two steps. That's all he gets.
Aidan lunges from the darkness and grabs the man's wrist. He twists hard.
The bone snaps with a crack that echoes through the hallway.
Before the man can make a sound, Cormac swings.
The iron bar smashes into his skull. The impact makes a wet crunch—like stepping on a rotten pumpkin.
Blood sprays across the wallpaper in a fine mist. Brain matter leaks from the dent in his head as he drops to the floor.
Dense. Wet. Final.
The man drops like a puppet with its strings cut, straight down, and his body hits the floorboards with a thud that vibrates through the soles of my bare feet. The knife clatters away from his limp hand and skids across the wood until it stops against the skirting board.
He doesn’t move.
The hallway is silent.
I’m standing three metres away with Henrietta in my fist and my back against the newel post, and I watched the men who moved into my house to protect me…
protect me. It took less than four seconds.
Four seconds between a man walking toward me with a knife and that man lying face-down on my hallway floor with his head at an angle that my brain recognises before my stomach does.
Aidan is standing over him, breathing hard. Not from exertion. From control. The kind of breathing that comes from holding yourself back from something worse. He crouches and presses two fingers to the man’s neck.
He looks up at Cormac with a nod.
Approval? Confirmation, the man is dead? Both?
Cormac is standing with the iron bar at his side, calm as you like. There’s blood on the bar. There’s blood on the floor. The man on the ground hasn’t moved.
“Dead?” I ask, my voice cold, strong.
“Pretty dead,” Aidan replies. Flat. Clinical.
“You expected less?” Cormac states.
“I expected you to be quicker with the swing,” Aidan says, straightening up.
“Sure. Next time,” Cormac says with an eyeroll.
My fingers are locked around Henrietta so tightly that the hilt is slick in my palm.
Layered like armour, something lurks. The sharp, shocking certainty that I wasn’t alone when it mattered.
They didn’t hesitate.
They didn’t debate.
They moved—like my safety was the only rule worth obeying.
The realisation hits so hard I have to swallow around it, because if I let it rise, it will turn into something dangerously close to trust.
Aidan pulls his phone from his pocket. He dials a number without scrolling, from memory, and lifts it to his ear.
“It’s me,” he says. “I need a cleanup. Locate me.” He hangs up.
I stare at him. “Clean up?”
“My family have them on speed dial.”
“Of course they do,” I mutter. Dad probably did as well. I know he wasn’t an investor. Or he was, but many of the things he invested in aren’t exactly legal. It’s a minefield I have yet to dig through when I have the mental bandwidth.
“I want to know who sent him.”
“We’ll find out.” Declan is already crouching beside the body, going through pockets with latex gloves he produced from somewhere I don’t want to think about. Nothing. “He’s clean.”
“Professional,” Aidan says.
“Very.”
Someone sent a killer to my house.
While I slept.
If the guys hadn’t moved in this morning, I’d have faced this alone and maybe lost.
The thought makes me want to punch a wall, which is counterproductive when my right hand is still healing, so I settle for grinding my teeth until my jaw aches.
“Who knew you were here?” I ask.
“No one,” Aidan says. “Except your neighbours, who may have seen us arrive and not leave.”
“So someone assumed it was still just me.”
Aidan’s gaze sharpens. “Looks likely.”
I crouch beside the body. Declan shifts to make room, but doesn’t try to stop me.
I pull back the balaclava and study the face underneath.
Late thirties, maybe forties. Hard jaw. Scar tissue across the bridge of his nose.
I don’t recognise him, and I didn’t expect to.
This isn’t the kind of man who sits in lecture halls or postures on driveways.
This is a tool. Someone pointed him at my house the way you’d point a gun, and all I’m looking at is the bullet.
“He came in through the study,” I say. “So, from the back?”
“Probably,” Aidan stares into the room. “This window is down the side of the house. The neighbours’ overgrown bush protects it. Tomorrow that bush goes.”
“Whoever sent him will know he failed,” I say. “When he doesn’t report back.”
“Which buys us time,” Aidan says. “They won’t send another one immediately. They’ll reassess. Gather intelligence. Try to work out what went wrong.”
“What went wrong is that you three psychopaths are living in my house.”
“You’re welcome,” Cormac says.
I shoot him a look that should strip paint, but the corner of my mouth betrays me, and I clamp down on it before it becomes something he can use against me.
Aidan gets a text and moves to open the front door.
Two men step inside, both in dark clothing, both carrying bags.
They’re older, thick-set, and they don’t look at me.
They don’t look at anyone. They look at the body on the floor, exchange a glance, and get to work with the silent efficiency of people who’ve done this more times than any of us want to count.
I watch them. This is the world I was born into, and the fact that I’ve spent most of my life pretending otherwise doesn’t make it less true.
Dad kept me away from the worst of it, but he couldn’t keep me away from all of it, and the night I found him at the table was the night the last wall between me and reality came down.
One of the men produces a bottle of something chemical and starts working on the bloodstain. The other has the body wrapped and is moving it toward the front door with Cormac’s help, because Cormac has apparently decided that body disposal is a group activity.
Declan is in the study, examining the window. He goes outside and reappears later with a piece of board and some tools.
I sit on the bottom stair and process this entire shitshow.
If Aidan wanted me dead or removed, he wouldn’t have protected me. It makes me feel better about my life choices. I’m not a total moron for letting them move into my house.
Twenty minutes later, my hallway is clean, the body is gone, the study window is boarded, and the only evidence that anything happened is the faint smell of cleaning fluid.
The cleaners leave without a word.
The four of us remain in the hallway, and the silence is the kind that comes after something irreversible.
“The study window needs replacing properly,” Declan says. “I’ll sort it tomorrow.”
“And I need the Board minutes from the weeks before Dad died,” I say, standing up, because I’m done being reactive.
Someone sent a professional to my house, and the only response that means anything is to find out why.
“Someone wanted him gone to create a vacancy on the Board. I need to know who and why.”
Aidan looks at me. “The Board minutes are kept in the Admin Building. Third floor. Whitmore’s office.”
“I’d ask if you’re joking, but… yeah. Of course, it’s Whitmore’s office.”
“He won’t just hand them over,” Declan says.
“No. He won’t.”
Aidan moves closer. “So we take them.”
The word we comes out, and he watches it land. It’s an acknowledgment that whatever this is, it’s no longer just mine. It’s ours.
The word we lands in my ribs like a dull thud.
Not a promise. Not comfort.
A claim.
My first instinct is to reject it on principle, because I didn’t ask for partners and I sure as hell didn’t ask for protectors.
But my hallway is still too clean. The smell of chemicals is still in the air.
And the truth is that this world tried to take me out in my own house, and these three men answered like it was personal.
I hate that my spine straightens at we.
I hate more that it feels right.
“You want that seat,” I say flatly. “Why am I trusting you?”
“I never said I wanted it.”
“You didn’t have to.”
He sighs as if contemplating whether to let me in on his plans.
“This is a conflict of interest,” I clip out. “You need to leave.”
“Not a chance, pixie. There is only conflict if we let it become a conflict. Healthy competition.”
“No.” I move forward, blade raised. “That seat is mine. You aren’t having it. I’ve got plans for this university, and I need that seat to get it done.”
Aidan’s expression doesn’t change. He absorbs the blade the way he absorbs everything, with a stillness that calculates before it reacts. His eyes drop to Henrietta’s tip, then come back to my face, and the faint curve at the corner of his mouth is the most dangerous thing in the room.
“Put the blade down, Dervla.”
“Give me a reason.”
“Because you’re pointing it at the only person in this house who knows the combination to Whitmore’s office safe.”
The words hit me like a bucket of ice water. My arm doesn’t drop, but my grip shifts. Behind me, I hear Declan exhale through his nose, and Cormac settle his weight against the wall, both of them reading the room and deciding not to intervene.
“You want that seat,” I repeat. “I can’t trust you.”
“Yet you didn’t stop me from moving in here. Why is that, Dervla?”
Because I’m tired. Because someone just tried to kill me in my own house. Because the alternative is standing alone, holding a blade with the wrong hand and pretending I don’t need anyone.
I don’t say any of that.
“Because you’re useful,” I say instead. “Don’t confuse that with trust.”
He takes a step forward, and the blade presses into the fabric of his shirt, right over his sternum.
He doesn’t flinch. “The seat. You want it for the access it gives you. The vote, the records, and the inner workings of every decision the Board has made in the last decade. You want to sit in the room where your father sat and pull the machine apart from the inside.”
My jaw tightens. He’s not wrong, and the precision of his read makes my skin prickle.
“I don’t want the seat,” he says, and the words come out with a weight that forces me to listen. “I want the whole fucking institution.”
The hallway is so quiet, I can hear the tick of the kitchen clock through the wall.