Chapter 19 #2
Declan shuts off the tap and looks at me over his shoulder. “Nothing you can’t handle tomorrow.”
“That is such a dishonest fucking sentence.”
Cormac tosses the cloth into the sink. “She said not to tell you about her and your dad.”
The room stills.
I look at him. “Her and my dad, what?”
Aidan closes his eyes for one second, like he’s already exhausted by where this is going. Declan goes flat and unreadable. Cormac, because he has all the finesse of a brick through glass, just says, “They were together.”
For a beat, I don’t react. I genuinely think my brain refuses to process it as a form of self-defence.
“Together,” I repeat.
“She says they were in a relationship,” Declan says carefully. “That she loved him. That he loved her.”
I bark out a laugh that sounds wrong even to me. “Of course. Why the fuck not? Add it to the list. Mafia map. Secret grandfather. Assassination attempts. Board conspiracy. Receptionist shagging my father. Sure.”
“It wasn’t my favourite reveal either,” Aidan says.
“They were more than shagging, according to her,” Cormac states.
“Yeah, according to her. My dad is dead and can’t confirm or deny.”
“She said she cared about him, about you.”
“Fuck off,” I growl, slapping my hands on the table. “Whose side are you on?”
“Yours obviously, and don’t ever question that again, even rhetorically,” he snaps.
The force in his voice slams into me harder than the words.
I go still.
Cormac does too, like he hears it the second it leaves his mouth and knows he’s put a foot wrong, but he doesn’t take it back. He never backs off anything once he commits to it, and he shouldn’t. Not even this.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way, obviously.”
His stare pins to mine, dark and unflinching. “Then listen properly. We are on your side. Every fucking time. So when you ask that like you mean it, yeah, I’ll answer.”
The kitchen feels smaller suddenly. Meaner.
My skin is too tight from the bath, the fight, the vodka, the day from hell.
“I’m allowed to ask when people keep deciding what I can and can’t know.
I’m allowed to be fucked off when a receptionist who is maybe five years older than me at best and who may or may not have been fucking my father, suddenly gets treated like a protected witness. ”
“No one’s protecting her over you,” Declan says.
“It feels a lot like that.”
Aidan pushes his phone aside and fixes me with that cold, intent stare that usually means he is two seconds from saying something brutal and accurate. “You are not angry because of Siobhán.”
Bingo.
“You’re angry because your father kept another part of himself from you. Again.”
That hits. Clean. Nasty. True.
My mouth closes. The fight goes out of me so fast it feels humiliating. I look at the table because if I look at any of them right now, I might either start shouting again or do something worse.
Every answer I get about him turns into another locked door. Another stranger telling me they knew some version of him I never did. A careful father. A dangerous man. A Board member. A criminal. A planner. A liar. Someone’s lover.
Mine in public. Theirs in private.
“I’m tired,” I say eventually, and even I can hear how thin it sounds.
Cormac’s tone changes at once. “I’m sorry, Dervla. This is a lot.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Thank you for telling me. I need to know this information. It changes everything and nothing. What if she was the one who tossed my house looking for something my dad mentioned to her while they were… together? Or was she trying to cover something up? Don’t you see how this affects not just me, but the bigger picture?
You shouldn’t have held out, but I appreciate you telling me straight when I asked. ”
He nods stiffly.
Aidan and Declan look away like they’ve been naughty and caught out.
“Siobhán isn’t Whitmore’s bitch. I have a feeling it’s the other way around. She wasn’t just fucking my dad, but also, she was working for him,” I state boldly.
“How do you figure? And how does what we saw with her crying and running fit in?”
“She doesn’t call you up offering all this information unless she has balls of steel.
Even going to Declan was a calculated move, and not because he’s the least likely to reach through the phone and throttle her.
She calls up because she has facts, and Declan was the most likely to take her seriously and listen to what she has to say.
” I look at him. “She knew you’d hear the content before the presentation.
You don’t get distracted by tone. You strip things down and keep what matters. ”
Declan’s brows lift a fraction. “That almost sounded nice.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
Cormac snorts. Aidan stares at me with that same cold, assessing focus, except now there is interest under it. Like he wants to see how far I’ll take the line once I’ve found it.
“So,” Aidan says, “you think Siobhán is playing a deeper game.”
“I think she has been playing one for a while.” I tap a finger against the table, thinking it through as I say it. “This is going to sound awful. Please don’t judge me, but if I don’t say it out loud, it will eat at me.”
“We would never judge you,” Declan says.
I swallow and feel terrible even thinking it, but something just isn’t sitting right.
“I think she came onto Whitmore as a play, and he rejected her. She pretended to be offended, humiliated, even, and that’s what we saw.
Remember, we didn’t actually see anything.
And God only knows I hate to be the one to defend Whitmore, but… ”
“But…” Aidan murmurs.
“Maybe he was about to find the bug, and she improvised. I hate this,” I add under my breath.
“It’s gross, but you could be right,” Declan says. “Only one way to find out.”
“Ask her,” I say and turn on my heel.
“Tomorrow!” Cormac calls after me as I hit the stairs.
“Yeah,” I mutter, feeling like shit. If I’m wrong, I will throw up violently and get on my knees twice daily for penance. Maybe add some flogging to show how bad I feel.
But there is just this niggling feeling under my skin that this woman, this woman who was strong enough to love my dad, and probably know what she knows, isn’t some victim of Whitmore’s. There is more to this. I just have to figure out what.