Chapter 6
Annabelle
The silence wakes me.
Not complete silence. The kind that hums with held breath and danger. I blink at the ceiling, disoriented for half a second, then everything comes back in one hard rush. The warehouse. The blood. Aidan missing. Ethan inside me. Callan’s hand in mine.
My body aches in a way that would be pleasant if the rest of my life were not a catastrophe.
Ethan and Callan aren’t here, and the bedroom door is closed.
I can hear hushed voices coming from elsewhere in the apartment and stretch.
I ache in places I haven’t ached in a while.
Pushing back the covers, I move quickly to the en-suite.
Aidan is still hurt and missing, and lying around isn’t helping anyone.
I flick on the shower and step under the spray.
Hot water hits my skin, and for one selfish minute, I close my eyes and let it beat against the back of my neck. My muscles protest. My thighs ache. There is a scrape on my knee from the pavement outside the library. My whole body feels used up and over wired at the same time.
I wash quickly. No lingering. No pretending this is normal.
I shut the water off at once, dry myself in frantic, clumsy movements, while walking back into the bedroom, and drag on clean underwear, leggings, and a vest top.
I finger-comb my damp hair back and pull it into a messy bun, staring at myself in the mirror for half a second.
I look pale. Wrecked. More alive than I have in years.
It is a disturbing combination.
There are still the hushed voices drifting from the apartment. One of them slams into me. Aidan.
He’s back. My heart kicks so hard it hurts.
Crossing quickly to the bedroom door, I yank it open and hurry to the living area.
The first thing I see is Aidan slumped in an armchair covered with blood.
The second thing I see is a man I’ve never seen before, but I know immediately who he is.
Everything inside me stops.
Jack Deveaux turns his head and looks at me.
I freeze in the doorway.
For one sick second, nobody moves.
Then all hell breaks loose.
“Back in the bedroom,” Ethan growls.
Callan is on me at once, not rough, but relentless, putting himself between me and the open-plan room. “Annabelle.”
I stare around him at the man who killed my mother. Pure, rage-driven instinct kicks in, and I duck around Callan, launching myself at Jack, hand raised. I slap him so hard across his face, my hand stings like a mother fucker, and my nails leave scratches down his cheek.
“Bastard!” I scream and hit him again, this time a fist to his face that feels like hitting a wall. “Fucking bastard! I’m going to fucking kill you!”
Ethan’s arms are iron bands around my waist as he picks me up, my feet leaving the floor as I kick and scream and scratch.
“Put me down!”
He doesn’t. He carries me backwards as if I weigh nothing, his chest hard against my back, one arm locked around my waist, the other catching my wrists before I can claw free again.
“Cal,” he snaps.
“I’ve got her.”
Callan steps in front of us, eyes on my face, not touching me yet, blocking the doorway to the rest of the apartment.
Behind him, I catch flashes. Aidan hauls himself forward in the chair with murder all over his face.
Jack is sitting there with a red mark on his cheek and scratches cutting across his skin.
He doesn’t wipe them away. He just looks at me.
I fucking hate that look.
I hate his face. His eyes. The way he exists after what he did.
“Let me go,” I spit, voice cracking. “Let me fucking go. I want him dead.”
“I know,” Ethan says into my hair, too calm, which only makes me angrier. “You’re not going near him again.”
Callan reaches for me then, one hand closing around my forearm, firm and sure.
“Look at me,” he says.
“I don’t want to look at you.” I wrench against Ethan’s hold anyway, still trying to get to Jack around Callan’s body. “I want to smash his fucking head in.”
“You’ve made your point,” Ethan says.
“My point?” I laugh, wild and horrible. “He murdered my mum.”
Jack’s voice cuts through the room. “No. I didn’t.”
I go dead still for one beat, then lose my mind all over again. “Shut the fuck up.” I try to lunge forward. Ethan tightens his hold. “Shut up. Shut up. You don’t get to speak to me.”
“Annabelle.” Aidan’s voice is rough with pain. “Breathe.”
I snap my head towards him. “Why is he here?”
No one answers quickly enough.
That makes it worse.
My chest heaves. I can hear my own breathing. Too fast. Too sharp. My skin is burning where Ethan holds me, not because it hurts, but because I want out and I can’t get out. “Why is he in this apartment?”
“Aidan brought him,” Ethan says.
I twist hard enough to glare up at him. “Have you all completely lost your fucking minds?”
“Potentially,” Aidan mutters.
“Not helping,” Callan says, still right in front of me, still steady, still blocking every route back to Jack.
Ethan is restraining one wrist against my stomach, and the other is trapped in his hand. “Explain it to me like I’m not about to fucking black out.”
Aidan drags a hand over his face, wincing as the movement pulls at his side. “He says he didn’t kill your mum.”
I stare at him. Then at Ethan. Then at Callan.
No one laughs. No one says it’s a joke.
Something cold and violent opens in my chest. “Right. So, you told me he did, and now he is saying he didn’t?
” My screech is probably only something dogs can hear.
The betrayal, the pain, the intensity of this is threatening to crush my mind, and I’m barely holding on.
Tears, hot and irritating, sting my eyes.
“Annabelle,” Ethan says.
“Don’t.” My voice comes out shredded. “Do not say my name like that and expect me to calm down.”
He loosens one hand enough to turn me in his hold, forcing me to face him instead of twisting back towards Jack. His expression is hard, but not with me. Never with me. “Listen first.”
“I have listened.” I laugh again, and it sounds wrong enough to make my own skin crawl.
“I listened when I invited you into my home. I listened when you fed me, showered me, and made me go to work. I listened when you told me you were three men, not one. I listened when you fucking told me your father murdered my mum. I listened when you told me I was being hunted, and bullets started flying at my head. Now I wake up, walk out here because I heard Aidan’s voice, and the man I’ve wanted dead for four years is sitting in your fucking living room, but he isn’t the man at all. ”
Callan’s hand slides from my forearm to my wrist, steadying, not restraining. “We know.”
“No, you don’t.” I rip the words out through gritted teeth. “You do not know what it is like to have been me for the last four years. You don’t.” A wretched sob escapes me that I can’t stop, even if I wanted to.
Aidan rises from the chair and sucks in a breath through his teeth. He comes closer. Chaos wrapped in a blood-soaked tee. “Annabelle.”
I ignore him. My eyes lock on Ethan’s. I can’t look back at Jack. I can’t. “Please,” I whisper. “Please don’t lie to me.”
Ethan’s face changes. Not softer. Worse. Honest.
“We didn’t lie to you,” he says. “We told you what we believed.”
“That is not better.”
“I know.”
Aidan stops a few feet away, one hand pressed to his side. Blood has dried in ugly streaks over his skin. He looks furious, ill, and completely serious. “I found him at the warehouse,” he says. “Then someone else started shooting at both of us.”
I stare at him through blurred vision. “So, you got trapped with a serial killer and came home with him.”
“Basically, yeah.”
“You say that like it’s fucking normal.”
“It isn’t.” His mouth hardens. “But he said things in that warehouse that I couldn’t ignore.”
Callan moves closer to my side. He is still a barrier between me and Jack, which I appreciate more than I want to admit. “Sit down,” he says quietly.
“No.”
“Annabelle.”
“I said no.” My throat burns. “If I sit down, this becomes a conversation, and I’m not ready for that.”
Jack speaks again, and my whole body locks. “You have every right to hate me.”
My head turns before I can stop it. “Do not tell me what I have a right to. You don’t get to give me permission for anything.”
His face doesn’t change much, which makes me hate him more. He takes the words like he expected them. Like he has practised being the monster in everyone’s story.
“Start with why he’s not dead.” I won’t address him to his face. I won’t give him that courtesy.
A muscle jumps in Aidan’s jaw. “Because he says Maeve killed your mum.”
The room goes thin around me. “Maeve? Your mother?”
My knees nearly give out as I look at the three brothers, then at the man in the chair, then back again. “Your mother is dead.”
“That’s what we thought,” Callan says.
“Thought.” I repeat the word because it sounds insane. “You thought. Jesus Christ.”
Jack’s gaze stays on me. “Maeve staged her death.”
“Stop talking.” I point at him with a shaking hand. “Every time you speak, I want to put a knife through your eye.”
Ethan steps closer, not blocking me now, just near enough that I know he is ready if I break apart or attack again. “Tinks.”
“No. I want it straight.” I wipe angrily at my face. “No riddles. No dramatic pauses. No one decides what I can handle. If I’m standing here listening to this deranged shit, then I get all of it.”
Aidan lowers himself back into the chair with a grimace. “That’s what we were doing before you came out.”
“Then do it again.”
No one speaks for a second.
I laugh once, sharp and humourless. “What now? You’ve all suddenly forgotten how words work?”
Jack is the one who answers. “Your mother was involved with me.”
A sound tears out of me. “No.”
It comes out flat at first.
Then louder.
“No.”
The room blurs at the edges. I stare at him and feel something in me split clean through the middle. My mother in the kitchen. My mother laughing at shit TV. My mother crying in the garden once when she thought I didn’t see. My mother dead, buried, and apparently fucking the man who ruined my life.
I shake my head hard. “No. You are not doing that to her.”
Jack does not look away. “It is the truth.”
“Fuck your truth.” I take a step forward before Ethan catches my elbow. “You disgusting bastard.”
“She didn’t deserve what happened to her.”
Rage hits so hard I nearly choke on it. “Do not talk about what she deserved. You don’t get to say her name. You do not get to stand in the wreckage of her life and act like you knew her.”
“I did know her. I loved her.”
I make a strangled noise and try to pull free again. Ethan’s hold tightens. Not painful. Unbreakable.
“Stop,” he says quietly.
“Why?” I snap. “So, he can keep shitting all over her memory?”
Aidan drags in a breath and looks like it hurts. “Annabelle, just hear the full thing.”
I whip round to him, but his face stops my next words. It’s pain.
It slams everything into perspective in under two seconds. I’m not the only one hurting. “Fine,” I grit out. “Speak.”
Jack draws a slow breath. I hate that he looks controlled in my presence. I hate that he gets to sit there in one of their chairs and speak about my mother like he has any right.
“I met Christa by accident,” he says. “I was already trapped in a marriage that had been dead for years. Your mother was kind to me when I didn’t deserve kindness. She tried to keep her distance. I didn’t let her.”
My stomach twists so hard it hurts. “You’re lying,” I whisper.
Jack keeps going. “Maeve found out. At first, she wanted to frighten Christa off. Then she became obsessed.”
The words hit like a slap I cannot block.
“Obsessed how?” My voice is thin, scraped raw. I hate that I asked. I hate him for making me ask.
Jack’s eyes do not leave my face. “With your mother. With me. With what Christa represented.”
I laugh under my breath, disgusted. “Represented. You talk about her like she was a fucking concept.”
“She was a woman I loved.”
“Stop saying that.”
He falls quiet for a beat. “Maeve watched her for months. She copied her clothes. Her hair. Her routines. She wanted to understand what made Christa different.”
A cold sickness rolls through me. Images flash in my head without permission.
I never asked enough questions.
Or maybe I did, and she lied because she wanted to protect me.
My chest hurts. “And then what? She killed her because she was jealous?”
“Basically. Yes.”
“Fuck!” I roar and shove my hands into my hair, pulling strands down from my bun.
The room goes silent after my shout, but it is not relief. It is the kind of silence that waits to see who breaks first.
I am pretty sure it will be me.
Ethan moves a fraction closer. Not enough to crowd me. Enough that if my legs give out, he catches me. Callan stays at my side like a blade someone planted in the floor. Aidan looks even more dangerous with blood all over him.
Jack sits in the middle of it all like he belongs nowhere and has accepted that years ago.
I force my hands down from my hair. They shake. “And where do you fit in? Why do your own sons think you killed their mother and my mother and countless other women?”
“Because I made sure they did. I needed them away from Maeve so I could get the evidence I needed.”
“And do you have it?” I ask.
The question hangs there, waiting to be answered.