Chapter 21
Ethan
Annabelle falls asleep in my bed with our names inked on her, and my brothers are close enough to hear if her breathing changes.
I don’t sleep.
I sit in the chair by the window with a gun on the table beside me, my phone in my hand, and watch the rise and fall of her chest while the sky outside shifts from black to grey. Every time she moves, my body tenses. Every time she settles again, the tension stays. It just changes shape.
Aidan passes out first on top of the duvet, flat on his back, one arm over his eyes like he can bully pain into fucking off by ignoring it.
Callan lasts longer. Staring at the bedroom door for ages, staring into the dark hall like he expects trouble to walk in wearing polished shoes and a warrant card. Eventually, he looks at me.
“You’re not sleeping.”
“No.”
He gives one short nod because of course I’m not, then disappears. I hear him moving through the penthouse. Locks checked. Curtains checked. The sort of things that mean he’s as calm as a live grenade.
By six, I’ve had enough of stillness.
I get up, leave Annabelle sleeping, and walk out into the living room. Callan is on the sofa with Maeve’s notebook open on his knee.
The little black book looks wrong in his hands. Too ordinary for the amount of blood tied up in it.
He glances up when I step in. “You look murderous.”
“I am murderous.” I hold my hand out. “Give me that.”
He doesn’t argue. He hands it over, and I take the sofa opposite him, flipping through pages filled with cramped writing, dates, initials, registration numbers, times, and locations. Names I already hate stare back at me in cold ink.
I keep reading. There are references to storage units, burner phones, women reduced to notes and timelines because that is what happens when men decide women are things to be catalogued and consumed. My jaw locks so hard it hurts.
One line catches my eye.
Bennett prefers rapport first. Isolates emotionally before physically.
I read it twice.
Then a third time.
I flick further in. Maeve has rough maps sketched out, route notes, shift changes, two service entrances at the station, one at the old evidence facility, and timings marked with question marks and angry little underlines.
“She’s been busy,” I mutter.
Callan says nothing.
I turn another page and find a list of women’s names. Some have dates next to them. Some have one word beside them.
Missing.
Buried.
Alive.
Moved.
Unknown.
This is years of obsession scratched into paper by someone trying desperately to end this.
I shut the notebook before I rip the pages out.
“We still don’t trust her,” Callan says. “But we can use the information without trusting her.”
“I know. I don’t not trust her. As annoying as that is.”
He stares at me for a beat but doesn’t comment.
My phone buzzes in my hand.
Unknown number.
Every muscle in my body locks.
Callan says what I’m already doing, “Speaker.”
“Bold. Give me a name, or I hang up.”
Silence.
“Ethan…” He sounds out of breath,
It’s Jack. Callan and I lock gazes.
“Where are you?”
“Hunted…” silence and then rustling sounds.
“Who exactly?” I ask, eyes narrowed. I find myself in the absurd situation where I trust Maeve more than I do Jack.
“Not sure. Professionals.”
“You hurt?”
“No, just running around in fucking circles,” he grits out.
“Where are you?”
“About forty miles outside the town. Abandoned farm two miles north of Ludsbrook.”
“Why?”
A pause. Callan raises an eyebrow.
“I’ve been following a lead. Maeve didn’t do this.”
“Yeah, we know,” Callan says. “Keep up.”
He growls. “A woman is dead near the old farmhouse. Still warm.”
“Who did it?”
“I don’t know. She was dead when I got here a few minutes ago. She was the lead I was following. She said she had information.”
“About the corrupt police?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Maeve knows, doesn’t she? She’s been hunting them all this time.”
“Yeah,” I reply. “Fuck. So she was going to come clean, and they killed her. Annabelle cannot go to them today.”
“What?” Jack snaps. “That was your plan?”
“It was a plan. That has changed in the last five seconds.”
“Keep up,” Callan mutters again. Jack cuts off, and the line goes dead.
I stare at my phone for a second. “Fuck!”
Callan is already on his feet. “We have a location.”
“Location of what?” Aidan asks, hobbling into the room and then attempting to cover it up as we both look at him. He strolls past us to the kitchen to grab a mug of coffee.
“A location for Jack and a dead woman he found who was going to talk,” I say. “And a reason Annabelle doesn’t walk into that station today.”
Aidan’s mug stops halfway to his mouth. He sets it down on the counter with a controlled click that means his brain has caught up with his body. “Okay. What did I miss?”
I give it to him fast. Jack’s call, the woman, the lead that got silenced before it could reach us. Aidan’s expression shifts through three different kinds of fury while I talk, and by the end of it, he is wide awake and ready to move out.
“So they’re still cleaning house,” he says.
“Actively,” Callan says.
“And Annabelle walking into Bennett’s hands today is—”
“Off,” I say. “It’s off.”
Aidan exhales. It sounds like relief as he nods.
Callan moves to the kitchen, pours himself a coffee, and stands with his back to the counter, looking at nothing in particular. “If they killed this woman, they are going to be extra cautious now.”
I pick up Maeve’s notebook again and flip to the service entrance timings. “We need to get to Jack.”
“And Annabelle?” Callan asks.
“She comes. We already have to tell her Plan A is dead. Plan B isn’t leaving her here alone. Not again. Not with Bennett expecting her at the station later.”
Aidan’s mug goes back to his mouth. “Good,” he says. “I hate plans that hinge on her walking into a building full of men who want to do exactly what Briggs wanted to do.”
I keep coming back to Jack. He found a dead woman. He called us. The fact that he called us instead of disappearing into whatever private crusade he’s been running for years means something. I’m not sure I like what it means, but I can’t ignore it.
I stand up and move to the bedroom doorway.
Annabelle is still asleep. Her hair is spread across the pillow, her cheek pressed into it, one hand open at her side like even in sleep she is ready to reach for something. The names on her skin are still sharp.
The possessive satisfaction I feel looking at her is deeply inconvenient, given that I need to think clearly.
I step inside and crouch beside the bed.
“Tinks.”
Her eyes snap open immediately. “What? Where? Why?”
I smile. “That’s a lot of loaded questions.”
“Coffee,” Aidan says, following me in and handing her his mug.
She sits up and takes it, giving Callan a wary look as he also drifts into the room. “This looks bad. What happened?”
“Plan A is dead,” I say, giving it to her straight. “We have a Plan B. Sort of.”
She tilts her head. “Okay… meaning?”
“Jack just called. He was following a lead. She is dead. He is being hunted by pros, and you aren’t walking into that police station later for fucking nothing.”
She swallows visibly. “Dead?”
I nod.
She chews the inside of her lip, and I can see it’s an effort to stop herself from crying. “She had information,” she says finally. “And they found out.”
“That’s what it looks like.”
She nods slowly, the mug in her hand forgotten. The grief moves through her, clean and quiet.
“So we go to Jack,” she says.
“We go to Jack,” I confirm.
Her eyes come up to mine. “And Bennett?”
“Bennett can wait.”
Something shifts in her expression. Not relief. Not disappointment. Something harder than both. “He’s going to know I’m not coming.”
“Yes.”
“That tells him something.”
“It tells him we know something,” Callan says from the doorway. “Which we do. Which changes the ground under his feet.”
She considers that. I can see her working through it, picking at the edges. It is one of the things about her that keeps catching me off guard. She thinks. She doesn’t just react and recover. She thinks while she moves, while she fights, while she tries to stay ahead of the thing chasing her.
It is the part of her that is going to keep her alive.
“Okay,” she says. “I need a shower.” She hands the mug back to Aidan and pushes the duvet aside. “And then you need to tell me the plan exactly and what you expect me to do.”
I stare at her. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting when I gave her the news that Plan A was in the toilet. It wasn’t this.
“I fucking love you,” I murmur and stand up before she can reply. I turn from her before she can say anything.
The silence that follows is spectacular.
But then Annabelle makes a sound that is not quite a laugh and not quite a sob, and I hear the mattress creak as she gets up. “You’re an idiot,” she says.
“Maybe, doesn’t change how I feel.”
“I love you too. For some reason I can’t quite figure out. All of you. You saved me.”
“Let’s not get all sappy before breakfast,” Aidan says, but goes to her and kisses her. “What he said.”
“You can’t even say it, you complete cunt,” I growl and walk back to the living room and stand by the window. He shat on my parade, and now I’m in a mood.
The city is waking up below. Traffic building.
Ordinary people doing ordinary things, while somewhere forty miles north of here, a woman is dead next to an old, ruined farmhouse, Jack is running in circles, and the man I’ve been watching my entire life is apparently not the monster I thought he was.
Everything is shifting.
Callan comes in behind me and doesn’t bother pretending he didn’t hear what I said. He sits on the arm of the sofa and looks at me with that flat, assessing stare. “What is the plan?”
“I have exactly ten minutes to figure that out.”
“Get on it, then. Aidan is showering with her.”
“Good,” I say with a nod and fall into a contemplative silence where things in my brain start to fall into place.