Chapter 33
I got one solid punch in before Liam and Arthur wrestled me off Brody. My brother, whom I always protected, almost strangled the woman I loved. I nearly lost her, not to a serial killer, but to one of the people I trusted most.
Blood trickled from his nose. He wiped his knuckles through it and smeared it over the rest of his flushed face. He deserved worse. I’d seen the mark of his fingers on her neck and the trauma in her gaze. He deserved the same at the very least. If he were anyone else…
“You’re a menace, Brody.” I thrust a pointed finger at him through the arms grappling me backward. “Rein it in, or I’ll do it for you.”
“She should be dead!”
Fury ripped through me. Someone behind me caught my elbow. Another got a headbutt. Their hold loosened, and I lunged.
My hands wrapped around his throat and squeezed. “You stay away from Alice.”
He punched my sides again and again, yet I didn’t relent. He tried to slip through my hold, but I knew all his moves. My thumbs crushed down against the depressions under his jawline, not to kill him, just to make him understand what he did to her.
“Killy, let him go.” Arms pulled at me. Hands tugged at the hold I had on his neck as his skin colored and his eyes lost focus. “Enough.”
“You don’t look at Alice,” I snarled in Brody’s face. Spittle spattered between us. “You don’t talk to Alice. You don’t fucking touch Alice. Do you hear me?”
Whatever he croaked out broke into pieces, all unapologetic bullshit squelched under the pounding in my ears.
There was no regret in the lines of his face.
Only his own rage and his feelings of my betrayal to our brotherly bond stared back at me.
Brody had only ever been able to understand his own logic, no one else’s.
I shoved him away with a roared grunt. He landed in a heap on the ground, coughing between gasps. Arthur patted his back, and with Liam’s arm grappled around me, I toppled backward into him and a wall. It knocked the air out of him.
“I mean it, Brody.” I labored through each word with choppy inhales and clenched my fists at my sides to avoid going at him again.
“Al-zee,” he rasped, the sound scraping out of him.
“Whatever shite notion you’ve conjured up, you’re wrong.” I battered away Liam’s hold and advanced on Brody.
“Ali-zee.”
He cleared his throat, hawking phlegm, and heaved himself up. Only a foot stood between us, our heights evenly matched, but he jutted his chin out like he still held control of the situation.
“Her name. It’s not Alice.”
I slashed a hand between us.
“Stop digging yourself in deeper. I’m going to marry that woman.”
“You,” he panted out, “already are.”
“What?” I shook off the reach of Liam’s hand as he attempted to pull me back from Brody again. “What the fecking hell you going on about now?”
From the back of his waistband, below his dress shirt, he drew out a stack of papers and photos and smacked them against my chest.
“I deserve your trust”—he coughed—“more than she does, you bleedin’ arsehole.”
The documents rustled and wobbled to the ground in an arc.
Photos stared back up at me. Candid photos of Alice crossing foreign streets, set against a background of old French buildings.
Photos of her at galas, on the arm of a man I knew as the head of the French mafia, Adrien De Villier.
Photos of her at conferences and product launches, wearing business formal attire for the brand Maison DV Parfums, written on banners and placards in the background.
Then there was the photo of Alice and Maeve from a few days ago. I picked it up and traced her smile.
“Alice is Alizé De Villier. Your wife.”
I shook my head, my jaw slack, and stumbled a step. I shoved my tongue against the backs of my teeth and rubbed at my suddenly itchy ears with heavy hands. This wasn’t right. She wouldn’t lie to me.
“Alice Marine out there”—Brody sucked in a breath, the rasp already gone—“exists only in the US and only as a foreigner who occasionally visits. There’s no record of her in France.”
“No.”
I tugged at my tie and picked up another photo. Every single one looked exactly like my Alice. I lost track of everything else around me as I stared down at the pictures of the woman I loved. It felt like someone jammed a nail through my ribs.
“You have it wrong,” I mumbled.
“I knew it the moment I saw that photo.” Brody pointed to the one of her and Maeve, and the nail shoved in deeper. “I knew it was her.”
“No.” I fought the rising lump in my throat.
Copies of official French documents and facial cross-referencing glared up at me.
Liam bent down, picked up a few, and rifled through them. “Shit.”
The pity on his face whacked that nail flush against the casing of my heart and shook my insides.
“It got me thinking why she’s here. There’s something fishy about her, Killy.” Brody sounded almost giddy behind his barbed tone.
A crack fissured.
“That’s…no.”
“Why is she alive but everyone else’s dead?”
“You’re wrong,” I muttered.
“Why did Kara die and not her?”
“Stop it.”
“She killed them.”
“No.”
“It’s her. She did it.”
“Shut up,” I shouted. Arthur and Liam closed in around us. “Shut up. Shut your goddamn mouth and get your head on straight.”
I tossed the photos back at him.
“She couldn’t have fucking done it, and you know it. You. Know. It.”
That much I was sure of. Add the fact that she never left my side, and there was no opportunity for her to kill Brody’s girl.
The rest…I wasn’t ready to analyze that yet.
Because that meant it had all been a lie, and Alice, my Alice, the woman who drove me both out of my mind and over the moon, would never do that to me.
“You don’t like that my woman lives and yours is dead. Fine. That doesn’t make my wife a criminal.”
“You admit it. She’s your wife.”
“Fuck, no, I—”
But shit, I had said it. My wife. Alice Marine. Alizé De Villier. That crack grew deeper and smarted. I stumbled away from them, the mess, the truth, and back to her amid the lively noises of the gala. Back to my greatest deception.
She wasn’t Alice Marine, and that truth fucked with my head.
All night, I sat against the cushioned headboard of my bed and raked my fingers through her hair.
I tracked her breathing. I counted her heartbeats.
I cradled and warmed her body while holding ice packs over the swollen skin.
I soothed her through the whimpered beginnings of nightmares with a soft run of my fingers up and down her spine. Because I loved this woman.
I loved this conniving, twisted little liar with all my heart, and fuck, it hurt. It split me down the middle and jabbed at my insides with hot pokers because we were a lie. All of it was. Yet I couldn’t find the strength to wrap my hand around her bruised throat and finish what my brother started.
That heavy truth sat like a boulder against my chest. I gazed down at her peaceful face, golden hue pale in the moonlight, eyelashes brushing her cheekbones, lips slightly parted, jaw void of tension. She looked delicate, almost ethereal.
Mo síbhean, I called her. My fairy woman. She was aptly named. Fairies were known for being tricksters. They lured humans into traps to steal their minds and bodies. She’d done both to me, and I willingly fell into the snare.
My fairy. My fraud. My wife.
Alizé De Villier. My stalker.
I sighed and swiped a hand down my face. A headache fluttered in my temples.
When Brody broke through a damn good evening and banjaxed it beyond recognition, I hadn’t cared beyond my rage.
It hadn’t mattered that no records in France existed of an Alice Marine, or that Brody had made dozens of photographic comparisons between the Alice I fell in love with and the Alizé De Villier I married, because I thought I knew the woman I spent every moment with over the last month.
As I squeezed his throat, just as he did to her, and vessels popped in the corners of his eyes, all that mattered was that she was Alice to me.
All that mattered through his hoarse inhales when I released him was that she was my woman and under my protection.
Same when I carried her out of the gala under heavy camera flashes.
When the clan doctor checked her over. When I made her soup and warm tea to drink and applied cream to the bruises between icing periods.
Even now, as I scoured through every conversation we had. Every clue she left me.
She played me like a fiddle, me of all people, and I gobbled up her lies, then asked for seconds before she shoved me through a trash compactor.
A silent chortle lodged in my throat. It bobbed there, up and down, not sure which way to go, in the same way my rage and affection teetered on a knife’s edge, one moment sharp and ugly, the next tender and caring.
What was I to do with her? What was I to do with this nagging anvil caving my rib cage in?
Sunrise came and went. Still, I made no move to leave her. There was nothing in the silence but a slow emptiness feasting on my insides.
When daylight snaked around the curtains, she stirred and twisted against my chest. Her wide blue eyes, bright against blown red vessels, stared up at me with what…affection? Shrewdness? Caution? Deceit? I didn’t know anymore.
“Hi,” she said, half croak, half whisper. A little smile curved up her face, and my inner balance tumbled right over into wrath.
How dare she be fucking happy when she wrecked my insides like a virus that wouldn’t quit its warpath.
“How does it feel?” I asked, my voice surprisingly steady.
Her prim fingernails skimmed the line of her neck, and her sweetness melted away. “Better. What happened?”
“You don’t remember?” Another lie? She recalled the events last night before she fell asleep.
“If only.” She dragged herself up, leaning on her arms. “I meant why.”
I scratched at my beard and gripped the back of the headboard with my other hand. So this was the game she wanted to play.
“What did Brody say to you?”
“Brody? Your brother?” Her gaze flickered left and right between sluggish blinks, confusion creasing her brows. Then her eyes snapped up. “It was your brother. Oh. I…He…he didn’t make sense. Said I killed her. That I got to live. I don’t know.”
She cleared her throat with a wet, raspy sound.
“His girlfriend was murdered.”
She scampered upright. Her hand rubbed over the mark my brother left behind, and I traced the colors with my eyes.
“By the serial killer I told you about. He’s angry because you’ve survived as long as you have when he only got a week with her. He thinks you’re lying about who you say you are.”
“Oh.”
One bland word that said so much and nothing at all. I gave her the opening of the century to spill her secret, and she gave me a fucking random interjection. Not a denial, not an admission. Just Oh.
Numbness seeped like a chill through my pores and crept into my bloodstream. It dragged me back down below the surface. The anger dulled. The hurt faded to a blunted thudding against my chest.
“We should get up.”
I scooted off the bed and padded to the bathroom before she voiced a protest or tried to sweet-talk me. I splashed water over my face to the sound of my name and stared at my reflection in the mirror.
Two paths lay ahead. One, I confronted her and discovered how far the rabbit hole went.
Or two, I cut my losses and let her go. One where she revealed it was all subterfuge, and I lost her emotionally, or the other where Cranwell announced her dead in days to a couple of weeks, and I lost her physically. Neither sounded better than the other.
“When do we need to leave?” she called out.
A slight, pained croak tweaked her voice, and it tugged at a piece of me that wasn’t quite as numb as the rest.
I filled a cup of water, prepared two pain pills, and placed them on her nightstand.
“We’re not.”
“Why not?”
I jerked my gaze down to her neck. She reached up and stopped halfway.
“No, I’m fine. I want to go.” On the bed, she shuffled on her knees toward me. “We have to. One more perfect date. We need it.”
“Do we?”
“I need it. With you. Us, together.” She clasped my hands. “I’m up for whatever you have planned. Absolutely anything. Please.” With one hand, she air-patted her throat, then turned her neck left, then right. “See. This is nothing. I’m fine. Some quality time with you will make it all better.”
The desperation practically steamed off her, but why?
“Take your pills. Get dressed.”
“Wait.” She squeezed my wrist. “Are you okay?”
“I wasn’t the one almost strangled.”
“I-I know. It’s just…you’re a little…”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Bizarre? Cold? Did something else happen while I was sleeping? Is it your brother? Are you…Will everything be alright between you two?”
I pinched my lips together.
“Don’t worry about it.”
Despite the jabbing cuts she kept scoring into my heart, I bent down and kissed the top of her head. Slight remains of her perfume suffused my lungs, a spiced tartness under the cheeriness of roses, just like her. Exactly what I fell for, a trap made just for me.
“I’ll get you a new perfume. This one doesn’t suit you.”
A hurt expression flickered across her brows.
“I made this one.”
“Right.” I scratched my beard and tongued the front of my teeth, exhausted with whatever the bleeding hell this conversation was turning into. “Just get dressed. Warm clothes. Let me know if you need anything for…” I gestured to her neck. “I’ll wait for you by the door.”