Chapter 6
Declan
The unspoken words hang there as if they’d been shouted. I look at Dervla and see the moment it locks into place for all of us. “Do you want to go today?” I ask her, seriously, ignoring Aidan’s sharp stare.
She gives me a look that screams her answer before she says the words. “Yeah, I do.”
“Then we go today. Go upstairs, get dressed to run, arm yourself and bring the drive.”
She nods gratefully that someone stood with her in the corner and had her back.
Aidan swears under his breath. “Absolutely not. We do not pivot because she had a thought on the stairs, and you decided to indulge it.”
I look at him. “It isn’t indulgence. It’s pattern recognition.”
“It’s impatience,” he snaps.
Dervla is already backing toward the hall. “You can all keep arguing if you want. I’m going upstairs.”
Cormac pushes back from the table with a wince and follows her with his eyes. “If she gets dressed and comes back down armed, that’s a vote counted.”
Aidan looks between us like he’s calculating whether he can physically restrain all three of us and still keep his dignity. “For fuck’s sake.”
I hold his gaze. “You said contingencies. Fine. We make them in the car.”
“That is not what I meant.”
“No,” I say. “But it is what’s happening.”
He goes still for a beat. I know that look. It means the argument is moving from principle to logistics. Which means I’ve won enough of it to matter.
“And he’s come around,” Cormac remarks.
“I haven’t come around,” Aidan says coldly. “I’m adapting to the fact that you’re all impossible.”
“That,” I say, “is the nicest thing you’ve said about us all week.”
He glares at me like he’d enjoy shooting me on principle.
Cormac gets up more slowly than usual, one hand pressing his ribs for a second before he drops it. “I’m getting changed.”
Aidan points at him. “You are not fit.”
Cormac keeps walking. “Good thing I didn’t ask for your opinion.”
Aidan stands there in the kitchen with fury and resignation, fighting it out behind his eyes, and I know exactly how this goes. He can either get ahead of the stupidity or be dragged behind it.
“You know we’re right,” I say.
“I know you’re all reckless.”
“Same thing half the time.”
“Fine. We do this properly or not at all. Armed to the teeth with as many illegal weapons as we can carry.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.” I head upstairs before he can change his mind again. No one wastes time now that the decision is made.
I strip off and change into black cargo pants and a dark tee, then pull on my boots and start arming up.
Knife at my ankle. Knife at my back. Glock at my waist. Spare magazine in my pocket.
Another blade in the inside pocket of my jacket, because experience says one weapon is optimism, and optimism gets people killed.
When I step back into the hall, Dervla is coming out of her room, tying her hair back.
Black leggings. Black puffer coat. Boots.
She has the hard drive in one hand and Henrietta in the other before she slides the blade into place and the hard drive into her pocket.
Wordlessly, we head downstairs together. Cormac is already by the front door, changed and armed. Ribs strapped. I can tell from here. From now on, he won’t even grimace when he thinks no one is looking. The pain is forgotten.
Aidan comes down last, all in black, expression flat enough to count as dangerous. He has a controlled fury about him that usually means somebody else is about to have a very bad day.
He opens the door. “Get in the car, Callaghan.”
We move.
The drive out is tight with energy. Dervla sits in the back with me.
Cormac is in the front passenger seat, turned half sideways every few minutes to look out the side window like he expects an ambush at every junction.
Aidan drives fast and clean, eyes moving between the road, the mirrors, and the route on his phone.
I keep watching Dervla.
She isn’t jittery. She isn’t frightened. She’s focused in that hard, quiet way of hers that usually means she’s already six steps ahead. “Are we switching out cars again?” she asks after about half an hour.
“Yes,” Aidan says. “Same place. Then we head towards the coast. There is a sightseeing spot where we can park up and take the final mile on foot.”
“Hope it doesn’t rain,” Cormac says.
“Tough shit if it does,” Dervla mutters. “I know Dad left me something else.”
“We’ll find out,” I say.
She turns her head and looks at me. There is something stripped back in her face this morning. No performance. No teasing. Just certainty and exhaustion held together by stubbornness. I know that expression. It is the one she gets when she has decided pain is irrelevant.
We pull up to Mick’s garage in Athlone, and he gives us a scathing glare. “Again?”
“Again,” Aidan says. “Something subtle, white and common.”
Mick sighs and flicks his cigarette on the ground, leaving it to burn as he walks around the back. I stamp it out, and Dervla gives me a look before she rolls her eyes.
“Safety first,” I murmur with a smirk.
She snorts. “Always.”
We round the corner to find Aidan inspecting a white hatchback.
“That one blends in so well it nearly apologises for existing,” Dervla says.
Mick tosses Aidan the keys. “Bring it back without holes in it this time.”
“No promises,” Cormac mutters.
Mick gives him a long look. “I don’t like you.”
“I’m wounded, but I’ll get over it,” he says and climbs into the passenger seat.
The rest of us get in. Aidan takes the wheel again. This time the car smells faintly of old takeaway and damp fabric, which is reassuring in a grim kind of way. Nothing memorable. Nothing that stands out. We roll out of the garage and head west.
The road narrows the closer we get. Stone walls. Wet hedges. Fields cut by low fences and old gates. The sky has held so far, but it’s turning the kind of grey that never means anything good. Dervla’s thumb taps once against her thigh every few minutes. Not nerves. Thought.
No one says a word until we pull up to the viewing point, which is a patch of gravel and broken tarmac overlooking a strip of dark water and rock below.
Empty except for a camper van parked at the far end with all the curtains drawn.
Each of us is lost in our own thoughts about what we are going to find and how this is going to play out.
I have zero expectations. My only job is to make sure Dervla lives.
Anything else is up to her, Aidan and Cormac.
Aidan kills the engine and turns around. “If this goes wrong, we don’t heroically improvise.”
Dervla opens her door. “That feels specifically aimed at me.”
“It was a group note,” he says.
“It was not.”
Cormac gets out first and scans the road, the cliff path, the gorse edging the car park. I get out after Dervla and shut the door quietly. Wind hits, sharp enough to let me know the rain is about to follow. Overhead, the sky is heavy and low.
Aidan checks his gun, then nods down the path. “That way.”
We head down the path in single file at first, then spread just enough to stop one burst taking us all at once.
I keep Dervla in the middle without making it obvious.
Aidan is ahead, fast and exact. Cormac drifts right, scanning the rise above us, the scrub, the break in the wall where someone could wait with a clear line of sight.
I stay half a step behind Dervla and watch everything she can’t watch while she watches the route ahead.
The path drops between gorse and old stone, uneven underfoot. The sea is somewhere below and to the left, hidden by the slope until the path bends and the house comes into view.
Callaghan House sits back from the cliff edge behind iron gates and low walls, all dark stone and long windows. From here, it looks still. Shut up. Empty.
That means nothing.
We come to a stop and crouch behind a cluster of bushes just past the back wall.
“Best way in?” I ask Dervla.
“Assuming that there is no one lying in wait to kill us? The back door. We can get through the boundary hedge on the right side. I’m guessing everything is wide open after our last visit.”
“We have to assume that the house is occupied,” Aidan says.
“So we go in hot,” Cormac says.
Dervla pulls Henrietta out of the sheath. “I go everywhere hot,” she murmurs.
He grins. “Facts. You’re a smokeshow, sweetheart.”
“Focus,” Aidan grits out. “We can fuck after this is done.”
“Right after?” I ask, eyes on Dervla.
The left side of her mouth lifts up. “I’ll give you a blowie on the back seat on the way back if you want.”
“Promise,” I murmur, eyes on her mouth.
“Jesus,” Aidan mutters and nods to Dervla. “Lead the way. If you see anything that looks off, we stop and reevaluate.”
She nods and ducks out from behind the bush, staying low as she makes a beeline for the boundary hedge.
I stay close to her. I don’t have a sixth sense pinging about an ambush, but that means fuck all in real-world terms. The hedge catches at my jacket as I push through after her.
Damp branches scrape over my hands. Dervla doesn’t hesitate.
She knows every inch of this place in the way you only know somewhere you grew up, half-loving and half-enduring.
We come out into the back garden and move towards the back door. Dervla presses herself against the wall.
I join her and listen.
Wind. Distant water. A loose gutter tapping somewhere high up. Nothing human.
Cormac moves up on our right, crouched and brutal and silent for a man his size. Aidan comes in on my left, gun low, eyes on the windows.
“Try the handle,” I say to Dervla.
She nods and reaches for it, pulling it down, but it doesn’t budge. “Locked.”