Chapter 9
Dervla
My fingers hover over the trackpad. The cursor blinks, a rhythmic pulse that feels like a countdown. My heart is a frantic bird trapped in my ribs, but my hand is steady as I double-click the new drive icon that’s just appeared on the screen.
“Do it,” Cormac growls, his presence a heavy, warm weight behind my right shoulder.
“Already done,” I mutter.
The folder isn’t encrypted with a password. Dad knew the decoder was the only key that mattered. A single file sits in the directory, labelled simply: THE APEX.
I open it. It’s a map.
Names, faces, and bank accounts sprawl across the screen in a complex web of digital hierarchy. At the centre sits the St. Augustine’s Board, but as I scroll, the lines continue upward, bleeding into a tier that isn’t labelled.
I scroll further. I know I’m looking for Nan’s name. The guys probably are too. I breathe out when I don’t see it. “She’s not a part of this.”
“But then who is?” Aidan says, leaning closer. “Who is our mystery fellow?”
“And who are all these fuckers?” Cormac asks, jabbing the screen.
“Irish mafia,” Aidan says quietly. “I recognise a lot of the names. They’re connected to my dad in various ways.”
I look up at Aidan. “Your dad is mafia?”
He raises an eyebrow as if that answers it. I guess it makes sense.
“So the Irish mafia rule—”
“Everything,” Aidan finishes.
“My dad was mafia, and he sat on the Board. Is that intentional? A conflict of interest? What?”
“Who knows?” Declan says. “But he has named a lot of powerful people on this map.”
“Which one do you think is the caller?” Cormac asks, peering closer as if that’s going to help a name jump out at him.
“Could be any one of them,” I say.
“Or none at all,” Declan points out.
“True.” I sit back. “Let’s run through what we know.
Dad was on the Board. Dad was part of the Irish mafia.
Dad was killed because he knew something or did something they didn’t want him knowing or doing.
His Board seat has opened up. Mystery guy wants me to get the seat before I aim higher?
Why? Is it an initiation? Is it a stepping stone? Is it a distraction?”
“All good questions with no answers,” Aidan murmurs.
I stare at the screen until the lines blur, my finger hovering over the trackpad as if one more click might unravel the whole tangled mess.
Aidan’s words hang in the air, heavy with the kind of truth that pisses me off—truth without edges I can grab onto.
The map sprawls like a living thing, names branching into accounts, accounts linking to companies I’ve never heard of, all feeding into that unmarked upper tier like tributaries to a poisoned river.
“Dad built this,” I say, voice low and edged with something I don’t want to name. “Piece by piece, probably over years. Why hide it unless he planned to use it?”
Declan shifts beside me, his body a steady presence without crowding. “Leverage. Blackmail. Or insurance against whatever got him killed.”
Cormac grunts. “Look at this shit. Your dad was mapping the mafia’s nervous system.”
“And the mafia runs everything,” I say.
“Pretty much,” Aidan replies. “This could mean that your dad was gunning for you to join him in the criminal underworld.”
“Or not,” I argue. “He blocked me from coming here, remember?”
“He blocked you from coming here because he knew what St. Augustine’s really was,” Aidan says. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t still intend for you to take your place eventually.”
“My place where?” I snap. “In this?” I gesture at the screen. “As what? A useful daughter with the right surname?”
Cormac plants both hands on the desk and stares down at the map. “Whatever the answer is, he didn’t leave this for anyone else. He left it for you.”
That lands harder than I want it to.
“This is all useless. I don’t know what to do with it,” I say eventually.
“Yet,” Aidan says. “I think we need to let this play out. Mystery caller wants you on the Board. We still aim for that, and we don’t play our hand. Which should be easy, seeing as we don’t know what that hand is yet.”
“Proceed as planned,” Declan murmurs.
I nod slowly. It’s the most logical next step. “Agreed,” I say, and slam the laptop lid shut. If I keep looking at it, I will drive myself mad. I pull out the hard drive and stash the laptop in the desk drawer. I get up and shove the hard drive under the mattress.
“Oh, great safe place,” Cormac snickers.
“Right where we fuck,” I respond. That shuts him up.
Aidan looks at the mattress, then at me. “Remind me never to trust your domestic instincts.”
“My domestic instincts are excellent. Nobody is going to go digging under the bed while I’m in it.”
Cormac’s gaze drops to the mattress, then back to me, dark and filthy. “Depends.”
Declan exhales through his nose. “Christ.”
I drag a hand through my hair and point at the door. “Out. All of you. I need five minutes where nobody tells me my dead father secretly built a criminal family tree and left it to me as homework.”
None of them move immediately.
That gets my back up. “Did I stutter?”
Aidan studies me for a second too long. “Five minutes.”
Cormac pushes off the desk. “Shout if you decide to have a breakdown.”
“I don’t do breakdowns.”
“No,” he says. “You do homicide.”
“Better.”
Declan is last to the door. He pauses, eyes on me, checking in without making it fucking sentimental. “Five minutes,” he says quietly.
Then they are gone, the door shutting behind them, and the room drops into a silence that feels too big.
I stand there in the middle of it and look at my desk, at the closed drawer, at the bed with the hard drive hidden under the mattress, and for one ugly second, I want to tear the whole room apart just so the inside of my head matches the outside.
Dad was mafia. I knew it; I accepted it, and then sort of forgot about it. It didn’t impact me or my life.
Except now it does.
But in a way I have no idea how it will affect me.
Aidan is right. We need to keep our eyes on the Board seat. That is where all of this started. Board seat and total annihilation. Where all of this extra shit comes into it is something we’ll get to later if the mystery guy keeps calling Cormac.
With that decision made, I feel a bit lighter. Yes, it is important, but without knowing how, we are chasing our tails. It’s pointless.
The door opens again, and Aidan lounges in the doorway with Declan next to him. “Did you change your mind?”
“No,” I say. “I reinforced it.”
“Told you,” he says to Declan, who rolls his eyes.
“You doubted me?” I say to Declan, mock-wounded. “How dare you?”
“I doubted your ability to sit still for five fucking minutes,” he says.
“That is not the same thing.”
“It is with you,” Aidan replies, stepping fully into the room now.
Cormac appears behind him, crowding the doorway. It should feel ridiculous, three grown men returning after being kicked out like I rang a bell for them, but it doesn’t. It feels normal. Which is probably its own kind of problem.
I sit on the edge of the bed and look at all three of them. “Well? Since you’re clearly back before your allotted time is up, say what you came to say.”
“What are we going to do about Roisin?” he asks.
“Assuming she shows her face tomorrow?” I ask archly. “Fuck knows. Pretend like it didn’t happen? Pretend like you didn’t get into a fight with her security? Pretend Eoin didn’t make a comeback and got beaten by me?”
“I say all of the above. We ignore it and her,” he states. “She is, if Cormac’s guy is right, not in a position to be doing much of anything.”
“Except running St. Aug’s behind the scenes,” I argue. “She is still Board, and Board does what it does.”
“How about you make a formal complaint against her?” Declan asks.
I frown. “Like what? To Whitmore?”
“It covers your arse and lets her know that you aren’t forgetting about this. It also shows the campus that as Apex, you aren’t afraid of the Board.”
“Does that not seem petty and childish?” I ask.
“Very,” Cormac says, “But Dec’s got a point.”
I look between them, then shake my head. “A formal complaint to a university that is half-built on corruption and the other half funded by men on that map feels a bit fucking naive.”
“It is not about justice,” Aidan says. “It is about record. Paper trail. Positioning.”
That, annoyingly, is better.
I stare at the floor for a second and think it through.
If I complain, I make it official that Roisin Brennan sanctioned a challenge against me in a space everyone now knows we control.
I force Whitmore to either ignore it, which tells me something, or acknowledge it, which tells me something else. Either way, I get movement.
“And what exactly do I say?” I ask.
Declan moves over to the window, back facing me as he stares across campus. “You say she abused her authority, created an unsafe situation, and allowed an unauthorised outsider access to a student event that turned violent.”
I look at him properly. “That is disgustingly good.”
“It’s why I ace English,” he says, almost distractedly.
“More than just a pretty face and a hot bod,” I mutter.
That gets his attention. He turns and gives me a half-smile that makes me forget all the shit for half a second.
Cormac shuts the door with his foot and comes further into the room. “So that’s the plan, then. You complain. Nicely. In official words. While we all know it’s really a threat.”
“I do like an administrative threat,” I say. “Very civilised.”
“Then do it first thing,” Aidan says. “Roisin won’t be expecting this. She’ll be expecting a confrontation at best, you ignoring her at worst.”
“I really wish I didn’t have to go to Whitmore. He is such a fucking creep,” I mutter, remembering how Siobhán looked, running away from his office.
“He will get what’s coming to him. For now, he is a useful idiot.”
“Useful idiot is still doing a lot of work in that sentence,” I say.
“True. Go in person, demand to see him and say it’s about a formal complaint about another student. Don’t mention the Board at all. Only mention Roisin when he asks who it was.”
“Got it,” I say with a nod. “Now, I’d like to shower, fuck off all these injuries with a magic wand and sleep.”
“You need food,” Declan says.
“So make me some and bring it up. I’m not leaving this room until morning,” I say with an ingratiating smile.
“If you think ordering me about will make me tell you to fuck off, know it will do the opposite.”
I groan. “You are impossible. Go now.”
Aidan herds them out with a look, and the door shuts behind the three of them.
Silence again.
I stand there for a beat, then strip out of my clothes and head for the en-suite before my body can remember one more bruise, and turn on the shower.
I rip off the bandage and examine the cut.
It’s pretty shallow, just looked worse than it was and has already scabbed over.
Fine. My hand still hurts, but I’m learning to ignore it.
Also, fine. My head is pounding, but that is more to do with the info dump than the headbutt and nothing a couple of painkillers won’t cure.
Stepping under the spray, hot water hits my skin, and I hiss. The cut on my forearm stings. My right hand throbs, but I’m so over this now.
By the time I get out, steam has fogged the mirror, my hair is wet down my back, and I feel marginally more human. I pull on an oversized tee and knickers and reach for the pain-relief gel under the sink. I spread a generous helping on my right hand.
There’s a knock at the door before it opens. “Food.”
He stands there holding a tray with a simple bowl of pasta, water, and painkillers.
I blink. “And you did it anyway.”
“Told you I would.”
“Thank you,” I say as he places it on the bedside cabinet and then backs out. “What?” I say with narrowed eyes when he doesn’t leave immediately.
“You promised me a blowie. You get tonight off. I want it tomorrow.”
“Leave now, and you’ll get more than my mouth around your cock,” I say with a sweet smile.
“I’ll hold you to that,” he says darkly and then finally leaves me alone.