Chapter 26
Annabelle
The drive is silent. Ethan keeps one hand on the wheel and one hand on my thigh.
I keep my gaze on the window, watching the fields blur back into the grey edges of the city.
The hedgerows give way to retail parks and roundabouts, ordinary life carrying on without any idea that people are dead in a farmhouse forty miles north of here, and that the person who put a bullet in the back of his head is still out there, nowhere to be found.
Bennett might have been telling the truth.
I can’t stop turning it over. The way he held the badge.
The way he didn’t flinch when Maeve nearly shot him.
The way he said I tried to stop it like the words cost him something real.
Something about the way Bennett stood in that open ground with four weapons on him and didn’t try to run doesn’t sit right with the version of him where he is the monster.
But he’s dead now, so it doesn’t matter what I think.
That thought arrives with a flatness that frightens me a little.
“Stop,” Ethan says.
I look at him. “Stop what?”
“Thinking so hard I can hear it from here.”
I turn back to the window. “Bennett might have been telling the truth.”
“Yep.”
“We let someone kill our only inside source.”
“We didn’t let anything. Someone was already there.”
“Briggs.”
“Or someone Briggs sent.” His thumb moves once on my thigh. “Bennett walked into that field knowing the risk. He knew what he was doing.”
“That doesn’t make it better.”
“No,” he agrees. “It doesn’t.”
The city thickens around us. “What now?” I ask. “What are we supposed to do now? Jack is dead, Maeve is the good guy, Bennett is a good guy and dead… what the fuck do we do next?”
He sighs. He has the look of a man who knows something he doesn’t want to tell me. “We let Aidan and Callan sort it out.”
My blood goes cooler. “Meaning?”
“I know my brothers. Neither one of them is sitting on this bullshit heap for a second longer. If I didn’t have you to consider, I’d be with them. They are going after Briggs.”
“And you know this how?”
“Triplet intuition.”
“Oh, don’t,” I mutter.
He shrugs. “It’s a fact.”
“It sucks.”
He doesn’t say anything as he pulls into the underground car park and into his space. He cuts the engine.
“You hate this,” I say.
“What?”
“Playing babysitter while your brothers have the fun.”
“I don’t hate protecting you, Annabelle.”
“That’s not what I said.”
He turns his head to look at me properly. His eyes are very steady and very dark. “I know the difference.”
“Do you? Because you drove me back here instead of going with them, and you look like you’re about to put your fist through the dashboard.”
He exhales through his nose. “I look like that a lot.”
“Ethan.”
“I’m exactly where I want to be,” he says, and the flatness of it tells me he means it. He wants to be here. He also wants to be wherever Aidan and Callan are walking into something stupid. Both things are true, and he is a man who doesn’t do well with competing truths.
I understand that more than I expected to.
I get out of the car before he can come around and open my door, not because I’m being difficult, but because I need to move. My legs feel strange.
The lift ride is quiet. The penthouse is exactly how we left it. Maeve’s notebook is still in my hand, somehow. I hadn’t even noticed it until now.
“So, we just sit here and wait?”
“Pretty much.”
“I need a drink.”
“Me too.”
Ethan moves to the drinks cabinet and opens it up, choosing an amber liquid and splashing a generous helping into two glasses.
He hands me one without asking what I want, and I take it without asking what it is.
The glass is cold. The liquid burns going down.
I don’t care. I swallow half of it standing at the kitchen island, set the glass down, and stare at the notebook.
All those names. All those women. My mother in there somewhere, reduced to initials and a date and whatever shorthand Maeve used to make the grief manageable enough to carry around in a back pocket for years.
I don’t open it. I know I should, but I can’t make my hands do it right now.
“Do you think she knew?” I ask.
Ethan is leaning against the far counter, watching me over the rim of his glass. “Maeve?”
“My mum. Do you think she knew Bennett was undercover when she was building her case?”
He thinks about it, which I appreciate. He doesn’t just say something reassuring to fill the silence. “No. I think if she did, Maeve would also have known.”
“The Briggs thing threw me. It threw Maeve as well.”
“Yeah, it’s annoying, but Callan and Aidan have a target, and they will get him.”
“And if they don’t?”
Ethan sets his glass down. “They will.”
“You sound very certain for a man who is standing in a kitchen forty miles away from whatever they’re walking into.”
“I know them.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.” He crosses to the island and stops on the other side of it, looking at me across the marble.
“Aidan has been shot in the last forty-eight hours, and he is still out there, which tells you everything you need to know about whether a little thing like Briggs is going to slow him down. And Callan—” He stops.
“Callan, what?”
“Callan has decided he wants things to stay as they are. That makes him more dangerous than he’s ever been, and he was already the most dangerous person I know.” He picks up my glass and hands it back to me. “Finish that.”
I take it. “What things? What has he decided he wants to stay as they are?”
Ethan looks at me for a long moment. “Don’t make me spell it out.”
I look down at the glass. The amber liquid catches the light. I don’t look up.
“You mean me,” I say.
He doesn’t answer, which is the answer.
I swallow the rest of the drink and set the glass down. “I don’t know how to do this,” I admit.
“Do what?”
“Be this. Whatever I am now.” I press my fingertips to the cold marble.
“A week ago, I was shelving books and taking my herbal supplements and crying because my mum has been dead for four years, and I still couldn’t get through a day without it ambushing me.
And now I’m standing in a penthouse with your name written above my pussy and a man’s blood drying in the dirt forty miles north of here, and I don’t—” I stop.
“I don’t know who I am in this version of my life. ”
Ethan is quiet for long enough that I finally look up.
He is watching me with that particular expression he gets when he has already decided something and is giving me the space to catch up to it. “Do you want to go back?”
“No, of course not. But making decisions, being this bad ass who isn’t supposed to care about men dying in front of me… isn’t me. Before my mum died, I was independent. Or I tried to be so my mum could live her life. Look where that got her.”
“That’s not—”
“I know it’s not my fault. But it changes who you are as a person. I don’t want to be that person anymore.”
“You want to be looked after.” He says it quietly, and it hits home. More than I wanted it to, but still not enough. “Yes.”
“Look at me, Tinks.”
I force my gaze to his with a tight swallow.
“We aren’t going anywhere. We have known for a long time that we are yours. We want to take care of you. It’s our whole fucking mission in life.”
“It makes me look weak.”
“No.” He comes around to my side of the counter and grips my chin, forcing me to look at him. “It makes you ours. If you want us to wash you, dress you, feed you, change your tampons, we will do it. We want to do it. We stepped back because we thought it was what you wanted.”
The word lands somewhere soft and undefended.
Ours.
I’ve spent four years being no one’s. Not even my own, if I’m honest. I existed in the space my mother left behind, filling it with other people’s books and other people’s stories because mine had stopped making sense.
And now this man is standing in front of me, telling me that the thing I’ve been quietly ashamed of wanting is not weakness at all.
My throat tightens.
“I threw away the supplements,” I say, because I can’t say the other thing yet.
“I know.”
“I might need them again. I don’t know. I’ve been on them for a year, since I decided to quit the medication, and I don’t actually know who I am without them.” The words are getting away from me. “I don’t know what I’m like without any of that stuff. I might be terrible.”
His thumb moves along my jaw. “Doesn’t matter if you are. We love you for who you are.”
“How can you say that? You don’t even know me.”
“We know you, Tinks. You know us. You know we would die for you.”
“It’s too heavy.”
“Is it?”
I consider that question. But it’s not really the issue. The issue is, I would die for them. They are my saviours, as fucked up as they are, as fucked up as this entire situation is, they are the ones who pulled me out of my darkest hours.
The thought settles in my soul and stays there.
I would die for them.
Not because I’m broken and have nothing left to lose, which was the version of me that existed before that night at the club.
But because they matter. Ethan’s thumb on my jaw is the most anchoring thing I’ve felt in four years.
Callan’s hand locked around mine in that bedroom, while I shook apart, was the first time I’d felt held in so long I’d forgotten what it felt like.
Aidan calls me little bell in that rough, careless voice and means it like a prayer he’d never admit to saying.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “That’s the problem. It should be, and it isn’t.”
Ethan’s expression turns to recognition.
“I’m terrified,” I tell him. “Not of Briggs, or what happens next with the evidence or the case or any of it. I’m terrified of this. Of needing you. Of what happens to me if any of you—” My throat closes around the rest of it.
He waits.
“I spent four years making myself need nothing,” I say. “Because needing something hurts when it gets taken away.”
The sentence finishes itself, and the silence it leaves behind is enormous.
Ethan doesn’t fill it. He doesn’t offer reassurance or talk over it when people are uncomfortable with someone else’s grief. He just stands there, his thumb still against my jaw, and lets it exist in the room between us.
That alone nearly undoes me.
“I know I’m past the point where I could walk away and come out clean.” I look at him properly. “That terrifies me, Ethan.”
His expression doesn’t change, but something moves behind his eyes. It’s deep, permanent and decided.
“Good,” he says.
I blink. “Good?”
“It should terrify you. It terrifies me.” His grip on my jaw shifts, his palm cupping my face instead. “You think I’m not standing here wondering what the fuck I do if something happens to you? You think watching you walk towards that farmhouse this morning didn’t nearly kill me?”
“You didn’t show it.”
“I’m showing it now.”
I stare at him. The penthouse is very quiet around us.
“I don’t know how to do the terrified part and the needing part at the same time,” I admit.
“You’re already doing it.”
“It doesn’t feel like it.”
“It never does from the inside.” He brushes his thumb across my cheekbone once.
“You threw away the supplements. You called Bennett. You stood in a farmhouse doorway and held your ground while a man who could have you killed tried to talk you round.” He pauses.
“That’s not someone who doesn’t know how to need things and survive it. ”
“But it’s too much,” I whisper. “This is what I’m talking about. I don’t want to be that person.”
“Then don’t.” He drops his hand, and for a second, I feel cold, but then he scoops me up in his arms and carries me to his bedroom. He lays me down on the bed and removes my shoes. “Stay there,” he orders, using that tone he used on me when I was barely functioning.
It feels right.
It feels perfect.
I watch him leave, but I’m not scared. I curl up into a ball on my side and wait for him to come back.
When he does, his arms are laden down with my clothes. “You live in here now,” he says, placing them neatly on the end of the bed.
He moves around the room and opens the wardrobe, making space on one side, neat and deliberate, pushing his things along the rail without ceremony. He pulls open the top drawer of the dresser and clears it in one efficient sweep, depositing the contents into the drawer below.
I stay curled on my side, watching him work, and feel something I haven’t felt in four years settle through me like sediment finding the bottom of a glass. Stillness that doesn’t feel like numbness.
He finishes with the drawer and turns around. He looks at me on his bed, in his room, and the expression on his face is the one he saves for moments he thinks I won’t notice. The one where the control drops just far enough that I can see what’s underneath it.
“I’m no Aidan in the kitchen,” he says after he has made two more trips with all my belongings and placed my toiletries in his en-suite. “But I can make a steak and oven chips.”
I gulp. “Thank you.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head and crouching down next to me.
“No thanks, Tinks. This is our life now.” He cups my cheeks with a soft smile that is smug, beautiful and terrifying.
“I will put your house on the market, sell it and deposit the funds into an account for you for the future. I’ll call Margaret in the morning and tell her you aren’t coming back to the library. ”
“Ethan…”
“This is what it’s like to be loved by us, Annabelle.” A statement delivered by a man crouching beside his bed, my face in his hands, looking at me as if the decision had been made a long time ago and he had simply been waiting for me to catch up.
My throat works. “It was my mother’s house.”
His expression doesn’t shift. “I know.”
“There are things in it. Her things.”
“We’ll go through it together. Every room. Every drawer. Whatever you want to keep comes here. Whatever you don’t, you decide what happens to it.” His thumbs move along my cheekbones, slow and deliberate. “Nothing gets thrown away without your say. But you are not going back to live in it.”
I stare at him. The certainty in his face is so absolute that arguing with it feels like arguing with the tide. It’s a relief to have this burden lifted off my shoulders. “Thank you.”
He kisses the tip of my nose and stands. “No more thanks, Tinks. That’s an order.”
“Yes, sir,” I murmur and see the corner of his mouth tug up as he turns to the door.
Moments later, the sounds of a man with control issues moving through the kitchen reach my ears, and I close my eyes.
This is what I want. This is everything.