Chapter 29 Dervla
Dervla
Ichew the toast because if I open my mouth too early, I might say something that gets all of us shot before coffee.
Séamus drinks black coffee like he’s conducting a military briefing.
Alanna cuts into her poached eggs like she’s performing a procedure.
Across from me, Declan is demolishing a plate of food as if violence requires fuelling.
Aidan looks offensively composed. Cormac is watchful in that quiet way of his that somehow feels louder than everyone else.
I set my cup down. “Right. Since we’re all pretending this is a civil breakfast and not a hostage negotiation with jam, let’s skip ahead.”
Alanna dabs her mouth with a napkin. “Always charming.”
“I do my best.”
Séamus regards me over his cup. “You have terms.”
Not a question. Of course not. Men like him don’t ask. They announce.
I sit back. “I have one.”
“Go on.”
“The hard drive gets copied in front of me before you take the original.”
Silence.
Not shocked silence. Measured silence. Evaluating. Calculating. Deciding whether I’ve overreached or finally said something intelligent. I’m getting very tired of rooms doing that at me.
Alanna’s eyes narrow a touch. “Sensibly paranoid.”
“I come by it honestly.”
Séamus sets his cup down with precise care. “You intend to keep a copy for yourself.”
“Yes.”
“And what would you do with it?”
“Sleep better,” I say. “Marginally.”
Declan makes a quiet sound into his coffee that might be a laugh.
Séamus ignores him. “That is not an answer.”
“It is the only one you’re getting.”
Alanna looks almost pleased by that. Or maybe I’m hallucinating from stress and caffeine. Hard to say.
Séamus folds his hands on the table. “If I agree, the copy remains sealed unless circumstances require otherwise.”
“No.”
His eyes sharpen. “No?”
“No sealed copy under your control. No copy that magically disappears into a vault I never see again. I want a copy in my possession.”
Aidan goes very still beside me. Cormac does too. Not because they disagree. Because they know I’ve just pushed.
Alanna tilts her head. “You are negotiating as if you have leverage.”
“I do. I’m the one who has it.”
The room goes quiet enough that I can hear a clock ticking somewhere.
Séamus studies me for a long moment. I force myself not to fill the silence.
If he wants a staring contest before breakfast, I can do that all day.
I’ve been having those since I was old enough to realise adults lie with their faces first and their mouths second.
Eventually, he says, “Very well.”
Nobody moves.
I blink once because I wasn’t expecting that to land so cleanly.
Alanna’s brows lift a fraction. Aidan turns his head slightly toward Séamus. Declan pauses with his fork halfway to his mouth. Cormac does not react at all, which means he’s reacting a lot.
“You agree?” I ask.
“I said I did.”
“Just like that?”
His expression stays maddeningly even. “You asked for something reasonable. I am not in the habit of refusing reason when it serves me.”
I narrow my eyes. “That almost sounds healthy.”
“It isn’t,” Alanna says dryly.
I glance at her. “Good. I was worried for a second.”
Séamus rises from his chair. “Finish your breakfast. Then come to the study.”
I don’t like that. Not because he agreed. Because he agreed too easily. Men like him don’t hand over concessions unless they’ve already priced in the cost.
“What’s the catch?” I ask.
He looks at me as though I’ve done something mildly respectable. “You bring your men if you like. One copy is made. One remains with me. One remains with you. And once the transfer is complete, you leave this house under escort and do not deviate from the route I set.”
He leaves before I can answer, which is probably deliberate. Harder to argue with a man who’s already decided the conversation is over.
I stare at the doorway after he’s gone.
“See?” I mutter. “That. That is exactly the sort of shit I hate.”
Alanna sips her coffee. “You hate authority.”
“I hate theatrical authority. Regular authority is bad enough.”
“Those are the same thing when exercised well.”
Cormac’s knee brushes mine under the table. Not soothing. Just there. Grounding. Aidan reaches for the coffee pot and tops up my cup without asking. Declan finally puts the forkful in his mouth like he postponed eating just to witness the exchange properly.
“Well,” he says after he swallows. “Could’ve gone worse.”
I look at him. “How?”
“He could have said no.”
“He still might murder us later.”
Declan shrugs. “Yeah, but not before breakfast apparently.”
Alanna sets her cup down. “If you insist on framing every interaction with your grandfather as an impending execution, you will miss the more immediate risks.”
I turn to her. “Which are?”
“You.”
I blink. “Helpful.”
“No, accurate. You push at people to discover where the edges are. That instinct is useful. It is also dangerous around men who are accustomed to obedience as a birthright.”
“Then he’ll have a rough day.”
Her eyes sharpen with something almost like approval. “Precisely. Just make sure it is only rough for him.”
I love her when she makes sense.
I rip another piece off the toast and eat it, mostly so I don’t say something that will make this a rough day for me. Across from me, Declan looks entirely too entertained with himself.
“Don’t enjoy this too much,” I tell him.
“Oh, I’m enjoying all of it,” he says. “You negotiating with your grandfather over breakfast like he’s a builder who’s quoted too high. Alanna looking at you like she’s deciding whether to adopt you properly. Aidan trying not to visibly plan a coup. It’s a good morning.”
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
Unfortunately, he says it with the confidence of a man who is probably right, which is deeply irritating.
I drain the rest of my coffee and stand. “If I stay here much longer, I’m going to start throwing cutlery.”
Cormac gets up at once. Aidan follows. Declan wipes his mouth with a napkin and rises more slowly, like he’s in no rush to walk into another fresh hell but will do it anyway.
Alanna watches me over steepled fingers. “A small note before you go.”
I pause. “That phrasing never leads anywhere pleasant.”
“Probably not.” Her expression stays cool. “Once this is done, you are not to mistake information for safety. The copy you keep will make you more dangerous, not less vulnerable.”
I shove my hands into my pockets. “I know it’s dangerous, and I’m doing it anyway.”
Something shifts in her face then. Not softness exactly. Recognition, maybe. Alanna nods once. “Good. Then at least you are not being stupid in the most common way.”
“That is possibly the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“It isn’t nice. It’s efficient.”
“Colthurst family motto?”
“Near enough.”
Declan snorts. I roll my eyes and head for the door before she can decide to gift me with any more ancestral wisdom. The guys fall in around me automatically.
The corridor outside feels colder than the dining room, though that might just be me coming down from the sharp edge of the breakfast table. Emily is waiting at the far end again, hands clasped in front of her like she was born in that exact pose.
“Study,” she says.
We follow her through two halls, past more portraits full of dead-eyed aristocrats with hidden cameras and polished wood that probably has a body count. The study door is already open when we reach it.
Séamus stands by the desk with a laptop open in front of him. Another one sits beside it, shut. Emily steps aside, and I walk in like I’m entering a courtroom where the judge also owns private burial land.
The study is warmer than the corridor, darker too. Bookshelves climb to the ceiling. Heavy curtains frame long windows washed pale by the morning mist. The desk is vast and old and probably witnessed three generations of men deciding who got ruined next.
Séamus stands behind it, jacket gone, silver at his temples catching the low light. It should make him look less intimidating. It doesn’t. It just makes him look like he’s settled in for work.
On the desk, beside the two laptops, sits a small external drive dock and a sealed pack of blank storage devices.
I stop two steps in. “Prepared.”
“I dislike wasting time,” he says.
“Shocking trait for a criminal patriarch.”
His eyes rest on me for a beat, unreadable. “Do you have it?”
I take the hard drive out of my pocket and hold it in my palm without handing it over. “Tell me exactly what happens.”
Aidan shifts at my side. Declan goes to the wall near the door and plants himself there like he intends to become part of the architecture until needed. Cormac stays close enough to feel like a threat in human form.
Séamus doesn’t answer immediately. He rests one hand on the desk and looks at the hard drive as if it were both familiar and irritating.
“It is connected to this machine,” he says, indicating the open laptop. “The contents are copied to an encrypted drive. Then it is disconnected. You watch the process from beginning to end.”
“And the original?”
“Comes with me.”
I keep hold of it. “No one else touches it.”
A flicker of something passes through his expression. Approval, maybe. Or annoyance that I’m forcing him to say it all out loud. “I’m going to have to hand it to my tech guy.”
“Tech guy,” I mutter. It’s fair. Of course he has a tech guy. I would too if I knew where to find one. “And if I decide halfway through that I don’t like something?”
“If you decide you don’t like something, the copy stops. If you attempt to leave with the original, we will have a different conversation.”
“Meaning what?” I ask.
“Meaning that hard drive stays with me, one way or another.”
I smile without humour. “That sounded almost civil right up until the threat.”
“It is civil,” Séamus says. “You are mistaking clarity for hostility.”
“No, I’m very good at hostility. This is that.”
Aidan steps closer to the desk. “Then let’s avoid the different conversation.”
Séamus’s eyes flick to him. “Sensibly said. Your dad raised a leader.”
I grimace at both Séamus and Aidan. I hate that he is right. I hate more that I can feel the room tightening around the sentence. One way or another. Not theatrical. Not loud. Just final.
I place the drive on the desk but keep two fingers on it. “Your tech guy does it in here. In front of me. No taking it out of the room. No sealed doors. No magical vanishing acts.”
“That was already the arrangement.”
“No. The arrangement was vague. I’m correcting it.”
For a second, I think he might push back just because I’ve pushed first.
Instead, he presses a button on the intercom built into the desk. “Brendan. Study.”
The reply crackles back at once. “Yes, sir.”
He releases the button and looks at me. “Satisfied?”
“Not remotely.”
“Good. Complacency would be a concern.”
Declan makes a low sound from the wall. Might be a laugh. Might be a warning.
A knock lands once, and the door opens before anyone answers it.
Brendan is in his thirties, maybe, with a neat beard, jeans and a dark jumper.
He has the tired eyes of a man who lives in front of screens and knows better than to ask why a room full of armed people are standing around a desk before nine in the morning.
He takes in me, the guys, Séamus, the drive on the desk.
Cormac’s presence at my side sharpens. “Walk us through it,” he says to Brendan.
Brendan nods once and moves to the desk without reaching for anything yet. “External source goes into the dock. I mount it read-only first, so nothing writes to the original. Then I make a mirror copy to the encrypted drive. Then I verify file integrity. Then I eject both.”
I stare at him. “Read-only.”
“Yes.”
“You can prove that?”
He points at the screen. “I can show you the mount settings before I start.”
“Do that.”
He doesn’t seem offended. Good. He opens a window, types commands, and turns the laptop fractionally towards me.
Lines of code. Terminal windows. Settings I mostly don’t understand, except for the parts he points out with patient, technical know-how.
“Mounted read-only here,” Brendan says. “See? No write permissions to source. The destination is this encrypted SSD. New key generated for the copy.”
“Okay,” I say with a nod and let him get to work.
Brendan slides the original into the dock with careful fingers, like he understands he is one dropped inch away from getting shot by somebody in this room.
The screen changes. Directories populate. A long list of files, folders, timestamps.
It is real in a way it was not under my mattress or shoved down my bra.
Real in a way it was not when everyone spoke about it like mythology.
Dad built this. Dad touched these files.
Dad named these folders. Dad sat somewhere, probably late at night, with a cup of tea gone cold beside him, and made this into a weapon.
The progress bar appears and starts to crawl.
No one speaks for a full ten seconds. It feels longer.
I move closer to the desk and stare at the filenames as they flick past. Most of it means nothing to me at first. Strings of letters. Dates. File sizes. Abbreviations that look like Dad made them for himself and no one else.
The progress bar inches forward.
Twenty-one per cent.
I swallow. “How big is this thing?”
Brendan looks up. “Fucking big.”
“Is that the technical term?”
“Yes.” He looks back down.
“Okay,” I mutter. “Fun sponge.”
That gets a snort out of Cormac.
We stand around like spare parts as the bar creeps towards one hundred, and eventually it’s done. Brendan unmounts the hard drive and hands it to Séamus. Then he hands the copy to me.
“Thanks,” I mutter, shoving it in my pocket.
Brendan starts packing away cables with efficient little movements that tell me he wants out of this room before anyone changes their mind and shoots him for being competent. He fucks off, and that’s it.
“My men will escort you back to St. Augustine’s,” Séamus says. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Why?”
“I want to know what happens when you claim that seat.” His smile is sinister in a way that is also grandfatherly, filled with pride. Sinister pride.
“Right,” I say and turn to leave, with the guys at my back.