Chapter 21
Dervla
“Like fuck!” I practically roar, and then bite my tongue when Aidan’s hand lands over my mouth with a warning stare to shut the fuck up.
I pull back from his hand and lower my voice to something that could still strip paint. “They want to use me as leverage against my own grandfather.”
Siobhán nods again, her face tight. “That’s what I believe, yes.”
“And you know this because my dad told you.”
“Partly. And partly because I’ve been listening to Whitmore’s conversations for eight months.”
“Did Dad know?” I ask. “That they were planning this specifically?”
“He suspected,” she says. “He didn’t have proof. He was building toward it when—” She stops. Swallows. “When he died.”
The word lands the way it always does. Like a door slamming in a quiet house.
I stare at the surface of her desk and think about my father, methodical and careful, building a map of everyone who wanted to destroy him while simultaneously trying to keep me out of the blast radius.
And then someone removed him before he could finish it, and left me standing in the middle of it instead.
“Who killed him?” I ask.
Siobhán’s face crumples for one honest second before she gets it back under control. “I don’t know.”
“Best guess?” I grit out. “You must have an idea if you’ve been listening in on conversations all year.”
Siobhán is quiet for long enough that I start to think she won’t answer. She looks at the desk, then past it, then somewhere that has nothing to do with either of us.
Then she says, “Whitmore didn’t order it. He doesn’t have that kind of reach. He’s a facilitator. A door-opener. He lets things happen and takes his cut after.”
“Roisin?” Aidan asks.
“I doubt she pulled the trigger. She is mostly talk.” She gives me a slow smile of pride that makes me feel warm and fuzzy for half a second before I remember she could’ve been my stepmother and is only three years older than me.
I scowl back. “But the entire Board was in on it? Gallagher, too?”
“I don’t know about him. Cillian trusted him. He told me he did.”
“Then Gallagher is a loose end,” Aidan says, and I hear the shape of what he’s already planning behind it.
Siobhán looks at me the way people look at someone they’ve been trying to protect from a distance for a long time and have finally run out of ways to keep doing it.
“Your grandfather has enemies,” she says. “Old ones. People who’ve been trying to find a pressure point for years.”
“And my dad was the pressure point.”
“Your dad was the warning shot,” she says. “You’re the pressure point.”
The foyer is very quiet.
I think about the map on the hard drive. All those lines feeding upward into the unmarked tier. “There is something above the Board. We don’t know what, but something, Dad was working on it.”
She nods slowly. “The intermediaries between the Board and the… uhm…”
“You can say it,” Aidan pipes up. “The mafia.”
Siobhán’s mouth flattens. She doesn’t flinch at the word, just absorbs it the way someone does when they’ve been living with a truth long enough that it stops startling them.
“Between the Board and the family networks,” she says carefully, “there are people who provide cover. Infrastructure. Legitimacy. They make the money clean and the decisions deniable.”
“And they’re the ones who want Séamus ó Briain gone,” I say.
She nods.
“And that makes Séamus ó Briain, what, exactly? Head mafia guy?”
Siobhán gives me a look like I’ve just said the stupidest thing imaginable. Maybe I have. What do I know?
“Head mafia guy,” she mutters under her breath, then louder, “Yeah, you could say that. The ó Briain family have ruled Ireland for centuries. Longer. They have built a network so tight and so fierce it’s untouchable.”
“Until now.”
“It’s the ultimate play,” Aidan says, moving behind me, so I’m standing between him and the desk.
I frown at him over my shoulder and then swallow hard.
I’m exposed.
The word lands somewhere low and cold in my gut.
Exposed.
Not physically. Not yet. But in every other way that matters.
I’m standing in a foyer with fluorescent lighting and a reception desk between me and the truth, and the truth is that I’ve been a pawn since before I ever set foot on this campus.
Since before my father died. Since before I knew any of these names.
Since I was born, maybe.
“Say that again,” I say to Aidan, because I want to hear it out loud. I want to hear how it sounds when it isn’t just a thought rattling around my skull.
“You’re the lever they’re using to move Séamus ó Briain out of position,” he says. “Get to you, get to him. Force his hand. Once he’s exposed in a way where he has to choose…”
“They take him out.”
I stare at the far wall and think about the man in the immaculate coat, and something hard hits me. “It’s why she left,” I murmur.
“Who?” Aidan asks, but then his mouth twists. “Your mother. You think she knew she was a liability, and what? Pretended to be estranged?”
“Maybe. It means her marrying my dad was either planned or stupid. Or she didn’t know.” I watch Siobhán’s face as I talk about my mother.
Her expression is blank, although her lips have a prim line to them that I only notice because I’m looking.
“What?” I snap at her. “What do you know about my mother?”
“Nothing. Cillian didn’t talk about her.”
I smile widely and lean forward. “She was the love of his life. He was devastated when she left.”
She flinches. I feel bad for about a second before I remember that she was fucking my dad, probably in my home while I was away in Dublin. “That is true,” she says slowly. “You can say whatever you want to hurt me; I already know.”
The triumph vanishes as quickly as it came, and I feel like an utter bitch. But I don’t apologise. I won’t. If anything, it makes me double down. “Are you sure my dad wasn’t using you?”
She snorts and rolls her eyes, perhaps having expected that at some point in this conversation. “Yes, I’m sure. He had no reason. If he wanted intel on Whitmore or the Board, he had other means.” She pauses. “I know it’s difficult for you, but he loved me. I know he did. He asked me to marry him.”
“He was still married to my mother,” I grit out, which hurt more than I expected.
She shakes her head. “She signed the divorce papers two months before he died.”
That hits me like arctic water. “What?” I stammer.
The look she gives me is worse than victorious. It’s pity.
Pity.
From her. The woman who was apparently almost my stepmother.
I want to say something sharp and cutting, something that draws blood the way she just drew mine, but nothing comes. My mouth is open, and my brain has gone somewhere very quiet and very far away.
My mother signed divorce papers. Two months before he died.
He was free. Siobhán wasn’t some secret he was hiding out of shame or convenience. My father had a whole life planned, a whole future arranged, and he never once thought to mention any of it to me.
I close my mouth.
Aidan is very still behind me. He has the self-control not to say anything, which I thank God for right now.
“He was going to tell you,” Siobhán says. Not defensively. Just plainly, like she’s handing me something she knows will cut and doing it anyway because I deserve the truth more than she deserves the comfort of withholding it. “He kept saying he needed the right moment.”
“He never made the right moment,” I say, and my voice comes out flat and empty.
Siobhán doesn’t fill the silence. She just stares at me with those careful, sorry eyes, and I hate her for it more than I hate anything else she’s told me tonight.
I hate that she knew him. I hate that she loved him. I hate that he loved her back in ways I can measure now, divorce papers and a proposal and four years of something real, and I hate most of all that none of it is her fault.
I hate that I can see that clearly.
“Right,” I say.
“Dervla—”
“No.” I hold up one hand, and to her credit, she stops. “I’m not going to fall apart in your foyer. That’s not what this is. I just need a minute where nobody tells me anything else my father kept from me.”
She nods once. Says nothing. Good woman.
Aidan shifts behind me, not touching, just present. The warmth of him at my back is the only thing that feels real right now.
“Back to the matter of the Board seat. I want it,” I say to her. “How do I get it?”
“You take it.”
Those three simple words are a revelation and a conundrum at the same time. “Take it?”
“Take it.”
“Just like that?”
She nods. “You battered Roisin in a moment worthy of an Apex who beat Goliath in the gauntlet. You weren’t supposed to.”
Aidan hisses. “What?”
“He was supposed to stop her. She got past him.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I spit out.
She shakes her head and licks her lips. “The snakes were there for him to uhm…” She makes a shoving gesture with her hands.
“What?” I croak, feeling like I’m about to cry from the sheer horror of what she just described without words. “They tried to kill me?”
“Kill? No. Scare half to death with a phobia to put you in your place? Yes.”
“Those utter fucks,” Aidan growls. “I’m going to finish off what you started on Roisin, and then I’m going for the rest of them.”
“We digress,” Siobhán says. “The Board seat. It’s yours. Just take it.”
I swallow back the bile of sheer terror and place my hands on her desk. “How? By declaring it’s mine?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. That’s up to you to figure out. I’m just telling you that you are feared here, despite the fact that they still want to use you to get to Séamus ó Briain.”
“That is so contradictory, it’s fucked up,” I mutter.
“This entire place is fucked up. The wrong people have been running it.” She looks at Aidan, eyes narrowed. “I know your plans, too, by the way. Cillian and your dad go way back. Went,” she corrects, her face a mask of grief for half a second before she composes herself.
“You sit here all innocent with your terrified-of-Whitmore-expression, but you are a fucking sly fox in the hen house,” I grit out, admiration evident despite the fact that I want to hate her on principle.
She smiles. It’s smug.
I hate her.
No, I don’t.
Her expression shifts marginally, and she loses the smile. “Yes, your classes have changed, Miss Callaghan. This is your new timetable.” She taps a few keys, and the printer whirs to life as Whitmore comes down the stairs.
“Why?” I say, giving Whitmore a vicious glare as I snatch the paper he retrieves and holds out to me between two fingers like it’s contaminated.
“Ms Brennan has a pending restraining order against you. It is in St. Augustine’s best interest to remove you from her classes.”
“Her classes,” I growl.
“She was here first, and she is a Board member,” Whitmore says with enough smug to out-smug Jeremy Clarkson on a good day.
“About that,” I say, lifting my chin, but Siobhán’s imperceptible headshake stops me.
It’s not the time or the place. Declaring it in front of Whitmore and the receptionist is a stupid, knee-jerk move. It has to be more powerful than that.
“Yes, Miss Callaghan?” Whitmore prompts when I don’t continue.
“I will be filing a restraining order against Roisin Brennan,” I improvise, using her move. “Make sure she stays out of my way.”
I glare at him, ignore Siobhán completely and spin on my heel, marching out of the Admin building with Aidan close enough to stifle me.