Chapter 45 #2
I tried turning him around, but with him tied in that chair, it was impossible. “Why are there ropes?”
No one answered, but I didn’t wait. I dug into his pockets, where I knew he kept his trusted knife, so I could saw through them.
“Come on, mari chéri. Stay with me. Maeve, help me.”
Drool dribbled down the side of his mouth as I cut the ropes away.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Maeve said behind me.
“Why?” I grunted as I lugged his body toward the wall to sit him up.
“Not a good idea.”
I halted midway through a last haul to the wall and nodded.
“You’re right. He’s better off lying down.”
There was nothing peaceful about the tense way he lay. His fists were balled. His muscles spasmed. Suddenly, he coughed and gargled, and I twisted his head in time for vomit to spew over the hardwood flooring. His eyes flickered open, the look in them glazed over.
“Get Arthur and Charlie,” I tossed over my shoulder.
“I doubt they’re any better than him.”
Those cryptic words flew over my head.
I patted away the sweat on his forehead with my sleeve. “You’re going to be fine.”
“He won’t,” Maeve singsonged unhelpfully.
Suddenly, he flinched hard. His eyes went wide, and his hands grappled onto me. A sound garbled out of him, not really a word, not really a moan.
“Don’t listen to her.” I massaged my nails through his hair, not sure what to do before the emergency services arrived. A swollen bump reddened one temple where he’d fallen. “What happened?”
It wasn’t the first time Maeve neglected to answer since I had entered the office, but it was the first time her silence clawed at me.
Cillian pushed the panic button, Brody had said. The sudden illness. The rope. That stuff didn’t just appear. I gasped in a quivering breath, my eyes watery, and shook my head at my silly thoughts. It wasn’t possible she’d do this.
Except I spied Maeve’s duffel bag lying wide open and empty on the office floor, where under no circumstances did it belong.
The same duffel bag I had thought held a change of clothes and necessities because she meant to ask to stay over for some space from Erel.
Beside it, the grill of a small, portable electric barbecue flared red-hot, and atop it lay a branding iron, heat sizzling off the edges of the design. A sort of Celtic knot.
A tear trailed down my face as it hit me.
Poisoned, branded, stabbed—the Love Knot Killer’s modus operandi.
It always sounded just a little far-fetched when Cillian mentioned it, but now the truth stared back at me under the guise of my best friend as she leaned against the wall, completely unmoved by this situation.
She wore her usual artless expression that had made her so approachable so many years ago.
“You didn’t call an ambulance,” I whispered.
“No.” She crouched beside me and wiped my tear with her thumb, but more flowed to replace its disappearance. “This is exactly what he deserves.”
My mouth gaped open between harsh swallows. “Why?”
“It’s either you or him, and it can’t be you. I refuse for it to be you.”
Her words were jumbled in my head, none of them fitting together in a logical combination. After all these years, how had I never seen this side of her?
“Give me the antidote.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“But he’s my husband.” I scanned his desk for the elusive panic button and instead caught sight of a gun taped to the underside of it. “You can’t take him from me. I won’t let you.”
“Babe, it’s going to happen. You just need to accept it.”
“No. He needs a doctor. Get him a doctor.” Why was I fixating on that gun? It wasn’t going to help him. I wrenched my gaze away. “My phone. Where’s my phone?”
Brody might still be listening. He could call for help, but when I launched myself to the ground to search for it, she shoved me backward.
“Call an ambulance. Get a doctor,” I yelled.
“Calm down.”
I shook off her touch and crawled over to check on Cillian. His skin was pale, too pale, and all that tension in his body from earlier was nothing but a memory. This time, I found no pulse. In a rush, I straddled him and started chest compressions.
“Come on, Cillian. Wake up. Don’t leave me.”
“I’d like us to do this together. It’ll be good for you. Cathartic.” Maeve spoke as if to placate a child, completely oblivious to my brewing dread. When had everything gone so wrong? “Babe, are you listening? Let’s end him together.”
My head snapped her way. “What?”
She cocked her head to the side, brows furrowed. “We have to do this. He would have hurt you. He’s going to. That’s what he does.”
“Why do you keep saying that? He never would have hurt me,” I snarled at her. Every pump of my palms against Cillian’s chest boosted my refusal.
“He was already doing it to you. Look at your throat. Your face. No matter how much you try to hide it behind makeup, the abuse shows. That’s what O’Learys do. They did it to my moms too.”
“What?” Moms?
“I never told you I was adopted.” She swept my hair away from my face as I pressed hard and fast down on his chest, but I jerked away.
She sighed and rose. “My birth mother died a few days after giving birth to me. A sudden heart attack. Mam called it having her heart broken too many times. And you know who did it? An O’Leary.
My own father killed my mother. He substituted her for a prettier woman just because he could.
He let someone steal what wasn’t ever supposed to be theirs, then left her pregnant to rot at barely nineteen with no one to help.
No one to care. And no money because he’d stolen everything she had left. ”
I startled in realization. “Cillian’s your brother.”
“He’s not my anything,” she shot back, finally something real peeking through the calm facade. “Never was. Definitely not after killing my mam.”
“No.” That wasn’t right. “Morrigan died of cancer.”
Maeve knelt in front of the grill and twirled the branding iron on its side, metal clanking against metal.
“She only died of cancer because the doctors were too busy treating her recurring infections from the knife wound he left behind, instead of looking for what else was keeping her weak. If he hadn’t tried to kill her, they would have diagnosed her sooner.
She would still be alive. It’s all his fault. ”
Morrigan’s death was always a hard subject for her.
I had helped her cope through her grief after Morrigan passed, but it was hard to sympathize with Maeve as I tried to pump life back into my husband’s body.
When he was dying because of her. When she abused our friendship to do this to the man I loved.
“Why did he stab her, Maeve?”
She’d conveniently left out that detail all those years ago, instead passing off Morrigan’s sudden abdominal health issues as a severe case of Crohn’s disease.
“Tell me why,” I spat.
I had a guess, and I really hoped I was wrong.
“You know why. He caught her. In that living room. He just couldn’t stand that we’d gotten the better of him.”
My jaw dropped as nausea burned up my throat.
“Morrigan was the Love Knot Killer?”
This was the same woman who had welcomed me into her suburban home on several occasions and happily fed me homemade Irish potato pancakes and corned beef brisket.
The same woman who used to volunteer at soup kitchens and took extra shifts as a janitor in different high-rises to put Maeve through college. I was going to be sick.
“No, we were. Together.”
My head shot up, bile flooding my mouth, and my hands stalled before I forced myself to keep making compressions. This wasn’t the Maeve I knew.
“Now I am,” she continued. “I always was there. She handled the poison, me the knife, and together the brand. Our routine for unity. And when I was too small to stab them, she helped me. Our hands went at it together. It was special.”
I gazed at the door longingly. How long until an ambulance arrived?
Had Brody even heard? What if he hadn’t?
I had to believe he had. I had to believe that every moment spent talking was a moment closer to help arriving.
My arms burned, but with every movement of his chest beneath my hands as he took in a breath, I pumped more and more.
“But you weren’t there that day,” I said, desperate to keep the conversation going.
“I was late. I almost didn’t come at all because you convinced me I didn’t have to follow in her footsteps if I didn’t want to.
But don’t worry. I don’t hold it against you.
I really didn’t want to do it anymore.” Her switch from aggression to placid calm made me flinch.
“I wouldn’t have, but he stabbed her. He made her leave me.
I had to nurse her back to health, only to then watch her die, little by little, until she was gone.
All because of what he did. It’s all his fault. ”
Metal scraped on metal as she picked up the branding iron. The Celtic knot blazed with searing red heat.
“It’s time. Don’t move.”
“No, wait, wait, wait.”