Chapter 22
Aidan
“Iwant to look at this on my own,” Dervla says.
I nod, having figured she would.
She hesitates and then places her hand on my arm. “Thank you.”
“Anytime, pixie,” I say with a slow smile.
She growls at me and disappears upstairs with her phone full of photographs. I pull my phone from my pocket and step out the back door into the garden.
The night air is sharp enough to clear the last of the adrenaline from the heist. The garden is all shadow and shape, the cleared boundary wall a dark line against the darker treeline. I dial my father.
He picks up on the first ring. Seamus O’Connell always expects the call.
“Well?” he says.
“We got into the safe. She’s going through them now.”
“She won’t find anything.”
“Oh?”
“If the answers were in Whitmore’s safe, this would be a smaller problem than it is. The rot goes deeper than paperwork.”
“It goes deeper than the Board.”
“It goes deeper than the university.” A pause.
The kind that means he’s choosing his next words carefully.
“St. Augustine’s is a machine, Aidan. It takes in the children of powerful families, it shapes them, it connects them, and it sends them out into the world owing debts to the institution and to each other.
It’s been doing this for three hundred years.
Every criminal network, every political dynasty, every financial empire in this country has roots that pass through those gates.
The people who control it have never been held accountable for a single thing they’ve done. ”
“Until now.”
“Until now.” I can hear the satisfaction in his voice, thin and precise, the kind that comes from watching a plan that’s been in motion for decades approach its final phase. “Tell me about the girl.”
“She’s looking at the photos. She’ll find enough to keep her digging. She’ll pull at every thread until the whole thing starts to unravel.”
“And when it unravels?”
“It takes the Board with it. And when the Board fractures, the institution loses its shield. No more quiet arrangements that keep the machine running. Every decision they’ve buried, every crime they’ve covered, every life they’ve ruined comes into the light.”
“And then?”
“And then we burn it to the ground.”
The words hang in the cold air. I’ve said them before, in quieter rooms, at quieter hours.
I said a version of them to Dervla in the hallway last night.
But saying them to my father is different.
To Dervla, it was a declaration. To my father, it’s a status report.
He’s the one who lit the match. I’m the one carrying it.
“The O’Connells helped build this university,” he says, and his voice has the weight of something rehearsed so many times it’s become liturgy.
“Generations of our family have poured money, influence, and blood into that institution, and in return, it has used our name, taken our money, and shut us out of every decision that matters.”
I know the history. I’ve heard it since I was old enough to sit at the dinner table and listen.
The O’Connells were founders, benefactors, the family that kept St. Augustine’s alive through two financial crises and a civil war.
The Board repaid them by keeping the family at arm’s length, taking the money but never offering a seat.
Never a voice. Never a vote. Just the privilege of paying for an institution that treated them like a chequebook with a surname.
My grandfather tried to buy his way in. My father tried to leverage his way in. I’m not trying to get in. I’m going to tear the doors off.
“Whitmore is the linchpin,” I say. “He holds the institution together through the VC office. If the Board fractures, Whitmore falls, there’s nothing left to hold the structure in place.”
“Whitmore is a cockroach. He’ll survive anything short of total exposure.”
“Then total exposure is what he gets.”
“Through the girl.”
“Through the truth. Dervla is looking for her father’s killer.
When she finds the answer, and she will, the trail won’t stop at one murder.
It’ll lead through decades of institutional cover-ups, financial crimes, and God knows what else.
Cillian Callaghan sat on that Board for years.
He saw everything. He knew everything. Someone killed him to keep it buried.
When his daughter digs it up, St. Augustine’s won’t survive the daylight. ”
“You’re putting a lot of faith in someone you’ve known for a week.”
“I’m putting faith in her anger. It’s the most reliable force I’ve ever encountered.”
My father is quiet for a moment. “And what happens to her when the institution falls?”
“She gets justice.”
“Justice.” He says the word like it’s a currency he doesn’t trade in. “And what do we get?”
“Everything that’s left.”
“Those are big words.”
“It’s a big plan.”
“It’s been a big plan for three generations, Aidan. Don’t let a woman’s grief steer it somewhere it doesn’t need to go.”
“This is a pivot, Dad. Don’t you see? Her grief is what’s going to make it work. Without her, I’m just another O’Connell banging on the gates. With her, the gates come down from the inside.”
“And when she realises you’ve been standing behind her the whole time, waiting for the dust to settle so you can claim the ground?”
“She already knows. Not all of it, but she knows my intention. She’s processing it, the way she does. She will have questions.”
“You’ve run out of distance. I can hear it in your voice. You’re too close to her. It’s affecting your judgement.”
“My judgement is fine.”
“Your judgement was fine. Now it’s compromised by something we didn’t account for.”
“And that’s why it’s a pivot. I’ve got it under control,” I say.
“Control.” He almost laughs. “Your mother said the same thing, right before she left.”
The line goes dead, and I roll my eyes. He thinks bringing her into it will make me fall in line. If anything, it does the opposite.
I stand in the dark garden, phone at my side. I should go inside, but I don’t. Not yet.
He’s right about one thing. I am too close.
Every interaction I’ve had with Dervla, the corridor, the courtyard, the hallway standoff, the blade at my chest, every single one has been filtered through the plan, justified by the strategy, rationalised as necessary.
But there’s a layer underneath the rationalisation that I can’t file away or calculate around, and it’s getting louder.
I don’t just want to use her. I want to deserve her. Those two things are incompatible, and I don’t know what to do about it, which is a feeling I haven’t had since I was old enough to start turning feelings into advantages.
I look up at the house. Her light is still on. Second floor, end of the hall. She’s still awake, still searching, still pulling at threads that will eventually lead to the truth about her father and the institution that killed him.
She will have questions about what I said.
She is too focused right now to come to me.
But she will, and when she does, I need to have my answers ready.
Right now, we are on the same side but with different endings in mind.
I need to know whether she is okay with blowing this entire thing apart, or if she wants to be on the Board to shape decisions for the next few decades, out of some honour to her father’s legacy.
I go inside. Lock the door. Climb the stairs.
In the hallway, I stop outside her room. The light is still on. I knock once, lightly.
“Yeah?” she mumbles.
I open the door and step in.
She is sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed with her phone in one hand and a notebook in the other, hair around her face.
A file is spread around her. Notes. Names. Dates. Arrows.
She looks up at me, expression flat and tired. “If you’re here to call me pixie, get out.”
“I’m here to ask what you found.”
“That depends.” She sets the phone down on the duvet. “Do you want the version I can prove, or the version that makes me want to commit murder?”
“Both.”
For a second, she just looks at me. Measuring. “Shut the door.”
I do.
“The minutes from six weeks before Dad died are mostly routine. Budget approvals. Facility contracts. A disciplinary appeal. Then, four days before he died, there was a discussion. About me.”
My curiosity goes up a notch, and I move closer. “You?”
She nods. “It was in passing. Apparently, when I applied to go here after my A-Levels, Dad blocked me.” Her face is granite.
I raise an eyebrow and stare at her. “Your dad blocked you from getting in?”
She nods stiffly. “Apparently. It’s mentioned here. I don’t know why it came up three years later. I don’t know why he acted so pissed off that I didn’t get it. Great actor, I guess.”
“I can think of a few reasons,” I say.
Her mouth hardens. “Go on, then. Enlighten me.”
I move to the edge of the bed and look down at the phone.
“Your father knew what this place is,” I say. “Maybe he wanted distance between you and it.”
“By sabotaging my application.”
“By protecting you.”
She laughs once, without humour. “That’s convenient.”
“It’s plausible.”
“It’s patronising.”
I glance at her. She’s wound tight, eyes bright with anger and something rawer under it. Hurt, probably. Not the clean kind either. The old kind that gets into the structure of you and stays there.
“What exactly does it say?” I ask.
She picks up the phone again and reads, voice clipped and precise. “‘Mr Callaghan raised a query regarding Miss Callaghan’s admission on grounds of suitability and exposure. Matter considered closed following unsuccessful application. Irrevocable.’” She drops the hand with the phone into her lap.
“Did someone suggest you attend?” I murmur with a frown.
“Fuck knows. There is literally nothing else. It’s like it landed out of the blue, and Dad just spouted it out with no reason.”
“Or it was redacted.”
“What?” she snaps.
“You heard me.”
She stares at me. “Minutes can be redacted?”
“Officially? Yes. Quietly? All the time.” I hold my hand out. “Let me see.”
After a beat, she gives me the phone.
I scroll back to the page. The formatting is clean. Too clean. A paragraph break sits where it should not, the spacing fractionally wider between two lines. Most people would miss it. I do not.
“There,” I say, tapping the screen. “See that gap?”
Her eyes narrow. She shifts closer, looking where I point. “That could be nothing.”
“It could. It usually isn’t.”
“It’s one line.”
“It’s one missing line.”
She goes still. I can feel the anger in her before she speaks. “So someone scrubbed part of the discussion about me out of the Board minutes.”
“Looks that way.”
“Why?”
“Because whatever was said, they didn’t want Whitmore to know.”
“Whitmore,” she growls. “That fucking—”
“Focus…” I say calmly before she goes off on one about what we saw.
“Whitmore isn’t part of the Board. He is the VC of St. Aug’s.
A nobody when you look at the scope of it.
He holds the Board meeting minutes like they’re something he can use.
He probably goes over them with a fine-toothed comb, looking for stuff he can use against everyone to gain more power. ”
“He’s a fucking arsehole.”
“Yes, but—”
“Why do you want to tear this place down?” she asks suddenly.
The question lands clean and hard.
I look at her for a second too long, because there are a dozen answers and only one of them is honest enough to matter.
“Because it deserves it,” I say.
Her expression does not change. “That’s not an answer.”
“It is. Just not one you like.”
“I don’t give a fuck about liking it. I want the truth.”
I hand her phone back. “The truth is that St. Augustine’s is rotten at every level.
The Board, the administration, the families behind it, the deals that get made in rooms no one admits exist. It doesn’t educate people like us.
It manufactures loyalty. It rewards the right monsters and buries the damage. ”
She watches me without blinking. “You’re saying my dad was rotten?”
I breathe in slowly but don’t reply.
She glowers at me.
I exhale once and sit on the edge of the chair by her desk.
Distance. Deliberate. Necessary. “My family helped build this place, funded it, protected it, and we still got treated like useful outsiders. I grew up hearing about what this institution was meant to be, and then I got here and saw what it actually is.”
“And that justifies burning it down?”
“It justifies ending it. There’s a difference.”
“Not really.”
“There is if you give a shit who gets buried in the rubble.”
She blinks. “Me. I’m in your way, aren’t I?”
The way she says it so matter of fact, I snort out a laugh. “Kind of, yeah.”
She blows out a breath. “So what do we do about it?”
“Well, depends entirely on what your end game is, pixie.” I sit back and wait because now we are getting somewhere.