Chapter 12
Declan
Cutting through the arcade behind the old theology wing, I go through the options. Whoever set this up wanted angles and choke points. Which means they either know the campus well or they’ve had help.
Both options irritate me.
Rain slicks the flagstones as I take the steps two at a time and hit the upper cloister that overlooks the quad from the west side.
From here, I get sightlines. Bell tower.
Chapel roof. Admin annex windows. Philosophy corridor.
My pulse is steady. Adrenaline sharpens everything down to edges and distances.
I stop behind a pillar and scan.
The students have cleared out of the open spaces now. Good. It gives the shooter less cover to work with. There’s less chaos for them to hide inside.
A movement catches high and right.
Third-floor window in the disused classics block. Just a flicker. Muzzle draw-back. Dark sleeve. Whoever it is knows enough to keep off the obvious rooftops and use depth inside the frame.
I raise my gun, sight in, and hold.
No shot.
Too much glass. Bad angle. If I miss, I lose him and gain nothing.
I cut left along the cloister and shoulder through the side door into the classics block. The corridor is quiet. My boots eat the distance. One classroom. Two. Fire door chained open. Good. The stairwell is ahead.
A shot cracks outside, muffled by stone. I take the stairs three at a time. My gun stays up while my other hand skims the rail as I move. I clear the first landing, then the second. On the third, I slow down.
I ease the door open half an inch and look through the gap at the third-floor corridor.
It stretches long, grey, and badly lit ahead of me.
One man stands at the far classroom doorway with a gun in both hands, angled toward the window.
He’s either a spotter or backup, wearing a dark jacket.
Another shape moves inside the room itself, hidden by the frame.
Two.
I don’t wait any longer. I step out and fire once. The bastard at the door drops before he can turn properly, taking a chest hit. He slams into the frame and folds in a heap. The second man shouts and fires blindly through the open doorway. The shot punches into the wall to my left.
I move fast and low, without hesitation.
He tries to come out of the classroom to clear the angle, but I hit him before he gets it.
My shoulder hits his chest and drives him back into the classroom door hard enough to jar the gun from his grip.
It clatters across the floor. He’s bigger than the first one, heavier through the middle, but slow on the recovery.
I take his throat with the heel of my hand, then put him through a desk.
He crashes into it, wood splintering under the impact. I don’t give him room to get clever. My fist goes into his face once, twice, then I grab the front of his jacket and slam the back of his skull into the wall. He goes slack.
I strip the knife from his belt on instinct, kick the dropped gun away, and turn for the window.
A shape shifts on the roofline opposite.
Not a shooter. Too low. Watching.
I move to the side of the frame and angle my head carefully. Black jacket. Hood up. Phone to ear. Gone before I can line up a shot.
Spotter.
I memorise the line of his shoulders, the height, the way he moves. Not enough to identify him. Enough to know he’s done this before.
The guy I put on the ground stirs, and I level my gun, shooting him before he can move. “Two down,” I mutter and move out.
The shooters are taken care of. The spotter is a problem, but probably not physically capable of shooting them from a distance. I pull out my phone and dial Aidan. It goes dead.
“Perfect,” I murmur and keep moving. They’ve been herded, that much is clear from the spotter. The question now is, where?
Thinking about it, I don’t need Aidan to answer to know where they’ve gone.
South is the only route that makes tactical sense if Dervla talked him out of staying where they were, and she absolutely fucking did.
I take the stairs back down at speed, cut through the classics corridor, and shove out the side door into the rain again. The cloister stones are slick under my boots. My shoulder clips the corner as I turn hard and head for the service lane behind the old lecture theatre.
Silence.
That is worse than if someone were shooting at me.
I slow for half a beat at the mouth of the lane and listen. Rainwater rattles down old drainpipes. Somewhere above me, a window slams. No shouting. No more gunfire. No students. The whole place feels held tight, like the campus itself is waiting to see who drops first.
Then I see the splintered service door hanging half off its frame.
I move.
Gun up, body close to the wall, I slip through into a maintenance room.
Buckets. Folding chairs. Shelving. One rear door is open.
Fresh scrape marks on the floor. They came through here.
Staring at the stairs, going up or down, I sift quickly through the options.
Aidan’s instinct would be up. Higher ground and not buried under the fucking university in a kill box with no way out. I take the stairs up.
The stairwell is narrow, concrete, and damp at the edges where rain has found its way in over the years.
My boots hit each step hard and controlled.
Gun up. Eyes moving. If they’ve been forced into a vertical route, the next move is either roof access or one of the old storage corridors that connect half the service spaces in this part of campus.
I hit the first landing and stop.
Voices. Above me. Muffled by a fire door. Male. One of them angry.
Not Aidan. Too rough.
I go still and listen.
A sharp thud. Something heavy hits a wall. Then Dervla’s voice, low and vicious enough to punch straight through my chest.
Good. Alive.
I move faster.
The second-floor door is ajar by an inch.
Light spills through the gap. I edge up to it and look through to a long corridor with exposed pipes overhead.
Dust sheets over stacked furniture. At the far end, Aidan is battling with a man twice his size, Cormac is going feral on some idiot dumb enough to attack him, and Dervla is pulling Henrietta out of another man’s stomach where she’s gutted him.
“Late to the party, Dec,” she says with a slow grin.
“Only because you’re incapable of waiting for me,” I shoot back.
Aidan drives his opponent into a bank of covered chairs hard enough to collapse the lot. Metal screeches. Dust bursts up. The big bastard gets a hand around Aidan’s throat for half a second before Aidan slides steel between the man’s ribs and twists once before yanking free.
Cormac is beyond conversation. He has one man on the ground and is hitting him with that cold, repetitive brutality that means the fight is already over and only the lesson remains.
Dervla wipes Henrietta on the dead man’s jacket with efficient disgust. There is blood on her cheek. Her eyes are lit in that dangerous, bright way that means the fear has already burned off, leaving rage behind.
Cormac finally stops hitting his man because there is nothing left to hit that matters. He gets to his feet, chest heaving once, and kicks the body over with his boot. “He’s done.”
“No kidding,” I say.
I move to the nearest door, clear the adjoining room, then the next. Empty. Old desks, rolled mats, broken projector. No movement. No voices. No second wave.
When I come back out, Aidan is already frisking the big bastard he put down. “Nothing. Pros.”
“No ID, nothing to tie them back to anyone. Makes sense,” I say.
“Board or mafia?” Dervla asks.
“Not mafia,” Aidan says, still crouched but looking around. “They don’t fuck about. If they wanted you somewhere, they’d come and take you. If they wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”
“So whoever this is wanted me alive, but here to be killed by these arseholes instead of shot on sight.”
“More painful, more of a story,” I point out.
“Or a warning,” Cormac says.
I look at the bodies again.
Three in here. Two up in classics. One spotter on a roofline who got away.
Too much organisation for a random hit. Too much choreography for panic. They wanted Dervla moved, contained, and handled somewhere quiet. The shots in the quad were theatre with intent behind them.
Dervla is very still now, standing in the middle of the corridor with Henrietta in one hand and blood drying on her skin. Adrenaline is holding her upright. I know the signs. The crash comes later.
“Are you hurt?” I ask her.
“The bigger question should be, did I add to my injuries?” she says with a snort. “The answer is no, not really.”
“Good,” I say, because if I let myself react to the image of her with a knife in a man’s gut any more than that, I’ll probably do something unhelpful and possessive in front of everyone.
Aidan gets to his feet and wipes his blade on a dust sheet. “We need to move. Campus security will eventually decide to grow a spine, and I have no interest in explaining this.”
Cormac looks at the dead man Dervla dropped. “Shame. I had notes.”
“Your notes are mostly punching,” she says.
“Effective notes.”
I holster my gun and cross to her. I drag my thumb over her bottom lip and then drop it. “You sure?”
Her eyes hit mine. Sharp. Wired. Alive. “I’m fine.”
I accept it. She wouldn’t tell me differently anyway.
Aidan checks the corridor once more, then jerks his chin toward the stairwell. “Down. Fast. We split routes once we hit the service passage.”
We move.
I go first. Dervla follows.
Aidan follows her. Cormac brings up the rear, which is exactly where he belongs when there might still be someone stupid enough to come after us.
We hit the maintenance room again and slip back into the service passage. The passage is empty.
“For once,” Dervla mutters.
“Don’t jinx it,” I say.
At the mouth of the lane, Aidan catches my arm for half a second. “You go right. Clear the cloister route.”
I nod once and break off. I cut through the side path, gun low but ready, and sweep the covered walk that runs behind theology. Empty. No bodies. No movement.
I signal clear.
They come through a second later, moving fast but not frantic. Dervla is in the middle again.
A siren starts somewhere near the front gate. I stop dead.
Turning, I look first at Aidan and then at Cormac. “Fuck.”
“What is it?” Dervla asks. “What?”