Chapter 24 #2
Aidan turns. The road narrows to a single track, winding along the cliff edge.
The Atlantic is spread out below us, hammered grey under a grey sky.
White caps on black rock. The wind is battering the car hard enough to feel in the steering, and the landscape is the kind of savage that either breaks people or builds them.
Cillian Callaghan chose to raise his daughter here.
That tells me everything I need to know about the man and the woman he produced.
The manse appears around a bend. Stone, two storeys, sitting on the clifftop like it grew out of the rock.
Not grand in the showy way. Grand in the way of something that’s survived everything the Atlantic has thrown at it and hasn’t shifted.
The garden is overgrown. The gate is open. No car in the drive.
Aidan stops the car, and we sit in silence.
I’ve been in fights I shouldn’t have walked away from.
I’ve bled in places that still itch when the weather turns.
But the fear that sits in my gut now isn’t for me—it’s for the second she steps back into the room where her father died, and whatever part of her is holding the world together slips.
I don’t know what to do with that kind of fear.
So I turn it into readiness.
It’s the only language I speak fluently.
I scan the windows. Curtains drawn on the ground floor. Open upstairs. No lights. No movement. The front door is closed. No signs of forced entry from here, but that means nothing. A professional would leave the place looking untouched.
“Clean from here,” I say. “Doesn’t mean it’s clean inside.”
Aidan nods. “I go in first. Cormac, you’re with me. Dec, stay with the car. Engine running.”
Dervla’s jaw tightens. “I’m not sitting in the car.”
“Dervla—”
“It’s my house. If someone’s been inside, I’ll know. I’ll see what’s been moved. You won’t.”
She’s right. I know she’s right. Aidan knows she’s right.
The problem isn’t her logic. The problem is that whoever sent the professional to her townhouse at St. Augustine’s might have sent someone here too, and walking her into that before we’ve cleared the space goes against everything in me that has been wired to keep her alive since the night I put an iron bar through a man’s skull for moving toward her in the dark.
“Sixty seconds,” I say. “We go in. You follow in sixty seconds. Blade drawn.”
She looks at me, and the look lasts one beat longer than it needs to, long enough for me to see what she won’t say out loud, which is that she’s not afraid of what’s inside the house. She’s afraid of the memories she’s been trying to bury.
“Sixty seconds,” she agrees.
I get out of the car, and the wind hits me like a fist. Salt and grass and something colder underneath, the Atlantic throwing its weight around.
Aidan is already moving, low and fast, heading for the side of the house.
I follow, blade drawn from the small of my back.
The weight of it in my hand settles the noise in my head, the way it always does.
This part I understand. The clearing. The entering.
The sharp edge of things where you find out who’s waiting and what they’re willing to do about it.
Aidan reaches the side door and tries the handle. Locked. He pulls his picks from his jacket, the same set he’s had since he was fifteen, and goes to work. Three seconds. The lock clicks.
He looks at me. I nod.
We go in.
The hallway is dark. Nothing has been here since Dervla left less than a week ago. No disturbance to the coats still hanging on the hooks by the door.
Aidan moves through the ground floor. Kitchen. Sitting room. I take the dining room.
I stop in the doorway.
It’s a beautiful room. Long table, dark wood, eight chairs. A bay window looking out over the Atlantic. Bookshelves on two walls. A crystal decanter on the sideboard, still half full of amber liquid. A single glass beside it.
The floor is clean. Spotless. I can picture her cleaning it. She got on her knees in this room and scrubbed until there was nothing left to see.
But I can feel it. The residue of violence that no amount of bleach removes. The room holds it the way old houses hold cold, in the walls, in the grain of the wood, in the silence that sits heavier than it should.
I check the windows. Locked. Check behind the door. Clear. Move on.
Aidan is at the bottom of the stairs when I come out. He nods. Ground floor is clean.
We go up. First floor. Three bedrooms, a bathroom, and the study at the back. The study door has a deadbolt, and it’s locked. I try it anyway. Solid. We’ll need Dervla’s key.
The bedrooms are undisturbed. One is clearly hers, or was.
Smaller than the others, with a single bed and bookshelves crammed with paperbacks and a desk under the window.
There’s a photo on the desk, a man and a girl, maybe twelve years old, standing on the cliffs with the sea behind them.
The man is tall, dark-haired, laughing. The girl is scowling at the camera with her arms crossed.
I nearly smile. She hasn’t changed.
I step back and check the landing. Clear. Aidan signals from the far bedroom. All clear.
Dervla comes through the front door, and I hear her stop in the hallway.
Just for a second. A pause that’s so brief you’d miss it if you weren’t listening for it.
Then her footsteps continue. I count them as she moves through the ground floor, and then silence as she reaches the dining room doorway.
I go to the top of the stairs and wait.
The silence stretches. Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen.
I don’t go down. I don’t call out. I just stand there at the top of the stairs with my blade in my hand and let her have the room and whatever she needs to do in it.
When she comes up the stairs, her face is granite, and her eyes are dry, and I know, with absolute certainty, that whatever she felt down there, she’s packed it away behind the same wall everything else is behind.
She walks past me without a word. Pulls a key from her pocket. Unlocks the study door.
She pushes it open.
And stops.
The study has been turned over. Completely.
Every drawer pulled out and upended. Every filing cabinet emptied onto the floor.
Papers everywhere, scattered across the desk, the chair, the carpet.
The shelves have been stripped. Books are piled in heaps with their spines cracked and their covers torn.
Someone has gone through this room with the methodical, unhurried thoroughness of a person who had time and wanted what they came for.
“Fuck,” she whispers.
Aidan appears behind us. He takes one look at the room, and his expression goes flat in that way that means he’s processing faster than he’s reacting.
“They got here first,” he says.
Dervla steps inside. Her boots crunch on paper. She crouches and picks up a folder, opens it, and flicks through the scattered pages. Her hands are steady. Her breathing is controlled. But her eyes are moving fast, scanning. Then she turns.
She looks at me, and for the first time since we left St. Aug’s, I see something crack behind her eyes. Not grief. Fury. The kind that calcifies into purpose. “They didn’t get what they came for.”
“How do you know?”
“I know my dad. He wouldn’t have left important shit, incriminating shit out in the open. Start looking for hidey-holes.”
I nod, trusting her, and crouch down to start tapping floorboards.