Chapter 14
Aidan
None of this actually surprises me because it fits neatly. It’s logical, methodical, and precisely the kind of thing a man in his position would do to protect his granddaughter in the only way he knows how. By making her untouchable.
“He’d need the Board seat first,” I say, more to keep her thinking than because she needs the help. “It was your dad’s. It’s a follow-in-his-footsteps type of thing. I bet Grandad was a Board member at one point as well. We should see if he ever went here.”
“The way he walked onto the campus before, I’d say that’s a given,” Dervla says. She doesn’t look horrified, or angry, or scared. She looks interested.
“Are you considering this?” I ask her flat-out.
“Yes,” she gives me a blunt reply that I appreciate. “For reasons that I’m not really sure about, but have to do with my dad, my family name, the fact that I’m done being pushed around.”
“All sounds like good reasons to me,” Cormac mutters.
“He had power,” she says, her eyes on me. “Does your dad have that kind of power?”
I smirk. “That’s telling tales, but sort of. He cannot order CTU to stand down and have them comply, though. That’s next fucking level.”
“The bigger question should be,” Declan says. “Did your dad have that kind of power? He was here on the Board and overruled on many issues. If he had immense power, wouldn’t he have just overridden them?”
“It would make more sense, but maybe he was playing them? Playing the long game?” I say, but I’m not sure I believe it. At least not entirely.
“For what purpose?” Dervla asks.
“Fuck knows. We don’t know fuck all, really,” I say with a smile.
She giggles. “No shit.” Then she goes serious again. “Dervla Callaghan, mafia boss. It’s absurd.”
“It would suit you,” I say.
Her eyes cut to mine, sharp and searching, as if she is trying to work out whether I’m taking the piss. I’m not.
“Hear me out,” I say, because now that the thought is in the room, I can already see the shape of it.
“You already have the name. You have the instinct. You have the appetite when someone pushes you too far. Half of leadership is whether people believe you’ll follow through.
They believe that about you. They’ve seen you handle your shit. ”
Cormac snorts. “We could do better in that area. Everything has been reactive.”
“Ouch,” Dervla mutters, but Cormac has a point. She beat Eoin because she had Henrietta, and the only reason she had Henrietta was because Eoin pulled a knife first. She would’ve stuck to the rules. Been clean.
Dervla huffs a laugh, but it is thin around the edges. “You’re all disturbingly quick to imagine me running organised crime.”
“Everything worthwhile in this country is run by criminals with good tailoring.”
“That is one of the bleakest things you’ve ever said,” Declan replies.
“And yet not inaccurate.”
Dervla is wound too tight to sit. I know the feeling. My skin still feels too small after the quad, the passage, the guns, the cuffs. The fact that someone tried to package us up as terrorists and call it tidy makes me want to burn this campus to the foundations and salt the fucking ground after.
Instead, I move.
I cross the kitchen, take Dervla by the wrist, and pull her into me.
She looks up at me. “What?” she asks.
“If you’re going to consider it,” I say, “do it with your eyes open. Not because some old bastard with your mother’s eyes decides it’s your destiny. Not because your father built a map and died dramatically. Because it serves you.”
Her expression changes by degrees. “And how exactly does becoming a mafia boss serve me?” she asks. “If we are even right about all of this?”
Cormac answers before I can. “Makes it a lot harder for people to shoot at you in broad daylight.”
Declan drags a hand over his jaw. “It also paints a bigger target on her back.”
“She already has the target,” I say. “That ship sailed when her father died, she came here, took Apex, and nearly slit Brennan’s throat in front of half the university.”
“But it’s still reactive,” Cormac presses.
“Yes. You need to do something proactive.” My gaze bores into hers. I’m trying to get her to come to this on her own.
“Like what? Start a fist fight with Roisin?”
The left side of my mouth curves up. “Yes. Exactly that. Take the power from her to you.”
“Whitmore will kill me.”
“He can try,” Cormac snarls. “He is a worm, and worms get crushed.”
Dervla’s face does something I haven’t seen before. Not fear. Not anger. Something colder and more deliberate, like a calculation she’s been running for a while and has just arrived at the answer.
“What does that actually look like?” she asks. “Taking the power from Roisin to me. Concretely.”
“It looks like you stop waiting for her to make a move,” I say. “You make one.”
“The formal complaint was a move.”
“A defensive one. Paperwork. I mean something she can’t file away or ignore.”
Dervla pulls back from me and moves to the counter. She puts both hands flat on it and stares at the wall. She works through it. She does this, processes out loud by going silent, which is one of the more infuriating things about her and also one of the things that makes her genuinely dangerous.
“She’s a Board member,” she says finally. “Which means she answers to the Board. Which means if I go to the Board directly—”
“They protect their own,” Declan says.
“Yes. But they also protect the institution. They will have to choose between a sitting board member and the one who wants the vacant seat. If they know more about my life than I do, I’m pretty sure they’re taking my side.
If I pick a physical fight with Roisin in the middle of the quad, where everyone can see me be proactive, it’s forcing them to choose. ”
“And if they choose her?” Declan says, playing Devil’s Advocate.
“Then I will enjoy burning this fucking corrupt place to the ground with them all inside it.”
“Fuck, I’m turned on right now,” I murmur, pushing her hair back from her face. I grip her chin and bruise her lips when I crush mine to them.
She kisses me back hard, her fingers curling into the front of my shirt, and for one moment, everything that happened this morning gets compressed into heat and pressure and the soft sound she makes against my mouth.
I push her backwards into the hallway. She lets me.
She breaks the kiss and takes my hand, leading me up the stairs.
The time for talking, the time for thinking is parked. Declan and Cormac follow us.
I grip her hand tighter as we climb the stairs, my blood still thrumming from the chaos outside, but now it’s twisting into something sharper, hungrier.
Dervla glances back at me, her eyes dark with that wild edge she gets when the world tries to break her, and she decides to break it back instead.
She’s ours in this moment, and the thought of anyone thinking they could take her from us makes me want to claim her until she can’t remember their names.
We hit the upstairs hallway, and she shoves open her bedroom door without a word, pulling me inside.
Declan and Cormac crowd in behind, the door slamming shut like a punctuation mark on the bullshit we just survived.
I don’t waste time. I spin her around and back her against the wall, my body pinning hers, one hand sliding up her throat to tilt her chin.
“You think you can just drag us up here and call the shots?” I murmur, my thumb pressing just enough to feel her pulse jump under my touch. It’s a question, but we both know it’s not. She’s the one who started this, but I’ll be the one who finishes it.
Her lips curve, defiant as ever. “Try stopping me.”
I crush my mouth to hers again, harder this time.
She bites my lower lip, drawing a low growl from my chest, and I retaliate by yanking her top up and over her head, tossing it aside, before I get her bra undone.
Her skin is flushed, marked with the faint bruises from earlier fights, but she doesn’t flinch when my hands roam over them. I’m possessive, mapping every inch.
Declan moves in from her left. He kneels and removes her boots before his fingers hook into the waistband of her leggings, peeling them and her knickers down slowly, deliberately, while Cormac circles to her right, his presence a heavy shadow.
She arches into my touch as Declan’s mouth trails hot kisses along her inner thigh, working his way up.
Cormac grabs a fistful of her hair, tilting her head back to expose her neck, and sinks his teeth into the spot just below her ear—hard enough to mark, but not break skin. Yet.
“Fuck,” she gasps, her hands scrambling for purchase, one fisting in my shirt, the other reaching for Cormac’s arm.
Her eyes flutter shut for a second before snapping open again, locking on mine.
She’s unravelling, but she’s fighting it, always fighting, and that resistance only makes me want to shatter her more.
I slide my hand down her body, over the curve of her breast, pinching her nipple until she hisses, then lower, dipping between her legs where she’s already wet and ready.
My fingers tease her clit in slow circles, building the pressure while Declan spreads her thighs wider, his tongue replacing his lips on her skin.
Cormac releases her hair and strips off his shirt. “On the bed,” he orders, his voice rough.