Chapter 5
Dervla
The kitchen is dead when I walk in and flick the kettle on, yawning as I stare out at a sunny morning for a change.
The kettle clicks louder than it should in the silence. I’m not used to it. I’ve got used to the noise three large men make as they move around.
I open the fridge, stare at the contents, and shut it again because I cannot be arsed constructing food before caffeine. My body complains in stages. Forearm tight. Right hand still aching. Thighs sore. Neck marked. Pussy pleasantly wrecked.
I make tea and carry the mug to the table, frowning at the emptiness of the room and realising I hate it. I’m halfway through my first sip when the back door opens and Declan steps in with a paper bag in one hand and a carrier tray of coffees in the other. He stops when he sees me already seated.
“You’re up.”
“Yep. Where is everyone?”
He sets the coffee and bag on the table carefully, stalling as he pulls out a cup and takes the lid off, then moves to get plates for whatever deliciousness he brought in. I narrow my eyes at him over the rim of my mug.
He pulls out pastries from the bag, then a bacon roll wrapped in paper, then another. “You should eat.”
I set my tea down. “Declan.”
He finally looks at me properly, and I roll my eyes.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I mutter. “What happened?”
The back door opens again. Cormac comes in first, bruised and bad-tempered, carrying himself like his ribs hurt and he’d rather die than admit it. Aidan follows, fully dressed, hair neat, face unreadable in a way I already distrust.
I sit back in my chair and cross one leg over the other. “Who gets to start?”
“Cormac,” Declan says.
“Oh, thrown to wolves. Nice. What’s up?”
Cormac drops into the chair opposite me with the kind of care that tells me something hurts badly enough to annoy him.
“I got a phone call last night. Unknown number. Older bloke. Irish. Educated. Careful. He knew about last night. About Roisin. About the Board. About you.”
Aidan pulls out the chair to my left and sits.
A cold little line runs through me. “How much about me?”
Cormac’s face hardens. “Enough.”
I look between the three of them. “That is not an answer.”
“He said Roisin acted without authorisation,” Cormac continues.
I frown. “Authorisation from who?”
“That,” Aidan says, “is the problem.”
I stare at him.
His gaze holds mine. “According to your mystery caller, there is something above the Board.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Oh? What?”
“We don’t know. Do you?” Aidan’s gaze bores into mine.
I shake my head. “I’ve never heard of the Board reporting to anyone. But there again, what do I know?”
“Yeah,” Cormac says. “This is the thing. None of us really knows.”
“But you’re saying this guy said that Roisin acted without authorisation? From the Board or from them this mystery top tier?”
“Also, unclear.”
“But she’s in trouble?” I ask with a sweet smile.
“Sounds like it. There’s more.”
“Of course there is. Why wouldn’t there be more?”
Cormac ignores my sarcastic comment. “He said that if Declan hadn’t walked you home last night, you’d be dead.”
I blink. “Okay. Why? What did I do to piss someone off?”
“Stand in the path of something old,” Cormac mutters.
“Right. And?”
“And this guy wants you on the Board, but then wants you much higher up. Wherever that ends up, remains to be seen.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah,” Aidan says. “One more thing. He called Cormac specifically. Said Cormac is the one who clears the path when the time comes.”
I turn my head and look at Cormac. “That’s weirdly dramatic.”
“It was weirdly annoying,” he says.
Declan puts a plate in front of me with a bacon roll on it and a pastry beside it like he thinks carbs will make this less deranged. “Eat.”
I give him a look. He gives me one back that says absolutely not optional.
I pick up the roll and take a bite because, annoyingly, I am hungry.
“So let me get this straight. Roisin goes rogue, or possibly not rogue, but at least out of line. There is maybe a level above the Board. Some older man knows what happened, knows about me, knows about the three of you, and thinks I’m destined for… what? A promotion?”
“No idea,” Aidan says.
“Great.” I take another bite and think. Dad’s letter. The ledger. The safe. Don’t trust any of them. The Board controls the threads.
What if they’re threads as well?
The thought lands ugly and hard.
I lower the bacon roll and wipe my fingers on a napkin. “My dad always said the Board runs power, money, and influence. He made it sound like that was the top of the pile. But if there’s something above them, then either he didn’t know, which seems unlikely, or he knew.”
“Or he suspected and couldn’t prove it,” Declan says.
“Maybe.” I look at Cormac. “Did your caller say anything that sounded personal? Anything that suggested he knew my father?”
Cormac shakes his head. “No names. No details. Just facts and orders.”
“Did he sound like he gave a fuck whether I lived or died?”
That makes all three of them go still for a second.
“He sounded invested,” Cormac says carefully.
“Invested. Like a stock portfolio.”
“Maybe exactly that.”
I finish the rest of the roll because if I stop eating now, I’ll start pacing, and if I start pacing, I’ll probably smash a mug. “So we have Roisin, the Board, mystery level above the Board, and a dead man’s encrypted hard drive that suddenly became urgent to decrypt.”
Aidan reaches for the coffee Declan brought in instead of whatever he was about to say. He takes a drink, buying himself a second, which tells me he’s already decided something I may not like.
“What are you thinking?” I ask, staring at him hard enough that he looks away.
That is enormous.
“Aidan,” I snap.
“We have to assume that your father was perhaps not who you thought he was.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, you are his daughter. Whatever this old guy thinks you are, it starts with your blood. Callaghan blood.”
“And you think my dad was involved in all of this? Why didn’t he just tell me then?”
“Maybe he was going to and never got a chance…”
I close my eyes as he trails off, and the scene of my dad in the dining room, dead, sits behind my eyelids.
I open them again quickly before that image can settle too deeply and wreck the rest of the morning.
“Don’t,” I say flatly.
Aidan’s face shifts, not quite regret, not quite caution. “I’m saying we need to stop assuming your father was only one thing.”
“My father was many things,” I reply. “None of them included being generous with fucking information.”
Cormac reaches for one of the coffees and pushes it toward me. “Drink that.”
“I already have tea.”
“Have both.”
I take the coffee and sit back, forcing myself to think instead of react. Dad’s letter sits in my head with all its gaps and warnings. The ledger. The hard drive. The safe in the wall. The way he wrote they want you, Dervla, like the words hurt him to admit.
“He blocked my admission three years ago,” I say slowly. “That means he knew.”
“I hate to be the one to say it,” Aidan starts, but cuts off when I shoot him a furious glare.
“Does this mean we have to go back home?” I ask after a beat. “Whatever we found the first time, clearly isn’t enough.”
“Well, we don’t know that because we don’t know what’s on the hard drive.”
“No, but I’m willing to bet that Dad had something in that house that would read it.”
“Last time we went, we got shot at.”
“And had to drive over someone,” Cormac adds.
“True, but will they be expecting us to go back after that?”
That gets them all to consider what I’m saying.
“I don’t like this,” Declan says.
“You don’t like any plan that isn’t yours,” I point out.
He grimaces but doesn’t refute my statement. “That’s because my plans usually account for all of you being idiots,” he says.
“Accurate,” Aidan mutters.
I ignore both of them and grip the coffee cup tighter. Heat sinks into my fingers. My right hand protests, but less than yesterday. Everything hurts, but it is a functioning kind of hurt. The sort that reminds me I won.
“We do not rush back in blind,” Aidan says. “That part is not up for debate.”
“Fine. We rush back in with better information.”
Cormac gives me a dark look. “That is still rushing.”
“It’s called momentum.”
“It’s called getting shot at twice in one week.”
I tip my head. “You say that like it’s a lot.”
Declan sets another pastry on my plate without asking, which is apparently his answer to stress now. Feed Dervla before she starts threatening people. It is annoying because it works. “You’re not going alone.”
I stare at him. “I didn’t say I was.”
“You were about to imply it,” Declan replies.
“I was about to imply nothing of the sort. I was about to imply that if we go back, we do it smarter.”
Cormac shifts in his chair and winces, which would be funny if he didn’t look one bad mood away from homicide. “Smarter how?”
I take a drink of coffee and think it through as I swallow. “Last time, we went in hard, fast, and obvious. This time, we go slightly less obviously.”
“On foot?” Aidan asks.
I nod. “Sneaky, armed, dangerous, and we don’t split up.”
“That last part is non-negotiable,” Declan growls.
Aidan gives me a long look. “You are saying ‘we don’t split up’ like you won’t be the first one to disappear through a side door if you see something interesting.”
“I am wounded by how accurate that is.”
“You should be,” Declan says.
I tear off a piece of pastry and point it at all three of them. “You’re all missing the best part.”
Cormac narrows his eyes. “There’s a best part?”
“Yes. If whoever shot at us thinks they scared us off, then we have exactly one narrow window where they relax. I’d like to make very poor use of that window.”
Aidan taps his fingers against his cup once. “There’s logic in it.”
“There usually is when I speak. You just hate the delivery.”
“I hate the casualty rate.”
“Bit early to assign casualties.”
Cormac makes a low, irritated sound. “Jesus Christ.”
I finish the pastry and sit back. The room falls quiet in that loaded way it does when all four of us are circling the same ugly conclusion. Go back. Risk it again. Find what Dad has that can read this drive so we know exactly who we are dealing with.
“Let’s go then,” I say, brushing off pastry from my hands before I stand up.
“Tomorrow,” Aidan says. “We need contingencies on top of contingencies.”
“Get planning then. I’m going back to bed.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Cormac mutters, and I give him the middle finger before I turn and walk away.
I know I’m right about this. I don’t know how, but I know Dad wouldn’t have left this drive without giving me something to read it with. He was nothing if not thorough. The trouble is, where the fuck is it if the house was tossed before we even arrived the other day?
“Think, Dervla. Think like Dad would…”
I make it halfway up the stairs before it hits me.
Not where. How.
I stop dead, one hand on the bannister.
Dad never left important things in one place if he could help it.
Not with business. Not with money. Not with anything that could bury him.
He compartmentalised everything, inside layers.
One person knew one piece. Another knew another.
Even in the house, it was like that. Study things stayed in the study unless they were the kind of study things that absolutely could not be found in the study.
I turn back.
All three of them are still in the kitchen. Aidan has his phone out. Declan is cleaning up. Cormac is glaring at his coffee as if it insulted his ancestors.
“Dad had habits,” I say.
They all look up.
“That narrows it down,” Aidan says.
“No, listen. He hid things by category. Obvious valuables in obvious places, because that is where thieves look and feel clever when they find them, so they don’t keep looking.
Important things somewhere adjacent, never central.
He used to say if you hide everything in the same room, you deserve to be robbed. ”
Aidan’s face sharpens. “Adjacent how?”
“The dining room,” I say with a crack in my voice that I ignore.
So do they.
“How do you figure?” Aidan asks instead.
“It’s just a dining room. Table. Chairs. Sideboard. Solid concrete walls, not fancy wood panelling that can hide a multitude of secrets. Blinds, not curtains. No paintings or photographs on the walls. He held business dinners in there. The men who would come and go—”
“The mafia,” Cormac points out with a smirk.
I ignore him. “—would think they knew the place top to bottom. They’d have scoped out every single place something could be hidden because it was, for all intents and purposes, empty.”
“Just a dining room,” Aidan says.
“Just a dining room,” I repeat.