Chapter 46
Did I keep pumping his heart or fend her off? I couldn’t choose. Part of me didn’t believe she’d do it. This was my Maeve. The one person I always trusted, the one who had my back no matter what. When everyone else tried to drag me down, she boosted me back up. I didn’t want to fight her.
When the iron came down for his cheek, my body reacted regardless.
I swiped the handle toward me, hoping she’d pull back.
She did, but the scalding metal still grazed his shoulder.
His eyes snapped open, his face twisting in pain, and he gasped for breath.
The skin smoked and roasted for that half-second touch, all red and angry, before the iron clattered to the floor and scorched the hardwood.
“It has to be done,” Maeve howled at me. She snatched up a chef’s knife off the bar cart and pointed it at me. I recognized it from her kitchen by the Damascus steel blade and white oak handle. “Don’t you get it? I’m trying to save you.”
“I never asked you to save me.” I scrambled off him and knelt in front of her. “It’s supposed to be me, isn’t it? You go after the O’Leary women. Why not me? Just leave him be.”
“It could never be you. You’re my chosen sister. Like my mam and mom, we chose each other.”
“But I don’t choose this. Please, Maeve. Don’t. Let it go.”
She gripped her head and growled. “I can’t.
I already gave you what you wanted. Don’t be greedy.
I let you go after him, even though it was against the rules.
I let you try to fill the hole inside you that needed male validation because your father never gave it to you, and you and I both know your brothers won’t give it either. I get that.”
“I have never needed a man to achieve anything I’ve done. Just because I wanted love doesn’t mean my self-worth depended on it.”
“Then move out of the way,” she yelled.
“He’s my person. Didn’t we always say how special it was to find your person?”
“I’m your person,” she lashed out. “Not him.”
I’d never seen her bursting with anger before. Her eyes were red and manic, and her skin was flushed.
“Maeve, you do this, and everyone will know. Erel knows you’re here. Cillian’s brother does too. And the concierge. But you can still stop this and walk away.”
“Walk away? There is no walking away. This is my life.”
I held my hands out pleadingly, feeling every second they were not checking Cillian’s pulse or pressing compressions against his heart slipping through my fingers.
“Non, ma belle. Your life is with Erel and me. With your employees and your company. Trying new restaurants. New hairdos. Your garden. There are so many other things in your life.”
“You don’t understand,” she cried out, slashing the knife through the air.
“Try me.”
“This is what I do. It’s what I have to do. There are rules. He slept with you. You took something that never belonged to you. One of you has to die. It’s the only way.”
“The only way for what?”
“The only way for me to right their wrongs,” she yelled, and then she lunged.
The knife flashed in slow motion. I saw it all happen in the blink of an eye. She’d stab him, and he’d die, just like all those women. Gone. The end. The threads of our story cut short. I refused to accept that. Help was coming. He only needed more time for them to arrive.
I dove between them and coiled myself around Cillian. I swore his arms wrapped around me too, and I fell into the ideal of one more perfect moment together before it all ended.
The blade stabbed through my lower back, pushing in and shoving me further into him. My ribs bent to give way around it. Pain flared white-hot, and I groaned through the burn.
Beneath me, Cillian growled, his body trembling with obvious effort. His eyes were open and hazy, but focused on Maeve behind me. He was alive. He was awake, and that was all that mattered.
When the blade tugged me backward and withdrew, it left a void of pain.
Barely a throb remained, just background noise compared to my need to keep him alive.
His gaze drooped again, going vacant, and his hand plummeted to the ground between us, palm cut to the bone.
He’d stopped the blade. It had gone in, but somehow I knew that he’d kept it from going too deep.
I crawled to him. “Chéri, stay awake.”
“Why?” Maeve yelled as she spun me around by the shoulders and shook me hard. A cry burst from my lungs, pain suddenly blazing to life from the wound. “Why’d you get in the way? He’s not worth it. They never are.”
“I won’t let you kill him.”
“I’m doing this for you.”
Again, she raised her knife, aimed at him, and I kicked out at her stomach. Her huff gave me time to reach the compact, lightweight firearm taped beneath Cillian’s desk. I racked the slide, disengaged the safety, then levelled it at her.
“Don’t,” I warned as she clambered to her knees. My grip shook around the gun.
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No. I know you won’t.” Maeve shook her head, so sure of herself. “You’re my soul sister. That means more than anything.”
She really believed that, and it would’ve been true half an hour ago. I shot the floor between her feet, the crack of the bullet breaking something between us, then pulled my aim back up to her chest.
“Please. I’m begging you.” My vision watered. “Just stop this. Let it go.”
“How can you ask me that?”
“We deserve to be happy, Maeve. That means letting the past go. It’s time to move on.”
My voice broke, and her face hardened. She wasn’t getting it. She didn’t want to. Or maybe it was because I didn’t believe my own words. What kind of future did a serial killer have?
“I was only ever happy with you,” she said. “Don’t you get that? I like the past. You were mine. I love us the way we were.”
Pounding thumped in my head, or maybe it was somewhere else in the apartment. The small gun grew heavy and sagged in my clammy grasp.
“We can’t ever go back to the way we were. Not after this.”
“Don’t say that.”
Tears poured down my cheeks with shaky sobs as I tried to find the old Maeve in her.
The smiling one. The witty one. The snarky woman who always knew what to say or do to make the world brighter.
But it was like looking through a broken mirror and realizing that everything I knew was distorted.
It was all a fractured illusion of the person I wanted to see.
“You’ve killed dozens of women, Maeve. You’re trying to kill the man I love. What else am I supposed to say?”
“What about him? How many has he killed? How many has your brother killed? What about Erel? Why are their kills acceptable compared to mine?” She thumped her chest. “All mine deserved to be punished. They had to die. That’s what a blood feud is.”
“And me? Don’t I deserve to die?”
“If you’d rather be with him than me, maybe you do. Maybe I was wrong.”
Again, that pounding rang in my ears because this hurt. It clawed at my chest and ripped my heart out with the reality that there was no way out of this. I lost either him or her today, and the choice was mine.
When she advanced with that knife raised, I made it. The gun banged between us and recoiled in my hand. At the same time, she dropped.
“You missed,” she muttered.
Blood pooled from a bullet wound in the right side of her abdomen, creeping outward in an arc. Quickly, too quickly. I had hoped by aiming right below her lungs, she would have a chance.
“I never wanted you dead.” The gun clattered to the floor beside me.
She reached a hand out along the floor, and our fingers grazed each other. “I’m glad you’re here. With me.”
My chest heaved with heavy sobs, searing me in pain as the stab wound in my back woke up. I barely felt her touch, and that hurt more than the stabbing.
That incessant pounding in the background finally broke in three sharp cracks.
“Killy,” an accented voice yelled. Liam? I chased the sound with a languid twist of my head.
“Maeve,” Erel cried out.
“Over here,” I quavered. The sound rattled in my chest.
A stampede rushed through the apartment, person after person filing inside the office in a nonstop flow. I heard the vibrations of their steps more than I saw them as they settled around the three of us in clusters.
“Hi, my name’s Michael. I’m a paramedic.” The newcomer’s drowned voice was too mellow, given that I’d just shot my closest friend. “Can you give me your name? Where does it hurt?”
“Help him,” I coughed out as figures blurred around me and turned into vague shadows. The world swam in and out. I lifted a heavy hand and tried to point. “Poison. Hellebore. Foxglove. In his coffee.”
“Okay, that’s good. There’s another team working with him. What about you?”
“And her. I shot her. Help her.”
“We will, but let’s help you too.”
My eyes opened and shut without my say-so.
My head lolled against Cillian’s desk. There were so many voices, one over the other.
So many sounds. Metal clanking, chiming, something mechanic whining.
The tear of clothing, not mine. Suddenly, I wasn’t sitting upright anymore but was lifted onto a gurney. A mask tightened over my face.
“We’ve got a single penetrating sharp-force trauma to the…,” the paramedic’s voice droned.
“Shock advised,” a mechanical voice stated from farther in the room.
“Is he going to make it?” Liam asked frantically, so close but so far away. Cillian…he was talking about Cillian, and I tried to reach out to him as the gurney snapped up.
“Move aside, sir. Everyone stand clear,” another stranger exclaimed as the room rolled past me.
A long, steady tone sounded, followed by a dull thud, then beeping picked up, rhythmic and steady.
“Maeve, stay with me,” Erel said, somewhere else.
“I-I want to go with…Al,” Maeve strained to say. “Take me to Al, Erel.”
“We are going to. In the ambulance.”
“Y-you need…t-to find some…someone b-better than me,” she stuttered. “You’re a-a good man, just n-not good for me.”
“Mon ange.” The pain in Erel’s distant voice broke what was left of me. “I only want you.”
Rocked by the sway of my gurney, I let oblivion swallow me whole.