Chapter 27
Dervla
I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed with the door closed.
The ledger is on my left. The sealed envelope is on my right.
Both of them have been sitting there for twenty minutes because I can’t decide which one scares me more.
The hard drive is sticking out of my laptop but is inaccessible due to encryption that I don’t have the skills to crack.
I pick up the ledger first. It’s slim, bound in dark brown leather, the kind you’d find in a stationery shop, nothing fancy. The pages are lined. Dad’s handwriting fills them in blue ink, small and precise, each entry dated.
The first entry is from nine years ago.
I start reading.
It’s a record of Board activity. Not minutes. Summaries. In shorthand. A private, parallel account of what actually happened in those meetings versus what went into the official record.
The official minutes from Whitmore’s safe recorded vote after vote as unanimous or carried without objection.
Dad’s ledger tells a different story. Contested votes scrubbed clean.
Dissenting voices erased. Abstentions magically turned into approvals.
The Board’s official record is a fiction, and my father documented the reality for nine years.
I turn the pages slowly, absorbing the pattern.
Every significant decision in the last decade where someone disagreed was either overruled or pressured into silence.
There is probably something useful in all of this, but right now, I can’t find it.
It’s just boring Board meeting shit that I can’t understand with all the shorthand and scribbles.
Maybe this wasn’t meant for me. Maybe it was just in the safe for safekeeping.
I dump it to the side to come back to later and pick up the letter.
The wax is thick, dark red, stamped clean with the Callaghan crest. I slide my thumbnail under the edge and crack it. The seal breaks in two pieces that fall onto the duvet like drops of dried blood. Inside is a single sheet of heavy cream paper, folded once.
I unfold it.
Dad’s handwriting.
Dervla,
If you’re reading this, I’m gone, and you’ve found the safe.
I want to tell you everything. I’ve wanted to for years. But putting it on paper makes it real in a way that puts you at risk, and that’s the one thing I swore I’d never do. So, I’ll tell you what I can.
St. Augustine’s is not what it appears to be.
The university is a front. The Board is the real institution, and the real institution exists to build and maintain a network of power, money, and influence that stretches across this country and beyond.
Every family that matters has a thread that passes through those gates.
The Board controls the threads. They decide who rises, who falls, who owes what to whom, and they’ve been doing it for three hundred years.
I sat on that Board for two decades. There are no good members. There are only those who benefit and those who get buried, and I benefited for a very long time.
They want you, Dervla. I don’t fully understand why, and that terrifies me more than anything I’ve encountered dealing with the people and the criminal underworld.
I blocked your admission three years ago because I could see what they were doing.
They want you there, and I haven’t been able to find out why.
I know you. I know you are there now, hunting down who killed me.
I knew it would come to this, that your life would be torn apart and you would end up precisely where I didn’t want you.
I kept you away. I gave in to your every whim.
I indulged you, encouraged you to live a life of frivolity without consequence.
But consequence is knocking now.
Bring them down, Dervla. Not for anyone other than to save yourself.
Don’t trust any of them.
I love you.
Dad
“Well, fuck,” I yell. “What the hell does any of this mean?”
The door bursts open and Aidan storms in, gun levelled, scanning the room with eagle eyes that miss nothing. Except for the fact that I’m talking to myself, apparently.
“Lower your weapon, for fuck’s sake. I’m alone.”
Aidan’s gaze flicks from the open letter in my hand to the broken seal on the duvet, then to my face. He lowers the gun with obvious reluctance.
“You yelled out,” he says. “Gut reaction.”
“I’m not a damsel, and I really wish you would all stop treating me like one!”
“To be fair—”
“Finish that sentence at your peril!” I growl.
I realise I’ve been in “save-me” mode since I got here, but that ends now.
I might’ve lived a frivolous life up to now, but I know how to take care of myself.
I carry a blade that I named for fuck’s sake.
I’ve used it. I’ve bled people with it—handsy, drunk students, older men looking for a good time, criminals looking for someone to exploit, I’ve seen it all—but since arriving here, I’ve had three overbearing control freaks looming over me, making it difficult to breathe.
Fucking Troy. I wish I’d headbutted him now.
Aidan holds his hands up. “Not going to stop protecting you because you feel it offends your delicate sensibilities, pixie.”
I close my eyes and inhale deeply before releasing and opening my eyes to glare at him.
He closes the door behind him with his foot and changes the subject. “What did he say?”
I hold the letter out. “Read it and tell me if I’m meant to feel comforted, terrified, or homicidal.”
He takes it and reads fast, eyes moving once, then back to the top for a second pass. His face gives away very little, which is irritating at the best of times and currently makes me want to throw the ledger at his head.
“Well?” I demand.
“He confirmed most of what we already suspected.”
“He also said they want me, and he doesn’t know why.” My voice comes out too sharp, too thin. “That’s not helpful, Aidan. That’s actually the opposite of helpful.”
“No,” he says quietly, handing the letter back. “It’s useful because your father didn’t lie to you in it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because men lie differently when they’re trying to protect someone. This isn’t that. This is a man admitting he was out of answers.”
That lands harder than I want it to. I look back down at Dad’s handwriting for a long second and wish he had lied. Wish he had written something cleaner. A reason. A name. A target I can drive Henrietta into until this stops clawing at me.
Instead, I get fear in my father’s handwriting.
I fold the letter once, then again, more carefully than I mean to. “He kept me stupid on purpose.”
Aidan says nothing, which doesn’t make me feel better.
“That was his grand fucking plan,” I say. “Keep Dervla entertained, spoiled, out of the way, and maybe the monsters won’t notice her. Jesus Christ.”
“He was buying time.”
“For what?”
“For himself to work it out. For you to stay out of reach. For something to change.”
I laugh once. It sounds nasty. “Worked brilliantly.”
His eyes stay on me. “You’re angry at a dead man.”
“I’m furious at a dead man.” I throw the letter onto the bed and scrub both hands over my face. “He knew enough to write this, knew enough to block my application, knew enough to hide shit in a wall, and still didn’t tell me a single useful thing while he was alive.”
“Maybe because if he had, you would have come here sooner.”
That shuts me up for half a second, mostly because he’s probably right and I hate him for it.
“Can I ask you a question? Deeply personal?”
“No,” I snap.
“Going to anyway. What about your mum? Where is she in all of this?”
“Are you for real?” I get up and pace to the window. “She is irrelevant.”
“I didn’t say she was relevant. I asked where she was.”
“You’d have to ask her ski instructor boyfriend then. Last I heard, she was enjoying après-ski in the Swiss Alps.”
“She abandoned you?”
I turn so fast I nearly trip over my own feet.
“No,” I say, and then, because the word feels too small and too simple for what she did, I say, “Yes. Sort of. I don’t know. Pick one.”
Aidan stays where he is by the door. Annoyingly calm. Annoyingly patient.
“She left when I was twelve,” I say. “Properly left. Before that, she came and went. Charity lunches. Horse things. Weekends in London ‘with the girls’. Then one day she just… stopped coming back for long enough that everyone had to admit it was permanent.”
He doesn’t interrupt.
“Dad said they were better apart. He said she needed space, and then he bought me a pony and let me redecorate my room and never once said the words your mother has chosen herself over you, but that was the gist.”
My throat feels tight. I hate that. I hate this. I hate him asking questions that open doors I keep shut for a reason.
“He bought you a pony?” Aidan’s mouth quirks up, and I resist the urge to slap his handsome face.
“Yes, I know how it all sounds, okay,” I reply stiffly.
“No, no,” he says, shaking his head, but the smirk is growing. “Just didn’t make you out as a horse girl, that’s all.”
“My dad owns racehorses. Owned,” I reply. “Guess they’re mine now.”
“Can I ask you another question?”
“No.”
“Tough. Do you know who your dad really was?”
“Rich investor with too much money.”
“Nah, the real Cillian Callaghan.”
I sigh and deflate. “Irish mafia, something or other. Fixed horse races, racketeered from east to west, north to south, links to… organisations that can’t be named for security reasons.”
“You knew all of that?” He looks surprised.
“I’m not fucking stupid.”
“Just frivolous,” he mutters.
“Do you want to meet Henrietta up close and personal?”
“If you knew all of that, how did you just carry on with your life?” His question is serious, and it catches me off guard.
I consider it for a long moment. “Because what else was I meant to do?” I say at last. “I was fifteen when I worked out Dad wasn’t just some rich man with a frightening address book.
By then, it was already normal. The money.
The scary-arse men that came and went. The things no one said directly, but everyone understood.
You grow up around something long enough, it stops looking strange.
” Aidan says nothing, so I keep going, because apparently, tonight is for emotional excavation and public humiliation.
“I knew enough to know there were parts of his life I wasn’t supposed to ask about.
I also knew he loved me. Those two things existed side by side, and I got very good at not pulling too hard on either of them.
And if I’m being honest, I liked what his money bought me. Freedom. Distance. No consequences.”
“Not no consequences,” Aidan says. “Deferred ones.”
I shoot him a look. “You really know how to take a vulnerable moment and make it irritating.”
“It’s a gift.”
I ignore that. “I thought if I didn’t ask questions, I could keep the good bits and avoid the rest. That’s how people live with powerful men, isn’t it? They edit. They call it protecting the family or minding their own business. It’s what my mother did… until…”
“She couldn’t anymore.”
“Yep.”
We stare at each other for a moment, and then he moves closer. He wraps his arms around me and pulls me closer, tucking my head under his chin.
It feels safe, and I wish it didn’t.
“I’m okay,” I say after a few minutes and pull back.
“But I’m tired of being reactive. The journal is a bunch of shorthand notes I can’t read.
The letter tells me I’m in danger and the hard drive is encrypted.
I would say that trip was a waste of time, except it wasn’t.
It has lit a fire under me. I need to start making noise, taking up space. ”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, this Apex thing needs to be tested. I want to, no need to show everyone, Whitmore, the Board, everyone that I’m not the grieving Callaghan girl who needs rescuing by the Kings of St. Augustine’s.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Some sort of show. Not a party, too uncontrolled, but something that shows who’s in charge.”
He thinks for a second. “Casino night.”
I roll my eyes, “Boring.”
“No, hear me out. Legal gambling, but also some off-the-books stuff. Illegal fighting underneath the cards and roulette wheels.”
My eyes light up. “Okay, now you’re talking. You mean running a bookies.”
“Precisely.”
I nod slowly. A grin pulls at my mouth before I can stop it. “That is either a terrible idea or the first interesting thing anyone has said to me all week.”
“It can be both,” Aidan says.
I grab my notebook and throw it to Aidan, my brain finally catching on something that feels like offence instead of defence.
“Apex already has the velvet-rope nonsense, the social posturing, the rich-kid bullshit. Fine. We use that. Dress it up as a housewarming for the new Apex, if you will, and underneath it, we run something real.”
His eyes stay on me, sharp and intent. “You want visibility.”
“I want a declaration.” I turn to face him fully.
“I want every person who thought I’d curl up and grieve politely so they could manipulate me to understand I’m not going anywhere.
I want Whitmore watching from whatever filthy hole he crawls out of and realising I’m still here.
I want the Board to hear my name every five minutes.
I want the students to realise there is a badass queen on campus, and she isn’t sitting in a corner being protected by the kings. ”
“I fucking love this plan.”
“Of course you do. Who do we need?”
Aidan moves to my desk and picks up a pen to start writing. “Venue first. The old boathouse is too small. We need somewhere that feels deliberate.”
“The chapel crypt?”
His mouth twitches. “Dark. Dramatic. Hard to control access.”
“Also, blasphemous.”
“That’s never stopped anyone here. The old assembly hall. There is enough room for tables, enough exits, and the lower level under the stage can hold the fights.”
“Oh, that’s fucking creepy. I like it.”
He smiles. It’s the first real smile I’ve seen that isn’t a smirk or a punctuation point grin. He moves to the door and shouts for Declan and Cormac, who come running as if the room is on fire, and they need to save us.
I sit back on the bed and feel a weight lifting.
Action. Pure and beautiful, and will make a statement for anyone who thinks they can get the better of me.