Chapter 23
Dervla
“What is my endgame? To get that empty Board seat and rule those arseholes.”
He gives me a searching stare. “That’s it?”
“It’s enough,” I grit out. “Once I find out who killed my dad, I want all of them, all of St Aug’s, to know who is in charge.”
“And you think that’s going to be you?”
“Don’t patronise me, Aidan,” I snap.
He doesn’t even flinch.
“No,” he says. “I’m asking whether you want power, or whether you want change. Those aren’t always the same thing.”
I stare at him. “Power gets change done.”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it just gives you a nicer chair while the same filth keeps moving underneath you.”
“You’re very fucking preachy for a man with a blueprint of the Vice-Chancellor’s office on his phone.”
His mouth twitches. “Fair.”
I set my phone down on the bed a bit harder than necessary. “You asked my endgame. Fine. I want the seat. I want access. I want to know why they killed my father, and when I know, I want every person involved dragged into the light and ruined.”
“Ruined how?”
“Fired. Expelled. Exposed. Charged. Buried under their own reputations. Pick one.”
“And after that?”
“After that,” I say, “I sit on the Board and make sure no one gets to do this again.”
He studies me in silence for a beat. It gets on my nerves immediately.
“What?” I ask.
“That’s the first answer you’ve given me tonight that isn’t just rage.”
“There’s plenty of rage in it.”
“I know. That’s why it might actually work for you. But it’s not enough.”
“Enough for whom?”
“Me.”
“And why should I give a flying fuck about what you want?”
“I’ve been doing this longer.”
“That gives you an automatic right to do what you want?”
“It gives me more experience than blind rage and grief, and something that you didn’t even want nine weeks ago.”
My first instinct is to punch him, but fuck him, he’s right.
I didn’t care while Dad was alive. I was happy-ish at Dublin City.
I had a life, people I partied with. No real plan for my future, but I was okay with that.
I lived day to day, funded by my rich dad, who gave me whatever I wanted without question. Spoilt? Maybe?
More like clueless. Clueless about the real world, and that a power structure you can’t see and never hear about, moves you around their board like a little pawn.
Power that has you killed because they wanted something you had.
Power that seeps into the bedrock, and you can’t run away from it, no matter how hard you try.
Maybe Aidan’s plan is better. Burn it all down.
“What are you thinking?” he asks, leaning forward, elbows on his knees.
“I’m thinking that you have this way of making me see things I don’t want to see.”
“And you hate me for it, right?”
“Wrong. I did before tonight. But your plan is better than mine. You have been doing this a lot longer. You asked me what my endgame is? That just changed.”
“And what do you want now, Dervla?”
“I want it all.”
He sits back, a slow, terrifying smile curving his lips. “You don’t just want to burn it down and walk away as it explodes behind you.”
“No. I want to sit at the very top of this ancient place and rule it.”
His eyes hold on mine, and something in the room shifts.
Not triumph. Not surprise. Recognition.
“That,” he says quietly, “is a different answer.”
“It’s a better one.”
“It’s a more dangerous one.”
I shrug, because danger stopped being theoretical the second a hired killer walked into my house. “Good.”
He goes still for a second, then nods once. “All right.”
“All right?” I repeat. “That’s it?”
“What do you want, applause?”
“I want to know what happens now.”
“Now?” He glances at the notes spread across my bed. “Now we build the case properly. We work out who wanted your father silenced, who benefited, and what they were protecting. Then we decide whether the seat is useful or whether taking the institution apart from the outside does more damage.”
“I still want the seat.”
“I know.”
“And if it comes down to it, I’m taking it.”
His mouth shifts at one corner. “Then I’ll help you get it.”
The answer lands harder than it should. “Just like that?”
“Just like that. We stop thinking in terms of one seat,” he says. “One seat is leverage. It’s not the end.”
“It’s a way in.”
“Exactly.”
“The long game, Dervla,” he says. “We play this your way for now. We go after the seat. When you get it, we blow this apart from the inside.”
I look at him for a long moment, turning that over.
The long game. It sounds patient and measured, and those are not words anyone has ever used to describe me.
But the anger in my soul isn’t going anywhere.
It’s not the kind that burns itself out.
It’s the kind that settles into bone, and I can feel it calcifying there, becoming structural. Permanent.
“How long?” I ask.
“As long as it takes.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only honest one. The four-week clock is ticking on your father’s seat. That’s our first deadline. Everything we do between now and then determines whether you walk into that room with enough weight behind you to actually claim it.”
“Who decides?”
“No idea. No one does.”
I glance down at my phone on the duvet. The photos from Whitmore’s safe. Minutes. Memos. Letters with signatures that shouldn’t exist next to decisions that should never have been made. I haven’t finished going through them all, but what I’ve seen so far is enough to make my stomach turn.
“The photos from Whitmore’s safe give us something we didn’t have before.”
“Leverage.”
“Evidence.”
“Same thing in this world.”
He almost smiles at that. “You’re learning.”
“I’m not learning. I’m remembering. My dad used to say that information is the only currency that appreciates.”
Something shifts in Aidan’s expression. Just for a second. A flicker that’s gone before I can name it. “Your father was a smart man.”
“My father was a dead man who saw it coming and didn’t run.”
The silence that follows is heavy. I don’t break it.
Neither does he. We just sit with the weight of it, the truth of a man who knew too much and stayed anyway, either because he was brave or because he thought the seat, the legacy, and the institution were worth more than his own life.
I’m not sure which answer makes me angrier.
“The redacted line,” I say. “If Dad blocked me because he knew what this place was, and it was brought up again four days before he died, then someone else wanted me here.”
“Which means this isn’t just about the seat,” Aidan says slowly as I also draw that conclusion. “It’s about you. Specifically.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re Cillian’s daughter. Because you have a claim that goes beyond money or legacy. You have blood.”
“So does every legacy kid on this campus.”
“Not like yours. Your father sat on the Board for decades. That’s longer than anyone except Gallagher.
In that time, he would have accumulated information, alliances, debts, secrets.
All of that transfers to you, whether you know it or not.
The Board knows this. They’ve known it since the day you were born. ”
The thought makes my skin crawl. The idea that I was a piece on their board before I could even walk.
That my father knew it, and blocked my application to keep me off it, and then I walked straight into whoever’s hands because they killed my dad to get to me.
That’s the long and short of it, and it hurts so much, I can barely breathe.
Who wanted me here, and why was it so important that they killed my dad over it?
“I need my dad’s files.”
“Where are they?”
“Back home. In his study. Assuming the place hasn’t been ransacked since I left to come here.”
“I think that’s probably a given.”
“But we don’t know. I have to go.” I get off the bed.
“Now?” he asks, getting up.
“Now. Four-hour round trip, an hour to load up my dad’s files.”
“Let’s at least get a couple of hours’ sleep first,” he says.
“Who can sleep?”
“Try,” he says. “I’ll make plans to leave at six. We can’t just grab a taxi, and we need supplies.”
He is irritatingly right, which is becoming one of the great misfortunes of my life.
I scrub both hands over my face and feel the exhaustion sitting under my skin, heavy and mean.
The adrenaline from the break-in to Whitmore’s office is starting to crash, but my head is still racing too fast for sleep.
Dad blocked my first application. Someone on the Board wanted me here.
Someone removed a line from the minutes.
Someone killed him four days later. Every thought opens into three more.
Aidan watches me, saying nothing. He has figured out, correctly, that if he pushes right now, I’ll tell him to go fuck himself and probably mean it.
“Six,” I say at last. “If you’re late, I leave without you.”
He gives me a look. “What? On foot?”
“Fuck you.”
“Original. Might get it tattooed on my forehead.”
“Do that. Now get out before I throw something at you.”
He heads for the door, smooth and unhurried. At the threshold, he stops and looks back at the bed, at the notes, at me.
“Try to sleep, Dervla.”
I don’t answer.
He leaves anyway.
The room goes quiet in the strange, stretched way it only does after someone has been filling it with tension. I stare at the door for a few seconds, then back at the photographs on my phone and crawl back onto the bed and rest my head on the pillow. “Sleep,” I mutter. “Sleep.”