Chapter 25
Dervla
The study looks like a bomb went off in slow motion.
Papers cover every surface and most of the floor.
The filing cabinets stand open, their drawers pulled out and upended, contents spewed across the carpet in drifts of white and cream.
The bookshelves have been stripped bare, the books themselves stacked in rough piles or tossed face-down with their spines cracked.
Dad’s desk drawers are scattered around the chair, emptied, the contents sifted through and discarded.
Whoever did this wasn’t in a rush. But they weren’t exactly methodical either.
They didn’t find what they were looking for, got frustrated, and ended up ransacking the place.
That thought lodges itself in my ribs like a shard of glass.
Someone walked into my father’s house, my home, and into the room where he kept his life’s work, and pulled it apart piece by piece, confident that no one was coming.
No one was watching. Because the only person who would have noticed was already in the ground.
I crouch and pick up a folder. Financial records from the university endowment, dated three years ago. Boring. Legitimate. The kind of thing that looks important but isn’t, and whoever searched this room knew the difference. They left the boring stuff and took what mattered.
I stand and turn slowly, forcing myself to see the room as it is, not as it was.
Dad’s desk sits in front of the window, heavy oak, old enough that the wood has darkened with years of polish and salt in the air.
He bought it when I was ten and told me proper desks mattered because papers deserved respect.
I thought that was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard.
Now I want to put my fist through the wall because some stranger has had their hands all over it.
“They searched obvious storage first,” Aidan says from behind me. “Cabinets, drawers, shelves.”
“Because they didn’t know him,” I say.
Cormac is already on one knee near the skirting board, tapping along the wall with the handle of his blade, listening. I flick through stacks of papers. Bank statements. Letters. University memos. Receipts.
Order from chaos. That’s his thing.
I move to the bookshelf beside the fireplace and crouch. The shelf itself is fixed, but Dad hated wasted space. If there was a way to hide something in plain sight, he’d have used it. I run my fingers along the underside of the middle shelf and feel for any give.
Nothing.
I try the next one. Dust coats my fingertips. Then, right at the back corner, my finger catches on a metal nub no bigger than a shirt button.
“Hang on.”
Cormac looks up instantly. “You’ve got something?”
“Maybe.”
I press it.
There’s a soft click inside the wall.
Aidan is beside me a second later, eyes tracking the shelf, the panelling, the fireplace. “Where?”
I push at the side panel of the bookcase. It doesn’t move. I press the nub again and hear the click a second time, lower this time, somewhere behind the fireplace breast.
“Not the shelf,” I say. “Something behind it.”
Cormac moves to the fireplace. It’s black stone, old and solid, with a narrow mantel and two built-in cabinets on either side at knee height. The left cabinet door hangs open, emptied out with a pile of old photographs and rolled maps on the floor. The right one is shut.
I cross to it and grip the handle.
Locked.
“Anything?” Declan asks, coming into the room.
“Why?” I ask, taking a minute to stare over at him. He appears slightly anxious.
“Bad feeling,” he mutters.
“Do I take that seriously or not?” I ask with a small laugh.
“Very seriously,” Aidan says. “We need to speed this up.”
I stare at him as if he’s joking, but from the expression on his face, I’d say he isn’t.
“Then open it,” I say.
Cormac pulls a gun out of the back of his pants and looks over as Aidan moves to the window and parts the curtain a fraction, scanning the drive and the road beyond. Declan is already backing out into the landing, checking the upstairs hall.
My pulse is too fast. Not panic. Recognition.
“Do it,” I say to Cormac and brace for the shot.
It’s loud, and I wince, but move forward as the door swings open.
Inside is a recessed steel box set into the wall.
A safe.
“Fuck yes,” I whisper.
Aidan turns from the window. “Key or code?”
“Neither,” I say with a hiss. “Biometrics.”
“Dammit,” Aidan mutters. “Press it.”
“What?”
“Your dad wasn’t a stupid man. Press it, and hurry.”
I slam my thumb against the scanner.
Nothing.
For one horrible second, the little panel stays dark, and my heart kicks hard enough to make my vision sharpen.
Then a thin green line flashes across it.
The lock releases with a mechanical click.
“Oh, thank fuck,” I breathe.
“Open it,” Aidan says.
I yank the heavy door wide.
Inside, there are three things.
A black hard drive.
A thick cream envelope sealed with dark red wax stamped with the Callaghan crest.
And a slim leather ledger.
I grab all three and step back as Declan appears in the doorway again, face tight.
“Car,” he says. “Now.”
Aidan doesn’t argue. Neither do I.
Cormac slams the safe shut and rises, gun still in his hand. “Movement?”
“EirGrid van turned in off the road. Could be nothing. Could be very much fucking something.”
“That’s not nothing,” I snap. “Let’s go.”
Aidan takes the lead. Cormac falls in behind me. Declan is already moving downstairs fast and quiet, and the whole house changes around us, every room turning from memory into threat.
We hit the ground floor at speed. I want to look at the dining room again. I don’t. I keep moving.
The front door opens to a wall of wind. We spill out into it.
The van is halfway down the drive when the passenger door opens.
A man leaps out.
Not EirGrid then. He’s in dark clothes, broad through the chest, moving with purpose, and the second he spots us, his hand goes inside his jacket.
“Gun,” I spit out.
Cormac slams me forward with enough force to knock the air from my lungs. “Move!”
Aidan’s weapon materialises in his hand like an extension of his arm. Declan vanishes to the left. The wind screams against my face as my feet pound across grass, each impact jarring up my spine. The hard drive, ledger, and envelope dig painfully into my ribs with every desperate stride.
The man by the van raises his gun, metal glinting in the sunlight.
Aidan’s shot cracks like thunder.
My eardrums compress as the world fractures into before and after. The man jerks sideways. Cormac’s fist is suddenly knotted in my jacket, hurling me the final distance.
“Get in!”
I crash through the open door, slamming face-first into leather. The files crush beneath my weight. Another gunshot echoes, and the window above me explodes, raining glass shards across my back.
“Fuck!” Declan roars.
I wrench myself around, blood pounding in my ears, to see the Range Rover’s rear windscreen smashed to oblivion.
Cormac is in the back with me before I can breathe properly, one arm across my chest as he drags me down over the seat. Aidan leaps into the driver’s side, and the engine revs hard. Declan yanks the front passenger door shut and twists in his seat, gun already up.
“Head down,” he barks.
I’m already there.
Aidan throws the car into reverse. The Range Rover fishtails across the drive as another shot cracks outside. Something punches the bodywork with a violent metallic thud. Cormac ducks lower over me, covering me with his body, whether I fucking like it or not.
The car jerks, tyres biting, and then we’re swinging around so hard I slam into the door. The hard drive digs into my ribs. I clutch the ledger and envelope to my chest.
“Run him over, would you?” I shout out.
“Way ahead of you,” Aidan grits out and slams his foot down. “Hold on.”
The engine howls, and the car lurches so violently that my teeth slam together.
I grip the seat with one hand and the files with the other as Aidan launches us straight at the bastard in the drive.
Declan is half twisted in the front, gun braced out through the shattered space where the rear windscreen used to be, and Cormac has me pinned flat across the back seat with his forearm locked over my middle.
There’s a sickening impact, a thud through metal and chassis and road. Aidan doesn’t brake. He guns it harder.
“Jesus Christ,” I gasp. “Did you get him?”
“What do you think?” Cormac laughs, head between the seats, apparently enjoying this way more than he should. “Nailed him.”
Another shot cracks behind us. Declan fires back through the ruined rear window.
The sound inside the car is brutal. My ears ring.
Cormac’s arm is still across my middle, heavy and solid.
Declan’s voice is clipped, controlled, the way it gets when he’s trying not to show fear.
Aidan’s driving like the devil is in the rear-view, jaw locked, eyes fixed ahead like he can bully the road into obedience.
I realise, with a strange, cold clarity, that I’m not running from this alone anymore.
Whatever this has become—this pack, this war, this mess—it’s wrapped around me.
I didn’t invite it.
But it’s here.
And it pisses me off.
“We left my house wide fucking open,” I snarl, pushing Cormac off me as the surface under the tyres evens out, indicating we are on the road.
“I doubt they will go inside. They’ll need to get moving after the shots, and one of them being ploughed down,” Aidan says. “You okay?”
“Yeah, fucking fine,” I say, shaking glass out of my hair. “Who the hell were they?”
“Someone’s men who didn’t want you going home,” Declan replies, sitting face forward again and putting his seatbelt on as Aidan drives like a maniac down the country lane.
The wind screams through the missing rear windscreen, whipping my hair across my face and filling the car with the kind of cold that gets into your bones.
I twist around and look back through the shattered frame.
The road behind us is empty. Just grey tarmac unspooling into the Connemara landscape.
“Any chance we can swap vehicles? It’s fucking freezing.”
Aidan doesn’t reply or slow down. His knuckles are white on the steering wheel, and his jaw is set in that way that means he’s running calculations I can’t see.
I look down at my lap. Whatever I’m holding is worth killing me over. But that’s the fucking plan, isn’t it? That’s been the plan all along. Someone wanted me at St. Aug’s—probably to kill me—and Dad stopped it while he could. While he was alive to do it.
“What do I have that someone wants?” I mutter.
“Right now?” Cormac responds, even though it was rhetorical. “Whatever is in those files.”
“No shit,” I murmur and close my eyes so I can’t see my impending death by hedge due to Aidan’s driving.