Chapter 24
Cormac
I’ve been awake since four, lying on my back in the dark, staring at the ceiling of a bedroom that still smells like fresh paint and someone else’s furniture polish.
Sleep doesn’t come easily in houses where people have tried to kill or died.
This one has had both, and the walls remember it even if the floorboards have been scrubbed clean.
After last night, after everything Aidan told us about their conversation, Dervla’s mind is probably all over the place.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and sit there for a second, rubbing the heel of my hand lightly across the scabbing cuts on my inner forearm.
Her name. Still raw. Still itching. I press my thumb into the D and feel the sting travel up to my elbow, and it centres me the way it always does. Pain is the only clock I trust.
I pull on jeans and a t-shirt and head downstairs.
The kitchen is cold. I flick the kettle on and open the cupboard.
Her cereal is on the second shelf, some organic granola shit that costs four times what normal cereal costs and tastes like sawdust and ambition.
I eat a handful anyway, because I’m hungry and it’s there.
Declan appears in the doorway wearing a dark jacket and a look that says he’s been awake as long as I have.
“You’re eating her cereal again,” he says.
“It’s disgusting. Want some?”
“No.” He sits at the table and pulls out his phone, checking something. “How far is Clifden?”
“Two hours from Athlone if the roads are clear.”
“Aidan’s sorted a car that isn’t his Porsche and can cram us all. Untraceable.”
“Of course he has.” The kettle clicks off.
I make two coffees without being asked, because Declan takes his black and I take mine with enough sugar to make him wince, and we’ve been doing this long enough that the routine is muscle memory.
I slide his mug across the counter. “What’s the plan once we get there? ”
“Clear the house first. Dervla gets her dad’s files from the study. In and out.”
“In and out.” I take a mouthful of coffee. “When has anything involving Dervla Callaghan been in and out?”
Declan almost smiles at the filthy innuendo. “There’s a first time for everything.”
“There’s really not.”
Aidan arrives next, his footsteps heavy and deliberate, fully dressed, probably hasn’t slept, probably spent the night on his phone to his father plotting three moves ahead while the rest of us were pretending to rest. Then lighter, quicker, with that faint jingle that gets into your head and stays.
Those fucking bells. I heard them the first day she walked across the quad and told Aidan to fuck off, and I’ve been listening for them ever since, which is a fact I will take to my grave.
They come into the kitchen. Aidan looks like a man running on strategy instead of sleep, which is his default.
Dervla looks like she hasn’t slept at all.
Hair pulled back, face bare, wearing jeans, boots, and a jacket that’s too big for her.
Her eyes have that hard, bright quality, the one I saw after the gauntlet and after Troy and after the intruder, the look of someone who has swapped rest for rage and is functioning entirely on the fumes.
She spots the cereal box on the counter. Her gaze moves to me.
“Seriously?”
“It’s growing on me.”
“You’re growing on my nerves.”
I grin. Can’t help it. She’s been in this kitchen thirty seconds, and she’s already drawn blood.
The woman is relentless. She’s also not looking at me the way she looked at me the other night, when I had her pinned against her bedroom door, and she was saying my name like it cost her something.
Right now, I’m furniture. Irritating furniture that eats her cereal.
That’s fine. We’re heading to the house where she found her father with a bullet in his head.
This isn’t the morning for whatever the fuck is happening between us.
Aidan makes himself coffee and leans against the counter. “Car’s two streets over. Black Range Rover. Dec, you’re navigating. Cormac, back seat.”
“Why do I get the back?”
“If anyone follows, I want someone in the rear who won’t hesitate.”
Fair. He knows what I am. I’m the thing that happens when the other two run out of civilised options. It’s always been that way. Probably always will be.
Dervla grabs a bottle of water from the fridge and shoves it in her jacket pocket. She doesn’t eat. She doesn’t sit. She moves like someone who’s already out the door in her head and is waiting for her body to catch up.
“Dervla,” Declan says from the table. “Eat something.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You didn’t eat last night either.”
“I’m. Not. Hungry.”
I recognise the tone. It’s the one she uses when she’s decided something and will fight to the death over it, regardless of whether it’s a good decision.
Declan recognises it too, because he doesn’t push.
He just makes a mental note, the way he makes mental notes about everything, filed away for later deployment when she’s less likely to stab him for caring.
I grab an apple from the bowl and toss it to her. She catches it with her left hand. Instinct. Her right is better now, the swelling mostly gone, but her left has become her lead.
She looks at the apple, then at me.
“It’s not cereal,” I say. “It won’t kill you.”
She bites into it without another word, and I feel… smug.
We leave the house in the grey morning. Campus is dead. A few lights in the library, the overnight keepers burning hours they’ll regret. The cobblestones are slick, and the old buildings loom, watching us the way they watch everyone, like the stone is keeping a record.
The Range Rover is where Aidan said. Unremarkable. No plates I recognise. I open the back door and wait for Dervla. She gives me a look.
“I opened a door. It’s not a marriage proposal.”
She gets in. I follow. The interior smells like pine air freshener and old leather. Declan takes the front, phone already mapping the route. Aidan starts the engine.
We pull away in silence, and the campus gates pass on our left, those iron bastards with the St. Augustine’s crest that have been filtering people through power and pain for three hundred years.
I watch them shrink in the side mirror and feel the tension in the car shift.
It’s not just leaving campus. It’s leaving the territory where the rules are understood.
Out here, in the real world, we’re four people in a car heading toward a crime scene, looking for files that might name a killer.
The roads are empty as we head west. Suburbs thin into farmland, stone walls and green fields, the usual Irish postcard that hides the usual Irish violence underneath.
Dervla is quiet beside me. Arms crossed, gaze fixed out the window, jaw set so tight I can see the muscle working.
She ate half the apple and put the rest in her pocket, which is progress.
I watch her out of the corner of my eye because staring at her right now would be a bad idea.
She’s coiled so tight that one wrong word would detonate her, and the detonation wouldn’t be crying.
It would be the kind of cold, focused fury that got her through the gauntlet, and I’ve seen what that looks like from the outside.
Impressive. Terrifying. Not something I want aimed at me in a confined space with no exit.
But underneath it, underneath the jaw and the crossed arms and the refusal to eat, there’s something I’ve only seen once before.
In the hallway, after I killed the intruder, when she crouched beside the body and pulled back the balaclava with the same calm she’d use to check a receipt.
She wasn’t shocked. She was recording. Filing the face away for a system she’s been building since she walked into her dining room and found her dad.
That system is the thing that scares me.
Not because it’s dangerous, but because it’s load-bearing.
She’s built her entire ability to function on top of it, on the rage and the investigation and the forward motion.
If the system breaks, if she finds something at the manse that cracks it open, I don’t know what’s underneath. Neither does she.
“Tell me about the study,” I say, because someone needs to give her brain a direction that isn’t a spiral.
Her gaze shifts to me. Measuring. The same look she gave me in the boathouse the first night, deciding how much to give. “First floor. Back of the house, overlooking the sea. Dad spent most of his time in there when he wasn’t at St. Aug’s. Everything was organised. He was meticulous about it.”
“And the dining room?” Aidan asks from the front.
The air in the car changes. Not a sound, not a movement. Just a shift in pressure, the kind you feel in your ears before a storm.
“What about it?” Her voice is flat.
“We’ll need to go through the whole house. If your father kept files in the study, he may have kept other things elsewhere. Hidden compartments. A second safe.”
“The dining room is just a room.”
“A room where he was killed. It’s significant, whether you like it or not,” I add, knowing it will incur her wrath.
She glares at me, but says nothing.
The landscape shifts. Wilder. Emptier. Stone walls getting lower, sky opening up, the fields turning from green to brown to the rough, windblown scrub of Connemara. The salt hits the air through the vents, and Dervla sits up straighter.
I can feel the change in her. A tightening. Every mile closer to Clifden is a mile closer to the dining room and the study and whatever is left of the life she had before all of this. She’s bracing for it the way she braces for everything: chin up, jaw locked, fingers still pressing into her thigh.
“Next left,” she says. “Then follow the road to the end.”