Chapter 27
Callan
“She thinks it’s one of us,” I murmur, gesturing for my brothers to leave her room. I close the door behind us.
“What?” Aidan snaps as we move back down the hallway into the living room. “Don’t be absurd.”
“Shh,” I grit out. “I’m not. She is piecing it together, or what she thinks she knows. Someone with enough money to pay off the police.” I gesture around the penthouse.
“You were the one who had to fucking blurt that out,” Ethan whispers, snapping at me. “Why would you say that to her?”
“Because it’s the truth. We have long suspected Jack is paying them to forget about it.”
“So you thought it was a good idea to plant that seed?” Aidan takes in a deep breath, calming himself before he decides to smash his fist into my face.
He doesn’t.
Progress.
She’s good for his temper.
Ethan drags a hand over his face. “If she runs from us right now, he’ll take her.”
“She isn’t running tonight,” I say.
Aidan paces to the window, then back again, a contained burst of violence looking for a target. “Then we tell her the truth. All of it. Rip it open and be done with it.”
“No.” The answer leaves me at once. “Not like this.”
He swings towards me. “You think finding out later will be better?”
“I think telling her our father murdered her mother while she’s locked in a bathroom, half-drunk and terrified, is the fastest way to unravel her.”
Ethan stays silent for a beat. He is weighing outcomes. Risks. Blood. “He’s right.”
Aidan laughs once, hard and humourless. “Of course he is. Because we always need to manage the fucking emotional temperature of the room.”
“We need to keep her alive,” Ethan says. “That is the only point that matters.”
Aidan plants both hands on the kitchen island and drops his head for a second. “I hate this.”
“I know,” Ethan replies.
“She will ask questions the second she comes out,” I say. “If we fumble once, she’ll know.”
“She already knows something is wrong,” Ethan says.
“She thinks. She doesn’t know anything.”
“That’s rather the point, though, isn’t it?” Aidan says. “Ethan interrogating her about a secret affair didn’t help.”
“It’s relevant,” Ethan insists. “It places Jack in a vulnerable position. One where we can finally prove what he is.”
“Nothing about that man is vulnerable,” I point out.
“You are so wrong,” Ethan says. “Look at him tonight. Sending a message to Annabelle while she’s standing with Aidan? Parking up downstairs, knowing we’d see him? He has weaknesses, and sticking it to us is a major one.”
I consider his point. It’s valid. “So how can we use it against him?” I ask.
Ethan looks at Aidan and then back at me. “By giving him what he wants enough to make him careless.”
Aidan lifts his head. “You are not using her as bait.”
“I didn’t say that,” Ethan replies, though his tone tells me he has thought it. He thinks in layers. Routes in and routes out. Every option gets weighed, even the ugly ones.
I rest my palms on the back of an armchair and watch the hallway. “He wants attention. He wants control. He wants to frighten her and provoke us. Men like him escalate when they think they’re untouchable.”
“Men like him,” Aidan says quietly, “are exactly why I want to put a knife through his throat.”
“Later,” Ethan says.
Aidan gives him a vicious look. “You keep saying later as if I enjoy waiting.”
“You enjoy the result,” Ethan says. “Waiting is part of getting it right.”
“All of this is just great, but what about convincing her we aren’t the bad guys?” I ask.
“We are the bad guys. There is just a worse one out there,” Aidan snaps.
Fair point.
“Should we consider that he doesn’t work alone?” I ask carefully, having wanted to broach this for the longest time, but worried about the blowback.
Ethan gives me a cutting stare. “And who do we suspect is working with him? Bennett?”
“Why not?”
“No,” Aidan cuts in. “He’s too arrogant. Too obsessive. Too meticulous. He wouldn’t leave anything to chance or in someone else’s hands. If Bennett is involved, it’s simply covering up the crimes for vast sums of money.”
“Which should be easily proven.”
“Should. But isn’t,” Ethan says. “Right now, we have to do damage control. We have to tell Annabelle that our mother was involved with her killer.”
“She won’t just accept that on blind faith, especially if she is starting to suspect us,” I argue.
“She will want proof, evidence, names, dates, places. We can’t give her any of that without giving away the fact that Maeve was married to her killer, and they spawned the triplets of Satan.
We don’t come out of this avenue looking great, Ethan. ”
“He’s right,” Aidan says. “But since he already opened his big fucking mouth about being the police being paid off, we have to tell her something.”
“Or maybe we don’t say anything at all,” Ethan says. “If she wants to suspect us, fine. She will have to stick around to find out the truth.”
“You give her too much credit,” I say.
“Or maybe you don’t give her enough.”
I’m about to fire off a crude response when I hear the bedroom door open. I place my finger to my lips, and everyone shuts up.
Annabelle walks slowly out of the hallway, looking at each of us before her gaze settles on me. “What did you mean by that? Saying someone is paying the police off?” she asks.
“Exactly that,” I say. “You said it yourself. It doesn’t make sense why they haven’t connected the dots by now.”
Annabelle’s eyes narrow. She doesn’t buy the calm in my voice. “And how do you know that?” she asks.
I hold her stare. “Because we’ve spent years looking at the same pattern you have. Women disappear. Women turn up dead. Files go nowhere. Detectives change. Leads die.” I pause. “That doesn’t happen by accident.”
She shifts her weight, still half-turned towards the hallway as if part of her wants the option of retreat. “You keep saying things like that, but none of you actually say anything.”
“We are saying things,” Aidan mutters. “You just don’t like them.”
Her head swings towards him. “No, I don’t like being jerked around by three men who apparently know more about my mother’s murder than the police do.”
Aidan takes a step forward. Ethan puts a hand out across his chest without looking at him.
I answer before either of them can make this worse. “We do know more than the police. That doesn’t mean we know everything.”
Her face drains. “How?”
Because I was raised by the devil. Because I know the cadence of his cruelty. Because I have spent years hunting the outline of my own father through dead women and missing files.
I give her the version she can survive. “When our mother was killed years ago. We started digging then. We found the same names your police missed. The same dead ends. The same patterns. We kept going.”
Her stare flicks between us. The reminder of our mother dying as well makes her rethink that we did it. “So you’re just three rich men who spend their days trying to track down her killer.”
“Pretty much,” I say, with a shrug.
She lets out a soft breath. Her suspicion has been tamed for now.
It is not enough for me.
Tamed suspicion is still suspicion. It sits behind her eyes, quieter now, but not gone. Annabelle is too intelligent to accept half-truths without storing the edges away for later. She is frightened enough to let it rest for a minute. That is all we have bought ourselves.
Ethan steps in before the silence can turn hostile again. “Come and sit down.”
She hesitates, then moves to the sofa anyway. I watch the way she chooses the far cushion, leaving distance between herself and all of us. It makes something cold scrape down my spine. She is pulling back. Not fully. Not yet. But I feel it.
I take the chair opposite. Ethan stays standing near the kitchen island. Aidan remains by the end of the sofa, prowling energy trapped inside his skin.
Annabelle looks at each of us. “If your mother was murdered too, why don’t you use all your money to hire people who can find out the truth?”
“We’ve tried,” I say, my throat tight. “It’s not that easy when you are dealing with someone who doesn’t leave a trace.”
“Or those traces are swept away by first responders being paid to sweep,” Ethan adds.
“So you think this serial killer is some obscenely rich man with unlimited resources with the police in his back pocket?”
“Yes.”
“So I’ve got no chance, then, have I?” she says bitterly. “I’m going to end up strangled next to a reservoir, and no one will try to find out who did it.”
“You aren’t going to end up that way, Annabelle, because we won’t let it happen.”
“You can’t stop it. He’s done this countless times. It’s the only thing anyone can agree on.”
“But your mother was the last,” I say. “We are as sure as we can be about that.”
“So he just disappears off the face of the earth, and that’s okay then because no one else has died.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“No,” she says. “You’re not. But that’s what the police think, isn’t it?”
“That’s what they want to think,” Ethan says.
Annabelle looks at him with open contempt. “Who is they?”
“The ones who failed your mother,” Aidan says.
I watch her face as that lands. Failure is easier to swallow than corruption. Easier than intention. Easier than the truth that a man can build a graveyard and still sit in plain sight.
She presses her lips together. “You keep talking around it.”
“Because talking straight gets people killed,” I say.
Her eyes cut to me. “That sounds dramatic.”
“It’s not.” I keep my voice level. “If somebody is watching you closely enough to send those messages at the exact right time, then we assume everything matters. What we say. Where you go. Who you call. Everything.”
She goes still again. Not the helpless stillness from earlier. This is thinking. Measuring. “So, what now?” she asks. “I just carry on and wait for the next text?”
“Yes, because it will draw him out, and we will be waiting.”
“You’re using me as bait,” she says. “My God! Do you hear yourselves?”
“Do you want your mother’s killer found or not?” I ask.
Her eyes flash. “That is unfair. How dare you?”
“I dare because I want my mother’s killer found.”
That puts her back in her box.
She slumps against the sofa. “I’m sorry. Of course you do.”
“Don’t ever apologise, Tinks,” Ethan says, glaring at me before he turns his attention to her.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.
If you want to stay here and never leave, that’s what you will do.
If you want to go to work but nowhere else, we will see to it that you are safe.
If you want to go wild and taunt this fucker until he shows his face, we will do that and laugh at his ashes when he tries to touch you. It’s up to you.”
“Don’t do that,” she murmurs. “Don’t make me think. I can’t… thinking is too hard. You were doing that for me. You took the burden off me.”
“I can’t decide this for you, Annabelle. As much as I want to, this is the one thing you need to have full control over.”
“You want me to bait him,” she says.
“We want him found,” I state, although it’s more than that. We want him close enough to kill.
“I can’t think about this,” she says, getting up and moving back towards her room. “Please just leave me alone.”
We let her go because Ethan is right. We can’t decide this for her. How this plays out is all on her.
“This sucks,” I say.
“It does, but she will do the right thing,” Ethan states.
“You sound very confident of that.”
“I’m confident that she wants her mother’s killer found.”
As much as I hate it, he’s right again.