Chapter 7
Dervla
“And who is Bitchface?” Declan asks with a smirk.
“Your mother?” Aidan asks with a raised eyebrow.
I narrow my eyes at him, one corner of my mouth twisting up despite myself. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you. In fact, that is kind of the point, I’d say. She has the same initials as my grandmother. Both are bitchfaces. But Nan beats Mum hands down.”
“Nans can be that way,” Aidan says with a snort. “You wouldn’t want to meet mine in a dark alleyway.”
I giggle and straighten up. “Alanna Colthurst. She absolutely refused to take the Callaghan name. Said Alanna Callaghan sounded like a cheap whore.”
Cormac huffs a laugh. “Respect.”
“Nan sounds fun,” Declan says.
“She once told a priest he had the face of a liar and the hands of a thief because he asked too many questions at lunch. She is awful.”
Cormac grins. “I’m going to like her.”
“No, you won’t. She’ll insult you until your ancestors wake from the dead to exact vengeance. But luckily, we don’t have to see her in person. Sitting room.” I leave the library at speed, the others right behind me, and cut across the hall to the sitting room.
It is one of the few rooms in this house that ever looked lived in when I was growing up. Not warm, exactly. Just used. My mother’s room when she was here. Nan’s room when she visited. Neutral territory for women who despised each other in slightly different accents.
I go straight to the writing desk by the window.
“This family is exhausting,” Cormac grumbles as I pull out a drawer.
“You’ve met me. This should not come as a surprise.” I pull it fully out and turn it over. Nothing. So I move on. “This was Alanna’s. She left it here as a reminder to my mother, who was the lady of this house.”
“Colthurst,” Aidan mutters. “As in the Galway Colthursts?”
I nod without looking up.
“You do know that they are rumoured to be extremely connected, and I don’t mean that in a societal way.”
“Mafia,” Declan says with a sage nod.
“You think my grandmother is mafia?” I say and then have to admit, it would make sense. She doesn’t give a flying fuck.
“Well, her family, at any rate,” Aidan says, looking around, then pauses at the bookshelf. “Redhead?”
“Yeah,” I say, narrowing my eyes.
He nods and reaches for a copy of The Wicked Redhead by Beatriz Williams.
“Noooo,” I say and lunge for it, snatching it from him. I open it, fanning the pages, and a note falls out. “DC.”
Cormac’s lips curl at one corner as his gaze slides from the note to me. “Let me go out on a limb and say you?” He taps his finger against his temple in mock revelation.
I give him a scathing glare for pointing out the obvious. I growl and chuck the book down. But we are onto something. I head for the stairs, taking them two at a time again and burst into my bedroom.
It looks like a rabid animal got set loose. “Jesus,” I mutter.
“Someone thought you had something in here,” Declan says.
“Yeah, but they wouldn’t be looking for a decoder, would they?” I ask and move to my dressing table. “I don’t even know what one looks like,” I grumble.
Declan bends down to retrieve something. He holds up a smashed, chunky, black phone between his index and middle fingers. It’s cheap, it’s innocuous, and it’s not mine.
“An old phone?”
Declan turns it over, taps the blank screen and then tries to power it on. He slides a nail along the seam at the bottom and removes the back. He pulls the clunky battery out with a smile and hands it to me.
“You’re joking?”
He shakes his head. “Hats off to your dad. Fucking hell. That was hard work.”
I stare at the initials CC scrawled in tiny print on the back of the battery that’s not a battery. I look up at Declan. “How did you know?”
“This was becoming a serious pain in the arse. Your dad wouldn’t have let it go on for much longer. He knew you and your lack of patience. I didn’t know, but took a stab in the dark when I saw it.”
I turn the battery-shaped thing over in my palm. It’s heavy. Solid. It has a micro USB port at the bottom.
“We need to get out of here,” Aidan says, moving to the window and staring out.
“Agreed,” I mutter, pocketing the decoder to sit next to the hard drive. “We can check it in the car.”
Cormac is already in the hall, gun in hand, scanning the landing. “Move.”
We do. Fast.
We take the stairs quickly. I go between Declan and Aidan this time without complaint because the second we found the fake battery, the whole trip stopped being theory. Someone tore my room apart looking for something. They missed it. Barely.
We hit the ground floor and cut through the hall. Cormac reaches the back door first.
Then he stops.
Not dramatic. Not loud. Just enough that every nerve in my body lights up.
“What?” I whisper.
He lifts his hand without looking back.
I hear it a beat later.
A car engine, close.
Aidan swears under his breath. “Front drive.”
My pulse jumps hard. “They’re here.”
Before we can move an inch, the front door opens, and my blood turns to ice. I gesture to Cormac to open the back door quickly, but the footsteps are already coming down the hallway.
“God, this place is a mess,” a clipped voice snaps, and I freeze as Declan, assuming I was moving forward, walks into me. With wide eyes, I lunge for the door, practically shoving Cormac out of the way, finger to my lips as Declan and Aidan slip out behind me.
“Who?” Declan mouths.
“Nan,” I hiss, pulling the back door closed. “Move before she sees us.”
We break into a run across the back garden, boots sinking into wet ground as the first drops of rain start to hit.
Cormac gets to the hedge first and pushes through the gap. I duck through after him, heart hammering, with Declan right on my heels and Aidan bringing up the rear. Branches catch at my coat and hair. I swear under my breath and keep moving.
We spill out into the wilderness beyond the wall and crouch low automatically.
“Why didn’t you want your nan to know we were there?” Aidan asks a damn good question.
“Gut feeling,” I mutter back. “Why is she here? Why is she not worried that the house has been tossed? If you are right about the Colthursts, where does her loyalty lie… need me to go on?”
“Nope,” Cormac says. “Good enough for me. Let’s go.”
We move fast and low along the outside wall until we hit the path again.
Rain starts properly then, cold and needling, soaking into my hair and the back of my coat. My boots slip once on the wet stone, and Declan catches my elbow before I go arse over tits.
Cormac reaches the bend first and checks the rise above the path, gun in hand. “Clear.”
“For now,” Aidan says.
I hate that he is probably right.
We keep going, not running flat-out because it’s slippery and muddy as fuck with the rain. My pulse is still going hard from hearing my grandmother’s voice. It sits badly in me. Not panic. Something uglier. Suspicion with an old family history underneath it.
We reach the car park, and Aidan unlocks the car quickly.
Declan yanks the back door open. “Get in.”
Cormac opens the passenger side and folds himself in, already scanning the road. Aidan gets behind the wheel, starts the engine, and pulls out in one clean movement.
Nobody says a word. My brain is going too fast for me to catch up. Why was my grandmother there? What was she looking for? The decoder? The hard drive? Something else?
Declan looks at me. “You think she knew we were there?”
“Wouldn’t she have called out my name if she thought I was there, instead of complaining about the mess? She didn’t exactly make a covert entrance. I think that was just seriously crappy timing.”
Aidan takes the next turn too fast for the road, and the hatchback protests. Rain lashes across the windscreen. The wipers work overtime and still don’t quite keep up.
“What are the odds?” Cormac asks, but I think it’s rhetorical.
“What was she there for?” I mutter, also rhetorically. “I haven’t seen or spoken to her since Dad’s funeral.”
“We aren’t going to get any answers about Alanna,” Aidan says. “We need to get home in one piece, so we can decode the hard drive and plug it into a laptop to give us whatever your dad was hiding about the Board and this mystery guy.”
“How do you know it’s all on there?”
“Because if it’s not after all this, I swear to God—”
“Okay, point taken,” I mutter as he slams his fist on the steering wheel.
I lean my head against the cold window, watching the Irish countryside blur into a smear of grey and green.
The weight of the hard drive and that fake battery in my pocket feels like a lead sinker, dragging me down into the muck of my own family history.
Alanna Colthurst didn’t just show up to water the plants.
She was there for the same reason everyone else is circling this house—to find the leverage my father died protecting.