Page 185 of Carnal Wagers

“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.”