Chapter 22
Cormac
All is quiet, which is suspicious enough in itself. I stand at the corner of the Admin building, back against the stone, and watch the quad settle into evening quiet. No students. No lingering crowds. Just damp flagstones and the last of the daylight going grey at the edges.
Too quiet.
After a day like this, quiet is not peace. It is preparation.
I move slowly around the perimeter, keeping to the shadows where the old stone swallows the light.
The far side of the building is lit up against the growing dark.
The staff will be here for a while yet. The academic wings are quiet.
The chapel is locked. The service lane behind the lecture theatre is empty, which I check twice because that is where the morning nearly killed us, and I do not intend to repeat the experience.
My phone vibrates once. Declan. Two words.
She’s out.
I type back. On my way.
I cut across the rear path and come around the far side of the chapel wall, giving the quad a wide berth. The light is almost gone now. The kind of dark that arrives fast in late autumn and sits heavy. I keep my pace even, hands loose, and watch every doorway I pass.
A figure steps out of the darkness, and my hand immediately goes to the gun shoved down my pants at the back. “Move closer, and I’ll finish what she started,” I murmur.
Roisin steps into the light, and I take in the damage. Her nose is a mess. Two black eyes already blooming. Her left arm is strapped against her chest in a sling. She looks like she got hit by a bus, and the bus was Dervla Callaghan.
She still manages to look superior about it.
“Put it away before you hurt yourself.” She moves out of the doorway and stops a few feet from me, keeping her distance like she’s smart enough to know what I’ll do if she closes it.
Her face is controlled, despite everything.
Despite the bruises and the blood. Despite the fact that half this campus watched her get put on the ground not that long ago.
I study her for a long moment. The arrogance is gone. Not the pride, that’s bone-deep in women like her, but the performance of it. She’s not posturing. She’s not calculating an angle. She looks like someone who has come to say something she doesn’t want to say.
I keep my hand where it is.
“What do you want, Roisin?”
She looks past me for a second, scanning the quad, the paths, the chapel wall. Making sure we’re alone. That alone tells me this isn’t an ambush. If she wanted one, she’d have brought people. She came here without them.
“To talk,” she says.
“Talk, then.”
“I am not her enemy.”
“No? Sure as shit looked like it when you set your rapey brother on her.”
She rolls her eyes. “He was never going to rape her. It was a test. Eoin wouldn’t know how to rape a woman if she instructed him on how.”
I snort because, despite being a seriously gross admission, it gives me a character description of Eoin that I sorely needed to get through the next day without killing him.
“What was it, then?” I ask. “Because from where I was standing, it looked like you sent an armed man into a room with her and told him to have at it.”
“A dominance play. She was, not failing exactly, but not showing enough of her Apex status.”
“She was getting used to what it meant—”
“She needs to toughen up.”
“Or what?” I ask, moving closer, the threat of my hand on the gun still between us.
“Or she is going to get eaten alive. She was never meant to make it out of the gauntlet as Apex. She did against the odds and then squandered it for days before she pulled her big girl knickers up. Kind of. Fighting me? That did it. She has the respect—the fear—she needs now to do what she should’ve fucking done on day two. ”
“Which is?”
“Claim the Board seat.”
“That’s what she’s trying to do.”
“She needs to try harder. In fact, fuck trying. She needs to do.”
“How?” I ask because while I’m here…
“She needs to get up in front of the entire university and all its staff and take it.”
I frown. “Like what? Just say ‘it’s mine’?”
“Exactly like that. How the fuck do you think I got it? I’m twenty-two years old.
The rest of them are old codgers. I manoeuvred myself exactly where I wanted.
She needs to do the same. I tried to get her to accept my endorsement.
She refused. We did this the hard way because that is what it is going to take for her to survive what’s coming. ”
“And what’s coming, Roisin?”
“War,” she says and then steps back as we hear voices. She vanishes into the shadows of the building, and I let her go. If Dervla sees her now, she will gut her and somehow, as fucked up as this is, I believe Roisin. She’s trying to help.
“Fucking hell,” I grit out, pissed off I’m in this position. Trying to get Dervla to accept this is going to be, probably, the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Dervla and Aidan round the corner as Declan catches up.
“All quiet?” Dervla asks me.
“More or less,” I say, because this is not the moment. She’s white around the edges, and not from the cold. Whatever happened in there with Siobhán has stripped something out of her that I don’t yet have a name for.
I fall into step beside her. Aidan takes the other side. Declan drops in behind, and we cut across the darkening quad in a loose formation that has become second nature in the space of days.
“New timetable,” Dervla says, holding up a sheet of paper without looking at it. “Roisin filed a restraining order.”
“That’s it? That’s all you got?”
“No, I got plenty,” she grits out, and then there’s no stopping her. She gets it all out, and I’m glad I didn’t distract her by telling her about Roisin yet. She needed to vent. On the plus side, it sounds like Roisin’s story lines up. The end being war.
“So basically, my grandfather is about to discover the lengths people will go to take him out,” she finishes off as we walk into the house. “Cormac? You still with me?”
“Yeah,” I say, meeting her eyes. “I’m with you.”
She drops onto the sofa in the living room and stares at the ceiling. The house is quiet around us. The kind of quiet that feels dangerous rather than safe. Declan and Aidan fall into chairs around her.
I stay standing in the middle of the sitting room and think about Roisin in the shadows of the chapel wall.
War.
I believe her. That’s the part I cannot shake.
I’ve spent enough time around people who say things to manipulate and people who say things because they’ve run out of other options, and Roisin, battered and stripped of her performance, was the second kind.
I don’t like it. I don’t trust it. But I believe it.
Dervla has one arm over her eyes now. She looks like she’s holding herself together through sheer stubbornness, which is exactly what she’s doing.
“I have something to say, and you’re not going to like it. Let me get through it without interrupting me, trying to cut my heart out or batter my face into the ground, okay?”
That gets everyone’s attention.
Dervla sits up straighter, her serious face on, and gives me the room.
“Roisin came up to me before you arrived. We talked.”
Aidan’s head lifts slowly. Declan looks like he’s deciding whether to be annoyed or impressed that I managed to keep that to myself for three minutes. Dervla just stares at me. No shouting yet. That’s almost worse.
But to everyone’s credit, no one interrupts me like I asked.
“She said she’s not your enemy and that she tried to get you to accept her endorsement, but we had to do this the hard way.
She says you were failing at being Apex, and that’s why she set Eoin on you—who is totally harmless, by the way—so you could beat him up publicly.
The fact that you fought her is good. This is what she needed you to do to get the Board seat.
She said you have to claim it in front of the university and staff.
She said you need it because war is coming. ”
Silence.
Dervla chews the inside of her lip and doesn’t look as shocked as I thought she’d be. “Anything else?”
“She said this method is what she did. She wanted the vacant seat and fought her way to the top for it. She manoeuvred herself where she wanted to be. What you said about the Board wanting you to fail the gauntlet? I don’t think she was part of that. She is…helping.”
Dervla clenches her jaw tightly and inhales deeply. She doesn’t say anything. Slowly, she releases her breath and rests her elbows on her knees. “Do you believe her? Honestly? You honestly can stand there and say you read her, and you believe her?”
“Yes.” There is no hesitation, and she sees it.
“Fuck,” she mutters and sits back. “Now I feel bad for smashing her face in.”
“Don’t,” I say, moving closer. “She was willing to sacrifice herself for you.”
“That’s dramatic,” she grumbles.
“It’s true. She took the hit so you could make this claim. She said you should’ve done it on day two instead of fucking about.”
“Why didn’t she just tell me all of this?”
I shrug. “Who knows? My best guess is she’s working against the rest of the Board and Whitmore, but didn’t want to seem like she was.”
“To what end?”
“To get you where you need to be.”
“Oh, fuck right off,” she snaps and stands up. “Everyone just fuck off! This day has been shit, and I just need to be alone.”
“We aren’t going anywhere,” Aidan calls after her when she storms out. “But we won’t disturb you either,” he adds when she turns around and hisses at him like a mad snake. She stomps up the stairs, and we hear her bedroom door slam shut.
“Well, that went well,” Declan mutters.
“She needed to know,” I say and fall back to the space she vacated.
“This just got even more fucked up. Why would Roisin let herself get battered by Dervla so she could claim this seat? What possible motive has she got?” Aidan asks.
“We need a Ouija board,” I mutter.
“Why?” Declan asks.
“So we can bring Cillian back from the dead to ask him what the fuck is going on.”
“That would make our lives too easy,” Declan says with a sigh.
“Unfortunately, you are right. Do you think we need to warn ó Briain?” I ask suddenly.
Aidan blinks slowly. I can tell the question pisses him off, which tells me he has been thinking about it as well.
“Think he probably knows already,” Declan says. “And is coming for her anyway.”
“Then we have to be what stands between her, him and this war that seems to be on the horizon,” Aidan says.
“Always,” I reply. “Always.”