Chapter 30 Declan
Declan
“By the way,” Séamus says as we head out the door. “You did okay for a bunch of meddling kids.”
I freeze and lock gazes with Dervla, whose eyes widen.
I turn back to him. “You did not just say that.”
He smirks and turns to his laptop.
Snickering slightly, I follow Dervla out of the study where we meet Alanna near the front door.
Dervla pauses. She looks mildly shocked when Alanna reaches out to cup her cheek. “When you find out who killed your father, make them pay.”
“Oh, I will,” Dervla grits out.
“I’m proud of you, Dervla. You are a true Colthurst.”
“And Callaghan,” she murmurs.
“And ó Briain,” Séamus calls from the study.
“Right,” she grits out.
Alanna steps back and gives me an appraising stare. Her eyes travel over me like she’s checking for defects in workmanship.
“What?” I ask.
“You’ll do,” she says.
I bark out a laugh before I can stop it. “Is that the Colthurst seal of approval?”
“It is more than most people get.”
“I’m honoured, then.”
Dervla looks between us like she’s too tired to deal with whatever strange elderly-warlord ritual this is. “If everyone is done assessing my men like livestock, I’d quite like to leave the murder palace.”
Alanna’s mouth tilts faintly. “Still your father’s daughter.”
“Yeah,” Dervla says, and this time it lands differently. Heavier. Realer. “I know.”
That wipes whatever else Alanna might have said right off the board. She studies Dervla for one second, then nods once and steps aside.
Emily opens the front door. Cold air knifes into the hall.
Outside, the morning has turned brighter without becoming any less grim. Mist hangs low over the gravel sweep. Two black SUVs wait with engines running. One in front of Aidan’s car and one at the rear, sandwiching it in. Armed men stand by them in dark coats, too still, too neat.
Dervla stops on the top step.
I stop with her.
“What now?” I ask quietly.
She stares at the cars. “Now I go back to St. Augustine’s and announce to an entire university that I’m taking a Board seat.”
Cormac comes up on her other side. Aidan says nothing behind us, which usually means his mind is moving too fast for speech.
I look at the line of guards, the iron gates beyond them, the wet gravel, the old house at our backs like a threat with chandeliers. “You say it like you’re announcing a weather change.”
Dervla lets out a breath that could be a laugh if it wasn’t so sharp. “What else is there to say?”
Plenty, probably. None of it useful.
One of Séamus’s men steps forward and opens the rear door of Aidan’s car for her. “Miss Callaghan.”
She snorts once and gets into the back seat. I slide in beside her before anyone can suggest a different arrangement. Cormac takes the passenger seat, and Aidan gets behind the wheel.
“Don’t try anything,” one of the men says to him. “You stay between us. If you try to duck out, we will find you.”
“I have no doubt,” he says with a smile that could strip paint. Too bad it doesn’t work on the guard.
The convoy rolls out through the gates like we’re transporting a head of state.
I watch the estate disappear in the side mirror until the iron gates are swallowed by mist and hedges.
The escort keeps close. Too close. Front SUV steady.
The rear SUV is tighter than I like. Aidan drives with both hands on the wheel and enough contained aggression to power the fucking car without petrol.
Cormac sits in the passenger seat with that heavy stillness he gets when he is one bad sentence away from becoming a crime scene.
Dervla sits beside me in the back, one knee bouncing. She has her arms folded around herself, not from the cold. From pressure. She stares out the window like she can already see St. Augustine’s waiting with its pretty stone buildings and rotten insides.
“You all right?” I ask.
She gives me a look. “No. Obviously.”
“Good. Hate to think this was becoming routine.”
That gets the ghost of a sound out of her. Not a laugh. Close enough.
We hit the road, and Aidan sticks close to the escort. Or the other way around. It’s hard to tell.
“Isn’t this just drawing attention to ourselves?” I mutter, staring out of the window.
“Like you won’t believe,” Dervla says. “But better than being dead, I suppose.”
“Gee, that’s cheery,” I say, giving her a look.
She smiles. “Don’t say I’m all doom and gloom.”
The silence in the car gets ugly fast.
Not empty. Loaded.
I keep checking the mirrors out of habit, though the front SUV fills most of the windscreen, and the one behind sits close enough to kiss our bumper.
If someone wanted us dead on this stretch, they’d have to be very confident or very stupid.
Séamus’s men don’t look like they leave much room for either.
Dervla drags a hand down her face. The bruising on her cheek has gone yellow at the edges now, but it still pisses me off to look at it. I don’t say that. I don’t say much for a while because everything I’ve got is either useless or too honest.
Cormac breaks first. “What are you going to do about calling an assembly? It’s not like you have that kind of power.”
“No, but it won’t be official. We start a chain. A whisper across the quad that something is going down in the hall.”
“And how do you intend to get the staff there?” I ask.
“By using the one person who can make the staff be there,” Dervla says.
Cormac turns slightly in his seat. “Roisin.”
“Yeah.”
I look at her profile. She keeps her eyes on the road ahead, on the black SUV escorting us like we’re royalty or prisoners, and maybe there isn’t much difference. “You trust her enough for that?”
“No,” she says. “But I trust what she wants.”
“That sounds dangerously close to the same thing,” Aidan says.
Dervla shrugs one shoulder. “She wants me in that seat. More than that, she wants everyone else to see me take it. That means she’ll help get staff there if I ask.”
Cormac stares ahead. “And if she decides to make a show of you instead?”
“Then I make a bigger one back.”
That lands in the car and stays there.
Of course it does. It’s her answer to everything lately. Hit harder. Stand taller. Bleed if necessary, but do it publicly enough that people remember.
I rub a hand over my jaw and look out at the hedges flashing by. “All right. Fine. We get back, you call Roisin, then what?”
“Then I call Siobhán,” she says. “If Whitmore hears there’s some student uproar, he’ll come running to control it. He won’t be able to help himself.”
Aidan’s eyes flick to the mirror. “And Siobhán?”
“She’ll know how to make sure he hears the wrong version first.” I nod slowly. It’s not clean, but none of this is. “You’re turning the whole place into bait.”
Dervla finally looks at me. “The whole place already is bait. I’m just choosing where the hook goes.” That is such a deeply Dervla sentence, I almost smile.
The convoy eats up the road in front of us. Wet hedges. Grey sky. Bare trees. Ireland in late autumn looks half-drowned and fully miserable. The kind of morning where the country feels old enough to remember every bad thing ever done on it.
It feels like we are about to add to that history.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
I frown at it. “It’s my dad,” I say.
Dervla raises an eyebrow with interest. I don’t talk about my family. At all. There’s a reason. I’m not that close to them. They have a different outlook on life than I do, and I was always considered the black sheep. It’s fine. It’s good. I accepted it a long time ago.
“Yeah,” I say, answering the phone.
“Declan. We need to talk.”
“You called me, so talk.”
The conversation is already getting on my nerves, and we’ve only said three lines between us.
“There are things… You should probably know that I’ve kept from you and that might come out.”
That makes me sit up straight. “Oh?”
Dervla gives me a frown, but I ignore her.
“I have a contact who has a contact who has a man high up. A quake is coming, Declan.”
“Okay, now you’re just being cryptic for the sake of it, and it’s pissing me off.”
“I realise that. I can’t say the word over the phone.”
“Okay,” I say, my brow creasing intensely enough to hurt. “But give me something so we aren’t going around in circles, when I really need to be elsewhere right now.”
“With Dervla Callaghan? Yes, I know.”
“You do.” It’s not a question. “Who is this man high up?”
“That isn’t important. What is important is that your friend Aidan O’Connell, is more of a friend than you know.”
The slight pause after O’Connell makes me clutch the phone tighter. “What are you saying?”
“Are you aware of who his father is?”
“Yes.”
“I mean really.”
“Yes, Dad. What is going on?”
The entire car is on tenterhooks now. There is no trying to get away from this conversation. My dad has hooked me, and I’m stuck on the end of the line.
“You know who he associates with?”
“Not in detail. I know who he is, though.”
“Right,” he says and huffs out a breath. “Right. Well.”
“Can you just spit it out?”
“I am as he is, only lower down the ladder,” he murmurs, like someone could overhear and make sense of what he is saying.
It takes a second. One whole second before it hits me square in the jaw. “Oh?” I grit out, my glare straight ahead. “And you never thought to mention this before?”
“I had hoped you would figure it out. Why you went to St. Aug’s, why I have gone above Whitmore every single time he calls me up to complain that you are a deviant beyond the normal student body there. Why you became friends with Aidan in the first place.”
“To be quite frank, Dad, I never pieced it together because I didn’t care enough to.” It’s blunt. Harsh, even. True, though. It kind of makes sense, I suppose in some weird-arsed way.
“I see. Well, my source says that shit is about to hit the fan, I wanted you to know from me before you found out another way.”
“Hitting the fan how?” My eyes narrow. “Do you mean this has something to do with ó Briain?” I just say it. All this beating about the bush is exhausting me. There is a beat on the line. Too long.
“Everything has something to do with ó Briain if you stand high enough to see the full shape of it.”
Every muscle in my body locks.
I keep my voice flat. “Say more.”
“I can’t say much on an open line.”
“Then stop talking like a priest in a confessional and give me the useful part.”
He exhales hard. “The people moving against him are not all outsiders. Some are inside the circle. Respectable faces. University faces. Political ones. Financial ones. If the wrong names come loose, there will be fallout all the way down the ladder.”
“Still not hearing why you’re calling me now,” I say.
“Because my name may be attached to movement around campus. Mine, Seamus O’Connell, Cillian Callaghan, to name a few. If this blows publicly, I don’t want you blindsided.”
“What kind of movement?” I ask carefully.
“Old but newer,” he states with a finality that means I couldn’t pry the information from him under torture.
“And this is going to get blown up by ó Briain’s… power move?”
“More than likely.”
“Any ideas on when?”
“Soon. ó Briain isn’t going to sit around and wait for people to make a move on him. He will move first, and his will make the 1798 Rebellion look like a tea party.”
“I’m guessing the rebels in this scenario are those moving against him.”
“Quite.”
“Jesus,” I mutter and look at Dervla.
She makes a what? gesture and I realise that no one can hear his side of the conversation but me. “Nothing good,” I say to her.
Silence hums down the line for a second. Road noise. My own pulse in my ears. The low engine growl.
“Do not let that girl out of your sight,” he says.
That lands badly enough that I go cold.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“I mean it. If she makes a public move, if she puts herself where people can gather around her, you stay on her. Not near her. On her.”
I glance at Dervla again. She’s glaring at me now, chin tipped slightly, already reading that something in this call has shifted.
“What have you heard?”
“A demonstration of support can be turned very quickly,” he says. “Crowds are useful until they aren’t. If anyone offers to isolate her for safety, you refuse. If any official tries to redirect her, you refuse. If the Gardaí appear in unusual numbers, you refuse.”
“Refuse how?”
“Violently if needed.” He ends the call abruptly, and I stare at it for a moment before I clear my throat.
“What?” Dervla demands.
I shove the phone back into my pocket and look at the three of them. Aidan’s eyes are on the road. Cormac has turned half around in his seat. Dervla is fully facing me now, one knee tucked under her.
“My dad just confirmed he’s connected. Not Board connected. Higher. Lower than Aidan’s dad, apparently, but in it.”
No one speaks for a beat.
Then Dervla snorts, “I’m not surprised. Nothing is a coincidence, I’m starting to see that.”
“Yeah.”
Aidan’s jaw tightens. “And?”
I keep my eyes on Dervla. “And he says if you make a public move, nobody lets you out of reach. Not near you. On you. If anyone tries to separate you for safety, we refuse. If officials try to redirect you, we refuse. If Gardaí show up in strange numbers, we definitely fucking refuse.”
Cormac goes very still. “That specific?”
“Yep.”
Dervla’s expression changes. Not fear. Calculation. Fast and ugly. “So he’s heard something.”
“He has,” I say. “Wouldn’t say what exactly. Just that he, your dad, Aidan’s dad and a few others are part of a movement on campus. Old but newer.”
“That’s unhelpful.”
“That’s my dad for you.”
“He also said your grandfather is about to show Ireland that rebels don’t win.”
“Fantastic. That is both poetic and terrifying.” She sits back. “So what? Do I claim this seat or not?”
“Oh, you’re claiming it,” I grit out. “You are claiming the hell out of it. It’s the catalyst. I know exactly who set this up.”
“Roisin,” everyone says in unison.
“That fucking bitch!” Dervla spits out.
“Yep,” I say, flicking Cormac on the forehead. “You got played.”