Chapter 2
Annabelle
Staring at Callan’s back as he stands in the kitchen of this small, terraced house in Treslock, forty minutes from home, I know something is bothering him. More than this situation.
“What’s up?” I blurt out. “Apart from the obvious?”
He turns. “Pretty.”
“Hmm?” I ask, moving closer. “What is?”
“The word pretty. Jack wouldn’t use it. He thought it was a stupid word.”
I blink. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“He hated the word. My mother used it all the time. The flowers were pretty, the dress was pretty, the new curtains were pretty. Jack said it was one of those words that grated on his nerves.”
“Okay, and?”
“He has texted multiple times about you being pretty.” He spits out the word with venom.
My tired brain tries to keep up. “Are you saying it’s not Jack sending the messages but someone who’s working with him?”
“My mother used the word all the time,” he says again.
I frown and pinch the bridge of my nose. “Look, I appreciate you the way you are, but this conversation needs more of your participation. I’m confused and getting a headache.”
The front door opens and closes, and then Ethan strides in before Callan can respond. “What?” he asks.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I mutter. “Callan is bemoaning the use of the pretty.”
“Doesn’t it remind you of someone?” he fires off at Ethan.
His face hardens. “Maeve.”
“So, you think Jack is being an even bigger sick fuck by using language your mother used to taunt you?” I ask, hating this man even more, and I didn’t even think that was possible.
Callan’s eyes cut to mine, then to Ethan. “No. I think it might not be him at all.”
The room goes quiet in a way that makes my skin tighten.
Ethan shuts the kitchen door harder than necessary and comes further into the room. His expression has gone flat. Dangerous. “Say it properly.”
Callan does not blink. “If the messages are written in language Jack hated, either he’s deliberately using her phrasing to get in our heads, or Maeve is involved.”
My pulse starts climbing again. “Involved how? She’s dead. You said Jack killed her.”
Neither of them answers quickly enough.
A horrible thought opens up in me. “No. Don’t do that. Don’t go silent and stare at each other like I’m not in the room.”
“You can’t base this accusation on some texts,” Ethan says slowly, but I can tell from his expression that he is trying really hard not to believe Callan. Not that Callan really said anything.
“I’m not doing anything,” he replies. “I’m processing.”
“Processing what?” I ask. My voice comes out too sharp, too thin. “Because from where I’m standing, it sounds like you’re both thinking the dead woman might not be dead, and I’d quite like someone to explain that before I pass out.”
Ethan drags a hand over his jaw and looks at Callan. “We buried her.”
Callan’s expression does not change. “We buried a body.”
Ice slides down my spine. “That is not better.”
Ethan goes still, then his face hardens. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because we saw her,” Ethan says. “After.”
Callan’s jaw clenches. “Did we?”
“That’s enough to know she was dead.”
“Is it?”
I stare between them, my heart banging harder with every sentence they trade like knives. “Can one of you stop talking in riddles for five seconds? What does that mean?”
Callan looks at me then. Really looks. “It means we never saw Jack kill her. We saw what he wanted us to see after the fact.”
Ethan gives a sharp shake of his head. “We saw blood. We saw her body.”
“A body,” Callan corrects. “A woman with similar colouring. Similar build. Damaged enough to make visual confirmation easy to fake. Jack was always theatrical, but not with language. Maeve was.”
The room tilts for a second. I put a hand on the edge of the table to steady myself. “You think your father staged her death and they’re working together?”
“I think it is possible,” Callan says.
Ethan swears under his breath and paces two steps before stopping. He looks like he wants to put his fist through the wall. “You are being fucking deluded. From one word that you’ve plucked out of the past? You are more fucked in the head than I thought. If she were alive, we would have known.”
“Maybe so, and maybe I am so far off the mark. But maybe I’m not. I’ve got this feeling…” He punches his gut. “Aidan.”
“What about Aidan?” I ask.
He shakes his head with a frown. “Where is he?”
“The fucking arsehole went into the refrigerator warehouse,” Ethan says.
“What? He will get himself killed!” I practically screech.
“I told him no; he went anyway. It’s what Aidan does.”
“Call him,” Callan says, moving forward.
He is close enough for me to touch. I want to. I need to. My hand hovers. He sees it and grips it tightly, pulling me closer to him. I lean into him as Ethan pulls out his phone with a grimace and dials.
It rings.
No one answers.
“Fuck,” he grits out. “Fuck!”
“We need to go and find him,” Callan says.
“You can’t,” I say sharply, panic hitting my gut. “You can’t leave me.”
Ethan’s gaze slams to mine. “I know.”
“Then act like it,” I snap. My hand tightens in Callan’s. “You don’t get to tell me I’m safest with you and then vanish the second one of you does something reckless.”
Callan’s fingers close harder around mine, not painful, just certain. “We won’t leave you undefended.”
“That is not what I said.” My chest feels too tight, my palms are starting to sweat. I can’t go back. I can’t go back. “I said you can’t leave me.”
Ethan looks away first, jaw set so hard I can see the tension in his face. He dials again. Puts the phone to his ear. Waits.
Nothing.
He cuts the call and swears. “He’s not answering.”
A sick feeling rolls through me. Aidan, bleeding out in some abandoned warehouse. Aidan, arrogant enough to walk into hell because he thinks he can drag it out by the throat. Aidan, who made my breakfast and told me I could bail.
“No,” I whisper. “No, no, no.”
Callan turns to Ethan. “We go now.”
“And take me where?” I fire back. “Back to the library, where your father is taking shots at me? Back home, where he knows exactly where to find me?”
Ethan’s stare comes back to me with brutal focus.
“We take you with us,” he says.
Relief and terror hit at the same time. “To the warehouse?”
“We don’t have another option,” Callan says. “If Aidan is hurt, we move. If Jack is still there, all the better.”
“Better for who?” I ask, my voice shaking. I’ve tried to be strong. I’ve been strong, but deciding to call up my mother’s murderer and confront him face-to-face is two vastly different options.
Ethan is already moving. He grabs a set of keys from the counter, then checks the gun at the back of his jeans with a quick, practised motion that turns my stomach. “You stay between us. You do exactly what we say.”
Callan releases my hand only to catch my jaw lightly, forcing me to look at him. His eyes are cold and bright and fixed on mine. “If I tell you to get down, you get down. If I tell you to run, you run. You do not freeze.”
My throat tightens. “I’ll try.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “You will. We think for you, remember, Annabelle.”
The ice in his voice makes my mouth go dry. They do. It’s what I wanted. What I needed.
But this thinking is frightening.
“Tinks,” Ethan says, his voice dark, controlled. “Agree, or you stay here.”
“I agree,” I whisper, because the alternative is being left behind in a strange house while the walls close in on me.
Ethan gives one sharp nod. That is all I get. Callan drops his hand from my face and moves first, every part of him switched on. Dangerous. Precise. I follow because I have already made my choice, and there is no room left in me for pretending otherwise.
The house is small and dim, half-furnished, clearly one of those places kept for reasons normal people do not have. Ethan heads for the front door. Callan veers into a sitting room and opens a drawer in a sideboard. He takes out another gun.
My stomach drops, but I stay silent.
Ethan opens the door and checks the street before waving us forward. “Car. Now.”
The summer air hits me, heavy and close. The terrace sits on a quiet road with patchy pavements, wheelie bins, and curtains open in the neighbouring houses. It looks painfully ordinary. I hate how often ordinary turns into something else now.
We head to the silver Audi. Ethan goes first. Callan stays at my back, not touching, but close enough that I feel boxed in by them. Protected by them. Owned by them. I don’t have the energy to decide which part frightens me most.
“Back seat,” Callan says as he unlocks the car.
I get in. Ethan slides in beside me rather than taking the front, and that tells me a lot. He wants me caged between them, not given even the illusion of a door I can open on my own. Callan starts the engine, and we pull away fast.
My phone buzzes in my bag.
Ethan and I exchange a glance. “Check it,” he clips out.
My fingers don’t want to work. They feel numb and stupid as I drag the phone out of my bag.
Withheld number.
Pretty butterfly just like her.
My blood turns to ice. My hand shakes so badly that Ethan has to grab the phone to stop it from falling on the car floor. He checks the screen. “Butterfly.”
“My mum. Christa. She had a butterfly tattoo on her wrist.” I almost choke on it.
“Fuck,” Ethan mutters.
“What?” Callan asks from the front. “What does it say?”
“Pretty butterfly just like her,” Ethan reads aloud, his voice like a death rattle.
“My mother’s tattoo,” I whisper, the words barely finding air. “It was small. She got it when she was sixteen and had a fake ID. She always covered it with her watch.”
Callan’s eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror, sharp and jagged. “Maeve loved butterflies,” he says so quietly, I only just hear him.
“She’s dead, Cal,” Ethan snarls, though the conviction is leaking out of him. “We saw the blood. We saw the crime scene.”
“We saw what we were meant to see!” Callan roars, swerving around a parked lorry. “The ‘pretty’ comments, the butterfly...”
“Or it’s Jack trying to fuck with us. He knew her better than we did. He knows all this shit.”
“Maybe,” Callan grits out, but it doesn’t sound like he believes it.
I clutch my stomach, feeling like I’m going to be sick. If their mother is alive, then the nightmare hasn’t even begun. My phone buzzes again. I don’t want to look, but I can’t stop myself.
Poor little butterfly. Broken wings don’t fly far.
I shove the phone at Ethan. “Make it stop. Please, just make it stop.”
“I’m going to kill whoever is sending these,” Ethan vows, pulling me into his side. “Whether it’s him, her, or both of them together.”
No one says a word for the rest of the drive back to town.
Callan eases off the accelerator as we turn in.
The Audi rolls forward, tyres picking quietly over the rutted gravel.
No one speaks. The industrial estate opens up around us, flat and still.
There is the white van, parked at an angle in the far shadows.
I look for Aidan’s car. It’s parked up. Deserted.
“Stay in the car until I say,” Callan orders, drawing his weapon as he kills the engine.
The silence that follows is terrifying.
Then, I whisper, “You can’t just leave me in here while you go in there.”
He turns around to look at me. “You want to come in?”
“Aidan’s car is there. No sign of Aidan. That doesn’t exactly look like a ringing endorsement for his safety,” I bite back more out of fear than anything else.
Ethan’s hand tightens on my thigh, a silent command for me to breathe. “She’s right. If we’re moving, we move together.”
He opens his door, and the heat of the afternoon rushes in, smelling of hot asphalt and old oil.
Callan is already out, his gun held low against his leg, eyes tracking the high windows of the warehouse.
I scramble out after Ethan, my legs feeling like they belong to a stranger.
Every shadow between the rusted skips looks like a threat.
Every broken pane of glass feels like an eye.
We reach the side of the unit. The metal siding is hot enough to burn. Ethan presses his back to the wall, and Callan takes the other side of the door. I’m tucked between them, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
“Jesus,” Callan mutters as he peers inside. “This place has been shot to hell.”
“Aidan,” I whimper.
Ethan’s face is grim as his gaze darts around the outside. “Looks clear.”
Callan nods and ducks into the warehouse. I follow quickly with Ethan right behind me.
“Oh, my God,” I murmur. “What happened?”
The interior is a graveyard of industrial waste. Bullets have shredded the metal racking. Dust motes dance in the light cutting through the high windows. I stumble over a coil of copper tubing. Ethan catches me before I hit the concrete.
Silence follows. It is a heavy silence. It presses against my eardrums. I scan the floor, terrified I will find a corpse. Instead, I see a dark smear near the metal staircase.
“He was here,” Ethan says. He points to a red trail.
“Is he dead?” I whisper. My stomach performs a sick roll. “Ethan, tell me he isn’t dead.”
“He isn’t dead.” Ethan doesn’t look at me. He focuses on the open service door.
Callan picks up a spent shell casing from the floor. “There were multiple weapons here. This wasn’t a hit. It was traded gunfire.”
I look at the blood again. I want to scream, but the air in the warehouse is too thin. I am drowning in their history. Every secret they have kept is a bullet meant for me. “Aidan versus Jack,” I murmur.
“Follow the trail,” Ethan says, already moving forward, his hand on my lower back.
The blood is a dark, wet line across the floor.
I stare at the mess until my vision blurs.
It leads straight through the small metal door.
Callan reaches the entrance first, his weapon leading the way.
Ethan keeps me close. His palm stays flat on my spine, pushing me to keep pace.
My knees turn to water. Every time my heart beats, it attempts to break my ribs.
“It is fresh,” Callan whispers, his fingers grazing a dark, tacky droplet on the metal frame.
We slip into the corridor. The air here is colder, smelling of damp stone and ozone. The flickering yellow light overhead makes every shadow jump, twisting the flaking paint into reaching fingers. I press my hand over my mouth to keep the whimpers back.
Callan pushes open the door at the end, and we emerge back into the late afternoon. “Gone.”
“Where?” I whisper.
He shakes his head as Ethan tries to call Aidan again.