Chapter 21
Dervla
Sunday crawls.
I spend most of it in bed, which is a first. Declan went shopping and came back with enough food to feed a small army, which makes sense given Cormac’s intake.
The fridge is full. The cupboards are stocked.
The house smells like someone’s home instead of a crime scene, which is a neat trick considering there was a dead man in the hallway not that long ago.
I try to nap. I try to read. I try to study the file again, but the names and dates blur together, and my brain keeps sliding sideways to the carved letters on Cormac’s forearm and the sound the door made when my back hit it, and I shove the file under the mattress and stare at the ceiling until the light changes.
By seven, I’m up, showered, and dressed in black.
Leggings, long-sleeve top, dark trainers instead of the Docs.
It’s about getting in and getting out as fast as possible.
Henrietta goes at the small of my back. Habit.
I don’t expect to need her, but I’d feel naked without her, and naked isn’t how I’m walking into Whitmore’s office.
Downstairs, the kitchen is quiet. Aidan is at the table with his phone, reviewing the blueprint one more time. He’s in dark jeans, a black jumper, and boots.
Declan is leaning against the counter, sipping tea, dressed in black from head to toe.
He looks like he’s about to rob a bank, which isn’t far off.
He gives me a nod when I walk in. Calm. Steady.
The same face he wears when he’s wrapping my hand or making tea or standing in the dark outside my bedroom door.
Cormac is sitting on the counter, legs dangling, eating an apple. He’s in designer jeans and a shirt that is pulled out haphazardly, one might say drunkenly. I hope. I don’t look at his arm.
My stomach twists with the sick awareness that he means it.
Not the carving. Not the theatrics.
The devotion.
It’s the most dangerous thing in the room, because it makes part of me soften before I can stop it, makes my throat ache with a feeling I don’t deserve and didn’t ask for.
He’s offering me a kind of loyalty that ruins people.
I want to accept it like a gift.
“Ready?” Aidan asks without looking up, interrupting my thoughts.
“Born ready,” I mutter and lean against the doorframe.
The clock on the wall reads seven twenty-five. We have five minutes. Nobody moves. Nobody speaks. The kitchen ticks into the silence, and the four of us sit with the weight of what we’re about to do settling over us like a second skin.
At seven-twenty-eight, Aidan stands. “Let’s go.”
We file out in silence. We stick to the shadows and cut to the treeline that runs along the north boundary instead.
The ground is soft from yesterday’s rain, and the canopy blocks most of the light, which makes the going slow but invisible.
Nobody talks. The only sound is our breathing and the occasional snap of a twig underfoot.
We emerge from the trees behind the Hennessy Building and skirt the east wall until the Admin Building comes into view. It’s a modern block compared to the rest of the campus, glass and concrete. The lights on the ground floor are on, which is the security office. The upper floors are dark.
Cormac peels off without a word. He circles the building and heads for the main entrance, hands in his pockets, shoulders loose, walking like a man who has had too many pints and could still down another.
The transformation is immediate. He goes from coiled predator to harmless idiot in the space of ten metres, and the performance is so convincing I almost believe it myself.
Aidan leads us to the service entrance on the north side. It’s a steel door set into a recess, half-hidden by a row of industrial bins. He punches in the code: 7149. The lock clicks. He pulls the door open six inches, listens, then steps through.
The corridor beyond is dark, lit only by the green glow of an emergency exit sign at the far end.
It smells like cleaning fluid and cardboard.
Aidan moves fast, his boots silent on the lino, and I follow with Declan at my back.
We pass a storeroom, a utility cupboard, and a door marked MAINTENANCE before we reach the stairwell.
Aidan checks his phone. A text from Cormac: one word. In.
He’s with the guard. The clock starts now.
Aidan takes the stairs two at a time. I match him, my trainers quiet on the concrete.
Declan brings up the rear, checking behind us at each landing.
Second floor. Third floor. The stairwell door opens onto a corridor with a grey carpet and frosted glass office doors on either side.
One camera at the far end, angled toward Whitmore’s office.
We’re under it and moving before the light blinks.
Whitmore’s office is the last door on the left.
The door is ajar.
He looks at me. I look at him. This is not part of the plan.
He holds up a hand. Wait. Then he leans forward, barely breathing, and listens.
Aidan grabs my arm and pulls me into the darkened doorway of an office on the other side of the stairwell. Declan presses flat into another one. The space is tight. My shoulder is against Aidan’s. No one breathes.
Siobhán, the receptionist, bursts out of Whitmore’s office, stumbling as she tries to run in her heels.
She’s crying. The quiet kind that is covering something deep and wrecked. Her blouse is untucked. Her hair is pulled loose from its clip. She’s clutching the sides of her cardigan closed with both hands like a shield.
She disappears down the main stairwell. Her footsteps echo and then fade.
The corridor is empty.
My blood is boiling. It’s not a metaphor. I can feel it, hot and acidic, rising through my chest and into my throat and behind my eyes, and my left hand is shaking, not from fear, from the effort of not walking into Whitmore’s office and putting Henrietta through his eye socket.
That oily, predatory piece of shit who looked me up and down on my first day. Who made Siobhán a nervous wreck. Who presides over this institution like a king on a throne made of other people’s silence.
Aidan’s hand tightens on my arm. I look at him. His face is stone, but his eyes are sharp, and they’re locked on mine with an intensity that cuts through the red haze in my skull.
He shakes his head. Once. Slowly.
I grit my teeth so hard my jaw screams. Every cell in my body is demanding that I move, that I act, that I make this right before Siobhán’s footsteps have even faded from the building.
But Aidan’s grip on my arm is an anchor, and the rational part of my brain, the part that Dad spent twenty-one years training, knows that going in there now, emotional and armed and ready to kill, will destroy everything we came here to do and hand Whitmore exactly the kind of chaos he thrives on.
So I nod.
It costs me. But I nod, and I file this away in the place where I keep the things that will be answered in blood when the time is right.
His grip doesn’t tighten like he’s afraid of me.
It tightens like he understands exactly what I’m capable of and is choosing—deliberately—to be the thing between me and a mistake I can’t undo.
It’s infuriating.
It’s also the first time anyone has ever tried to stop me without trying to shrink me.
I file that away with the other dangerous facts about these men that are surrounding me, claiming me in ways I’m not used to.
A humming comes from the office as we stand around like statues, waiting for him to leave, or not.
He’s humming. The fucker is humming while a woman he just violated is stumbling down his stairwell in tears.
I stand in the doorway with Aidan’s shoulder pressed against mine and Declan not nearly close enough, and I count the seconds because if I don’t give my brain something to do, it will send my body through that door.
I’m about to ask Aidan what we should do, when the office light clicks off. Whitmore’s footsteps cross the room. The door opens fully, and he steps into the corridor, pulling the door shut behind him. He doesn’t lock it. He walks to the main stairwell, the same one Siobhán used, and descends.
Aidan’s hand tightens further on my wrist.
We don’t move until the sound of his footsteps has completely gone.
Aidan releases me and goes first. Through Whitmore’s door, across the office, straight to the safe. It’s behind a painting on the wall behind the desk. He lifts the frame off its hook and sets it against the wall. The safe is small, grey, with a digital keypad.
He punches in four digits. The lock clicks. He pulls the door open.
Inside, there are folders. Stacked neatly, labelled by date. Aidan steps back and gestures for me to move forward.
I pull my phone from my pocket, open the camera, and start shooting.
I work fast. Pull a folder, open it, photograph each page, replace it. Next folder. Same process. The minutes are a resource I’m burning through, and every second I spend here is a second closer to Whitmore realising he didn’t clean up properly and returning, or whatever else could fuck this up.
I photograph everything in the time period, not even looking at what it is. We can pore over them later.
Declan stands at the office door, watching the corridor.
Aidan stands to the side of the window, watching the car park below.
Neither of them speaks. Neither of them needs to.
The silence is operational, the kind that comes from three people who know their roles and trust each other to execute them.
I finish the third folder and slide it back into the safe. My hands are steady. My breathing is controlled. My heart is doing something complicated behind my ribs, but it’s not fear. It’s the fierce, cold satisfaction of knowing that I’m holding the thread that might unravel everything.
I step back and pocket my phone. Aidan closes the safe. Hangs the painting back on its hook. He checks the room once, confirming that nothing is out of place, and nods to the door.
We move.
Down the corridor. Through the stairwell. Down the stairs. Along the ground-floor service corridor, past the utility cupboard and the storeroom and the smell of cleaning fluid. Out through the steel door into the cold night air.
Aidan texts Cormac: Clear.
We’re halfway across campus when Cormac catches us up.
The walk back is fast and silent. Aidan locks the front door behind us, and the deadbolt slides home, and the four of us stand in the kitchen in the dark, breathing.
I lean against the counter and close my eyes. My phone is heavy in my pocket, loaded with photographs that might contain the reason my father was murdered.
“What happened?” Cormac asks, staring at me. “You look like you’re about to commit murder.”
“That’s because I am,” I grit out.
He holds his hands up. “Wasn’t me.”
“No, it was Whitmore,” I spit. “That filthy fucking rapist!”
“What?” Cormac snarls, moving for the door.
“Not Dervla. The receptionist,” Declan says quietly.
Cormac’s expression darkens. Not the hot, explosive fury when he thought it was me, but something close. “When?”
“When the time is right,” Aidan says. “It moved further up the list.”
“It was on the list?” I ask.
He smiles. “Total annihilation, pixie.”
“I want to be the one holding the blade.”
“As long as you wait for my say-so.”
I clench my fist, wanting to argue. I want to avenge that poor woman now. “Fine,” I clip out eventually. “But don’t make me wait too long.” I pull out my phone and start flicking through the photos, hoping there is something, anything, here that can help me narrow my suspect list down.