Chapter 15
Annabelle
Striding into the living room, gun up, I see a woman in a beanie and sunglasses in the open-plan kitchen. She pulls off her beanie and takes her sunglasses off, placing them on the kitchen island before she looks up and sees me.
I frown. “Lucy?”
“Hello, Annabelle,” she says. “I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. Been kind of busy, but I don’t think that’s a reason to shoot me, is it?”
“Lucy?” Ethan says, coming up behind me, slower than I expected. “What is going on?”
I blink. I don’t lower the gun. “Where have you been?”
“Trying to prove who killed Christa,”
“It was Maeve Deveaux,” I blurt out. “Go and find her.”
“Wait,” Aidan says, pushing past Ethan to stand between me and my mum’s friend. “Lucy? Annabelle. This is our mother. Maeve.”
My heart drops to my feet and then shoots back up again. My hand with the gun trembles enough that he lunges forward and takes it from me, placing his hand over the barrel and lowering it carefully. “What?”
“Let me explain,” Lucy… Maeve says.
“This should be good,” Callan mutters behind me.
Aidan turns and raises the gun, pointing it at Lucy. “You’d better answer her now. What sick game are you playing?”
“I’m not,” she says to Aidan. “I already told you, Christa and I were friends. I told the rest to Ethan in the car while we were trying to track you down. Christa and I were working together to bring down the corrupt police ring,” she says, quickly, which I appreciate.
Beating around the bush right now will just make my brain shut down.
I shove Aidan out of the way. “What? What do you mean by working together?”
Lucy, or Maeve, whatever her name is, takes a breath and leans forward on the kitchen island, then catches herself, straightening instead. She looks at me properly for the first time since I lowered the gun, and there is something in her face that I was not expecting.
Guilt.
Not the performed kind. The kind that has lived in someone for years, wearing grooves into them.
“We met about six years ago,” she says. “A support group. Not the kind you advertise. Word of mouth only, women who had been failed by the police. Raped, assaulted, stalked. Reported it. Watched it get buried.”
My throat closes.
“Christa was there because of what Briggs did to her,” Maeve says. “I was there because two of the women in the group had been killed after reporting Fletcher and Bennett. Everyone thought they were suicides. I knew they weren’t.”
“How did you know?” I ask.
“Because I was a victim too.”
“What?” Ethan spits out. “You failed to mention that earlier.”
“Would it have made a difference?” she asks, looking at him briefly but then back to me.
“We were trying to bring them down with cold, hard evidence we could take to court. We had files, but nothing from them could be used. We would’ve ended up dead if we’d gone public with what we had.
Christa wanted to. She was scared. She… died because of it. ”
“What?” I whimper. “No.”
“Enough,” Callan says.
“No, it’s not enough,” Lucy… Maeve… says. “It’s not enough until those fuckers are behind bars.”
I sob quietly into my hand, shaking my head, biting my lip to try and get control of myself. “What about—what about Jack? Why does he think you killed her?”
Maeve’s expression shifts. Not flinching, but something close to it. She looks at Aidan first, then Ethan, then back to me.
“Because I let him,” she says.
The words land flat and terrible in the kitchen.
“You let him,” I repeat.
“Jack had found fragments. Pieces of things that looked damning if you didn’t know the full picture.
A woman dead near my car. Correspondence that Briggs had forged.
A timeline that put me in places I genuinely was, but for different reasons than the ones Jack constructed.
” She presses her lips together. “When I realised what he was building, I had a choice. Correct it, which meant exposing myself and destroying years of work, or let him keep believing it.”
“So you chose to let him think you were a murderer,” Ethan says, his voice dangerously quiet. “And all the while we thought it was him. You two are so fucked up, you deserve each other.”
“I chose to stay alive long enough to finish what Christa and I started,” she snaps at her eldest son. Her eyes come back to mine. “I’m sorry. I know that isn’t nearly enough.”
“Stop apologising,” I snap, because every time she does it, something in me wants to accept it, and I’m not ready because I don’t fully understand what is going on. “So, you are saying the police aren’t being paid off? They’re the ones doing it and covering it up?
Maeve nods.
I look at Ethan. “You believe this?”
“Yes,” he says, grimly.
I drag in a breath so deep it hurts. My mother wasn’t just killed.
She was killed because she was trying to do something about the people who hurt her.
She was brave, and she was killed for it, and I spent four years not knowing any of that.
Four years thinking she just got unlucky.
Four years thinking some faceless evil touched her life at random.
It wasn’t random.
It was deliberate and calculated, and they got away with it.
My legs go. Not completely. Aidan catches my elbow before I hit the floor, and I let him, because my pride ran out somewhere around the point a sniper shot out the window.
“Sit down,” he says, low and firm.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not. Sit down.”
I sit on the sofa because arguing with him takes energy I don’t have. The gun is still in his hand, pointed loosely at the floor. He is standing slightly in front of me without making a production of it. That steadies me more than anything else could right now.
Maeve looks at me from across the kitchen island.
She hasn’t moved. She is giving me space, and that makes me trust her a fraction more than I want to.
Ethan’s endorsement adds to it, but she still lied to me.
I didn’t know her well. I met her a handful of times when I caught my mum with her.
That’s the only word I can use. Mum’s stammered-out introduction was clearly fake now that I think back to it.
“Annabelle! Why are you home so early?”
“I’m feeling off. Think I’m getting a cold.”
“This is… this is…”
“Lucy,” the woman said quickly. Too quickly.
I nodded and went upstairs because I felt like shit and just wanted to lie down. There were maybe two more times after that I saw her, but barely spoke to her.
“Bennett called me,” I say, when I can speak without my voice cracking, because Ethan trusts her.
“I know,” she says. “I was with Ethan when he called you.”
The room shifts.
“What did he say? Exactly?” Maeve asks.
“He wanted me to come into the station. Said he had new information about my mother’s case. I told him tomorrow afternoon.”
Maeve closes her eyes for exactly two seconds. When she opens them, they are sharp and decided. “That’s it.”
“That’s what?” Callan asks. “And be very fucking careful what your next words are.”
“That’s how we do it.” She looks between her sons, then back to me. “He’s escalating. He wants to take this to the next level.”
“Next level?” I murmur. “What do you mean, the next level?”
“You are their target,” Ethan says quietly. “They want you.”
“Want?” I croak, but I don’t need anyone to give me specifics. Not after what I’ve just learned. The silence that follows is the worst kind. The kind where everyone in the room knows the answer and no one wants to be the one to say it out loud.
Maeve is the one who does.
“They’ve been watching you since before Christa died,” she says. “Briggs started it. He had a fixation that went well beyond professional. When she died, it transferred. You look like her. You live alone. You grieve visibly. I’ve been protecting you, making sure someone was always near you.”
“Not us,” Aidan says instantly. “We were marching to the beat of our own drum.”
“So I’m on some kind of list,” I say, ignoring him. My voice comes out very flat. “And Bennett ringing me wasn’t about my mother’s case at all.”
“No,” Maeve says. “He is moving in, and you’re going to let him.”
“No,” Callan says, moving forward. “You are not putting her in that position.”
“She can end what her mother started!” Maeve insists, her eyes going slightly wild after her composure of the last few minutes. “We can get the evidence we need!”
“She’s not a fucking pawn,” Aidan says, and his voice drops into that register that means the conversation is about to stop being a conversation.
“I’m not saying she is.” Maeve’s hands come up, palms out. “I’m saying she has a choice. That is more than Christa had.”
That lands somewhere it shouldn’t.
I look at my hands pressed against my stomach. They are steadier than they were a minute ago, which surprises me. The grief is still there, hot and enormous, pressing against my ribs from the inside. But underneath it, something else has started. Something quieter and far more dangerous.
My mother was not a victim who stumbled into the wrong place. She was brave. She was fighting. She died for it.
I want to finish what she started.
The thought arrives fully formed, and I hate how clean it feels.
“Annabelle,” Ethan says. He is watching me the way he does when he already knows what I am thinking and is deciding whether to let me get there on my own or intervene.
“Don’t,” I say.
He goes still.
Maeve watches me with those worn-out eyes that have seen too much and said too little, and I feel the weight of everything she is not saying pressing down on the room.
“I want to hear the plan,” I say.
“Annabelle.” Ethan’s voice is a warning.
“I’m not asking your permission. I’m telling you what I want.”
His jaw hardens. His eyes do that thing where they go very dark and very still at the same time, and I know he is fighting every instinct he has not to pick me up and lock me in the en-suite until this whole city collapses in on itself.
“She’s right,” Callan says from behind me.
Ethan turns his head slowly.
“She is. You know she is.” Callan says, even though Ethan hadn’t spoken. He moves around the sofa and stops a few feet from me, looking at me directly instead of around me, which I appreciate more than I can put into words right now. “You want to hear it before you decide. Not after.”
“Exactly,” I say.
Aidan is very quiet beside me. He sits down next to me on the sofa, slowly, like the movement costs him, and I know it does. His hand finds my knee, and he leaves it there.
Maeve takes a breath. “Bennett will expect her to come in alone. Frightened. Easy to manage.” She looks at me. “If you go in with us on you like flies on shit, when he makes his move, we can take them all down in one go. Bennett, Fletcher, Arnold, Cooper. All of them.”
“With me?” I repeat.
“We will have eyes on you the entire time,” she says. “You go in alone. You let him take you wherever he wants to take you. We will be following.”
“Oh, fuck no!” Aidan snaps. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
I look at Maeve. Something about this moment has weight and edges, and I can feel exactly where they are.
“Stop,” I say.
Aidan’s hand tightens on my knee. “Annabelle—”
“No.” I stand up, and he lets me because he can see something in my face that tells him not to push it. “I’m not fragile. I’m not the girl you found barely hanging on by a thread.” I look at Ethan. “You made me into something different, remember? You said that.”
His jaw works. He doesn’t deny it.
“Stop treating me like I’m still her.”
The penthouse is very quiet.
Maeve watches me with something that is not quite pride and not quite grief on her face. It makes me want to look away, so I don’t.
“I need all of it,” I say. “No editing. No deciding I can’t handle it.”
Maeve nods once. “Bennett will try to remove you from public view. He won’t do anything inside the main station. Too many cameras, too many straight officers. He’ll use the case as leverage, say there’s evidence in storage, or a witness, or that you need to identify something. He will move you.”
“To where?”
“Likely a secondary location.” Her mouth tightens. “They used an old evidence facility before. It was decommissioned three years ago, but the utilities are still live because it’s technically waiting for redevelopment.”
Ethan’s voice is flat. “Address.”
Maeve rattles one off without hesitation.
Callan is already taking out his phone. “That’s near the canal.”
“Yes.”
“And you expect us to let him put her in a car and drive her there,” Aidan grits out.
“I expect you to follow,” Maeve says. “I expect you not to lose her.”
“That isn’t a plan. That’s a fucking prayer.”
“No,” she snaps. “A prayer is hoping someone saves you. A plan is making sure the bastards never know they’re already caught.”
Ethan gives a humourless laugh. “You sound very confident for a woman who has spent years not catching them.”
Maeve flinches. It is tiny, but I see it.
Good. Maybe she needs to bleed a little too.
“I didn’t have Annabelle,” she says.
The room goes cold.
Aidan stands so fast that I reach for him on instinct, worried about his wound. His face has gone flat in that terrifying way I’m learning means he is a heartbeat away from violence.
“Say that again,” he says.
“I’m saying they have made her central, whether any of us like it or not. Bennett rang her. Not me. Not Jack. Her.”
That makes something hot crack through my chest.
“She’s right. If I am the only person who can do this with their eyes wide fucking open, then I’m doing it. I will get you cold, hard evidence even if I have to suffer to do it.”
“Tinks,” Ethan growls, moving closer.
I shove him away. “No. None of you gets to decide how I do this. My mother was abused by these men. They killed her when she wanted to out them. I will see them fucking burn for this if it’s the last fucking thing I ever do.”
And for the first time in four years, the will to live has never been stronger, just so I can bring these arseholes down. After that… who knows?