Chapter 5
Ethan
Annabelle’s breathing evens out between Callan and me, but she is not asleep. I know because every few seconds, her fingers twitch against the sheet, like her body is trying to settle while her mind keeps running.
Mine doesn’t settle at all. The fucking didn’t help.
I lie on my back for a minute, staring at the ceiling, my hand resting on my stomach, and think about the fact that I just watched Callan come apart for her.
I think about the way she took us both without hesitation.
I think about Aidan bleeding somewhere in this city while Jack plays games with our lives.
Then I sit up.
Callan looks up but says nothing, not wanting to disturb Annabelle.
I drag on my jeans and shirt and leave the room.
My skin still carries her heat. It makes me more vicious, not less.
She chose us. Jack is not taking that from me.
Pulling my phone out, I dial Aidan again.
It goes to voicemail. This time, I am very clear about my message.
“Ring me back, you utter cunt. Annabelle is worried sick, and this game is pissing me off to the point where I’m about to add you to my hit list. So you’ve got five fucking seconds after I hang up to call. ”
I hang up and wait.
Four seconds later, my phone vibrates in my hand.
I answer. “Finally.”
Aidan breathes out hard down the line. Traffic roars behind him. “You done threatening me?”
“Not even close. Where are you?”
“Busy.”
“That answer is going to get old very fast.”
“I’m coming back, but I’m not alone.”
Every muscle in me locks. “Explain.”
A pause. Not long. Long enough.
Then, “I’ve got Jack with me.”
I go very still. “What?”
“You heard me.”
My hand tightens around the phone so hard it aches. “Put him on.”
“No.”
“Aidan.”
“I said no. There are things you need to hear, but not over the fucking phone.”
That lands wrong at once. “Why?”
Another beat. More road noise. An engine rattle under it. Not his car. Something older. Rougher.
“Because if this is what I think it is,” he says, voice clipped, “we don’t speak about it where anyone can listen. Tell me you’re at the penthouse.”
“I’m at the penthouse.”
“Good. Five minutes out.” He hangs up.
I consider setting a trap to murder him as he walks through the door for leaving it this late to inform me he is on his way here, and only under duress. But that would be wasting time.
Moving back into the room, Callan puts his fingers over his lips. I nod. “Get dressed. We’re expecting company.”
Callan slides off the bed with a look I cannot quite read. He pulls the covers over Annabelle and gets dressed. He follows me out of the room, and I shut the door, motioning for Callan to move into the sitting room.
“Aidan’s on his way,” I say, moving to the windows and glaring down at the street.
“Okay, why the urgency?”
“He says he’s bringing Jack here.”
The silence that follows is absolute.
Callan goes still, a dangerous kind of stillness taking over him. “He what?”
“That was my reaction.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know yet.”
That is the part I hate. Not knowing. Not controlling the variables. Not already having Aidan by the throat for whatever he’s done.
Callan’s expression turns murderous in a way most people would never survive. “He brings that cunt through our front door, I’ll put him through the fucking wall.”
“You’ll get in line.”
His eyes cut to the hallway that leads to the bedrooms. “Annabelle cannot wake up to Jack Deveaux in the penthouse.”
“I know.”
“Then stop this.”
“I’m not stopping anything until I know why Aidan thinks this is worth it.” I turn from the window. “We lock this place down, we keep her in the room, and if Jack so much as breathes wrong, he dies.”
Callan follows, already reaching for his gun. “You’re taking this too calmly.”
“I’m not calm.”
“No, you’re worse. You’re organised.”
“Been waiting for this. Just didn’t think our brother would be the one to walk him through the fucking door. When they come up, Aidan had better hope he enters first.”
“And if Jack is first?”
“I shoot him.”
Callan nods once. “Good plan.”
My phone stays in my hand. I stare at it for a second, tempted to ring Aidan back and force more out of him, but he has already decided what he is willing to say. Pushing now gets me nothing useful.
Instead, I send one message.
If he scares her, I kill you first.
Delivered.
No reply.
I pocket the phone and stand in front of the lift doors, so I’m in position when they open, gun levelled.
“You’re expecting this to go badly.”
“I’m expecting Aidan.”
“That bad, then.”
I almost smile, but it dies before it gets anywhere. “If they come out of that lift and Jack isn’t restrained, he doesn’t clear the threshold.”
Callan gives one short nod and moves the short stretch to the hallway, so Jack has to go through him first to get to Annabelle. That’s if he makes it past me.
My finger finds the guard instead of the trigger. I leave it there.
Callan is silent. No words. None needed.
The lift dings.
The doors part.
Aidan stands there first, pale under the strip light, one hand pressed to his side, shirt dark with blood. The other hand has a gun shoved hard into Jack Deveaux’s ribs.
Jack stands beside him in a battered dark jacket that has seen better years, hands visible, expression unreadable. No cuffs. No ties. No fucking muzzle.
Rage punches through me so cleanly that it almost sharpens into calm.
For half a second, nobody speaks.
Then I say, “Convince me.”
Aidan shoves Jack forward out of the lift. “He comes in alive.”
“Not seeing the conviction yet.”
“He’s not here for a reunion, Ethan. He’s here because we need what he knows.”
Jack lifts his head. “Ethan.”
I take two steps forward and jam the barrel under his jaw. “Give me one good reason not to blow your fucking head off.”
Jack doesn’t flinch.
Not that I expected him to.
But that, more than anything, makes me want to fire.
“Because if you kill me now,” he says evenly, “you hand her to a killer.”
The name lands like a strike to the throat.
Behind me, Callan goes dead quiet.
Aidan’s voice comes out strained. “Let him in.”
I keep the gun where it is for another beat, staring into the face I have hated for years, searching for the slip, the tell, the smirk that says this is another manipulation.
“You’ve got ten seconds,” I say. “After that, if I don’t like what I hear, I redecorate the floor.”
Jack’s eyes flick to the hallway. “Where is Annabelle?”
“Keep her away from this.” I press the barrel harder under his jaw.
Aidan exhales sharply. “Eth.”
I cut him a look. “You okay, brother? Or are you going to pass out on me?”
“Fine,” Aidan grits out. “A graze, nothing more.”
“Patch yourself up.”
Aidan gives me a filthy look. “After he talks.”
“After you stop bleeding on my floor,” I snap.
Aidan swears under his breath but moves. Callan closes in from the hall, silent and lethal, tracking every movement Jack makes.
The penthouse feels smaller with him in it. Dirtier. Wrong.
“Kitchen chair,” I say.
Jack stops in the middle of the open-plan room and looks around once, taking in too much. The sofa. The island. The glass. The hall to the bedrooms. I want his eyes out of his skull.
“Sit.”
He sits.
Aidan grabs the Medi kit from under the sink. He’s moving freely enough. He’ll live.
I keep my gun on Jack while Aidan rips open the Medi kit with one hand and peels his blood-soaked shirt away from his side with the other. It is a nasty graze, angry and wet, but not deep enough to drop him. He pours antiseptic over it without so much as a flinch.
“Start talking,” I say to Jack.
Jack looks at me with the same cold control I remember hating before I ever had a proper reason for it. “Maeve is alive.”
Callan lets out one short, brutal laugh that holds no amusement. “You’ve got five more words before I break your teeth.”
“We buried her,” I say flatly. “We all saw her dead.”
“You saw what was left in a fire-damaged shell of a body after she made sure you would, and blame me for it.” Jack’s gaze flicks to me, then Callan, then Aidan as if he is checking whether any of us are capable of hearing him without lunging across the room.
“She staged it so she could go about her life without anyone suspecting her.”
I stare at him and feel something dark and old shift under my skin. “Convenient.”
“It is the truth.”
“Truth from you is a fucking novelty.”
Jack takes that without reaction. “I know how this sounds.”
“Do you?” I ask, voice low enough to cut. “Because from where I’m standing, it sounds like a coward trying to save his own arse.”
Aidan presses fresh gauze to his side and bares his teeth. “He told me in the van after someone opened fire on both of us.”
My eyes snap to him. “Someone.”
“Yes,” Aidan says. “Someone with an automatic weapon. Not him. Not me. A third party.”
“Who?”
“Maeve.”
Jack rests his forearms on the table, careful, visible, measured. “Maeve has people. Always has. Men she cultivates. Men she controls. Some know exactly what she is. Some only know enough to follow instructions and cash cheques.”
“And one of them shot at Annabelle outside the library?” I ask.
“That was Maeve as well,” he says.
Callan moves another step closer. “I knew it. Pretty. Fucking pretty.”
“What?” Jack asks, looking at him properly for the first time.
“She’s sending texts to Annabelle. Not you. Her. Pretty this, pretty that. Fucking butterflies.”
Jack draws in a breath. “Christa.”
“This is fucked up,” I snap. “Why should any of us believe you? You spent most of your adult life convincing us you were a serial killer. Are you saying now it was Maeve and you were covering for her?”
“Not covering,” he says, slamming his fist on the table. “I was gathering evidence. Maeve knew I had found out about her. She was framing me every single time. My hands were tied until I had enough evidence to bury her.”
“How hard could that have been?” I ask pointedly. “You follow her and record her.”
He gives me a withering glare. “If it was that fucking easy, I’d have done it.
She built her whole fucking life around making sure nothing stuck to her,” Jack says.
“She never acted directly when she could put someone else between her and the mess. She selected vulnerable women, isolated them, studied them, and then used them. Sometimes she killed. Sometimes she had help. Sometimes she made me discover enough to look guilty without ever seeing her hand.”
I laugh, short and vicious. “Do you hear yourself?”
“Every day,” he says.
Aidan tapes the gauze down with rough, irritated movements. “He isn’t lying about one thing. The place was a trap.”
“That proves nothing except you walked into one,” I shoot back.
Callan’s voice is quiet from the hall. “What evidence?”
Jack looks at him. “I have documents. Accounts. Correspondence. Recordings. Names. Safe locations.”
“Where?” I ask.
“In a place she doesn’t know about.”
“No more cryptic shit,” I say. “Where?”
He holds my stare. “I’m not giving that up until I know I can get her without a shadow of a doubt.”
“And how do you think you’re going to do that after all these years?”
“Annabelle.”
“Not a fucking chance,” Aidan says before I can. “You aren’t even going to see her.”
Jack doesn’t blink at Aidan’s refusal. “And that is why Maeve will keep coming for her.”
My hand tightens on the gun. “Explain that without making me want to shoot you more.”
His eyes come back to mine. Blue. Same as ours. I hate that. “Christa mattered to Maeve in ways you don’t understand yet. Annabelle is not random collateral. She is part of the obsession.”
A cold thread slides down my spine. “My patience died two seconds ago.”
“Maeve knew about Christa before I realised she did,” he says. “She watched her. Studied her. That is what she does when something threatens her control. Christa became important to me, which made her important to Maeve.”
“Important enough to murder,” Callan says from behind me.
Jack gives one short nod. “Important enough to fixate on. Important enough to copy. Important enough to destroy.”
I look at Aidan. He looks back at me with a grim kind of fury that says he believes enough of this to keep listening. That is a problem all on its own.
“Get to the point,” I say.
Jack’s voice stays maddeningly level. “Annabelle looks like Christa.”
I know what Jack means before he says another word, and I hate myself for it, because that means some part of me is following his logic. Petite. Fine-boned. Blue eyes. Fragility that is not actually fragility once you get too close.
“Maeve didn’t just want Christa dead,” Jack says. “She wanted to erase what Christa made me feel. She wanted to own it. When she couldn’t make herself into Christa, she kept the closest thing she had left in reach. Her daughter.”
The words hit something feral in me.
“No.” It tears out of me before I can stop it. “No. You do not get to put that on her.”
“I’m not putting anything on her,” he says. “Maeve already has.”
Callan moves fast. “I warned you about your teeth.”
I put a hand out without taking my eyes off Jack. “Not yet.”
Callan stops because I tell him to, but only just. Violence rolls off him in cold waves. Aidan looks like he wants to shoot first and ask questions over the corpse.
I share the urge.
Instead, I keep the gun trained on Jack and force myself to think.
“You’re saying Maeve is fixated on Annabelle because she’s Christa’s daughter. Fixated enough to stalk her for years?”
“Yes.”
“Fixated enough to kill her mother, wait four years, then start circling the daughter?”
Jack’s expression hardens. “Not wait. She has been actively pursuing her. Your intervention, even just being in Annabelle’s outer perimeter, watching her, was enough for Maeve not to act. Yet.”
My blood turns cold for a different reason.
“Outer perimeter,” I repeat. “So, us stalking her.” Oh, the fucking irony.
Jack gives a slight nod. “You were visible enough to alter her behaviour.”
Aidan lets out a humourless breath. “He’s saying we accidentally kept Annabelle alive.”
“I’m saying Maeve adapts,” Jack replies. “She prefers women isolated, grieving, vulnerable, and easy to recast in her own image. Annabelle was all of those things after Christa died. Then you three started orbiting her, and the pattern changed.”
Callan’s voice comes from my right, low and vicious. “Don’t talk about her like she’s a fucking case file.”
“I’m talking about the danger accurately,” Jack says.
“If Maeve has been near Annabelle for years, where were you?” I ask.
His gaze settles on me. “Looking for proof that would survive scrutiny.”
“And failing.”
“Yes.”
That lands harder than if he defended himself.
Aidan sinks into an armchair with his jaw tight. “Let’s face it, brothers. This just got a hell of a lot more complicated.”
“No shit,” I grit out and lower the gun.