Page 95 of Carnal Wagers

“Nothing. I don’t know. All I know is that I’ve seen more passion in you in the last three weeks than I have in the last five years.” He switched the car fan to demister. The hot air whirred against the thin sheen of moisture clinging to the bottom third of the windshield. “And now what I see is my brother self-sabotaging that. The moment someone gets close, you build a wall, and you’re doing it with her when all she’s doing is making you feel. Always two steps back, a shield at the ready.”

“Oh, feck off. It’s either that or send her straight into LK’s arms. I know which one I’d rather.”

He nodded. “True. But that’s no way to live. And face it, Killy. You stopped living a long time ago.”

I side-eyed him, not clear where this shitstorm of a conversation was headed.

“You think we don’t notice, Brody and me? You’ve been pulling away more and more until you’ve become just a thrill-seeking shell, always out for your next high and unwilling to seek anything else. The number of times I’ve caught you staring at nothing at all. That blank, despondent look on your face, it scares the bejaysus out of me.” He tapped his fingers along the steering wheel, then squeezed the wheel and adjusted his position in the driver’s seat. “So, aye, if you’ve found someone who stirs something in you, I’m going to tell you to keep her close and never let her go.”

“This coming from the forever playboy of the family.”

“This coming from someone who doesn’t want to turn into you but might be on the way there.”

That admission sucker-punched me in the gut and sucked anything I had to say right back down into my lungs. For the first time in a long time, I looked at my baby brother, really looked at him. His boyish looks had all but faded away, his face marked by sharp, heavy lines, his joyful mask cast off. The truth stunned me. All the smiles and erratic behavior, all the jeers and larger-than-life disposition, it was just him clinging to how he thought he needed to be. With it stripped away, he was other. Different. Frail. What I saw reflected back at me was my own failure.

“Liam…” But I didn’t know what to say.

“You’re not the only one who’s hurting, Killy, and I’m tired. I need you to fight. I need you to snap out of your shite and grab the world by the balls, because if you don’t, I feel like I’m going to lose you. I can’t lose you. You hear me? I can’t. Anyone else but you and Brody. Anyone else.” He wiped the corner of his eye against the shoulder farthest from me. “Nothing to see here.”

I slapped him against the shoulder and twisted around in my seat to give him some privacy.

The view blurred past, just a dark, wet spread of fields and trees between towns, with the occasional lone home, spotlighted under the flash of lightning and the curtain of rain slapping against the window.

“Cranwell called Brody earlier, by the way,” he finally said after a couple of tense minutes.

“And?”

“He looked a little more into Fiona’s death. Turns out she had no history of cardiomyopathy despite the cause of death. Not only that, but she was hospitalized four days before her death, and not for heart issues. She gave birth.”

I sat up straight, and my head jerked his way, spinning like a top.

“My same reaction,” he said. “We have a half brother or sister somewhere out there.”

“Where?”

“No idea. There aren’t any records of a baby. Nothing in Fiona’s file, and no mention of an abducted newborn raised at the hospital either. Kid’s a ghost.”

I smacked the back of my head against the headrest. “If they can alter hospital records and cause of death, I’ll bet they can disappear a newborn.”

“Aye, sure, but you don’t think…”

“The Love Knot Killer, yes. Makes sense.” I sat up in my chair, connections forging between all the little details we’d had up until now. The three of us had been doing a deep dive into Fiona’s life, tracing her steps back from before the divorce to her youth in Ireland. “Think about it. What do we know about Fiona?”

“Well, her parents were separated.”

I ticked up one finger. “And she lived with her mother and a string of different stepfathers until she accused one of them of sexual assault when she was seventeen. Only then did she go live with her father.”

“Who was well-off.”

I nodded and lifted a second finger. “But he still sold her off to Da for a partnership on one of his schemes when she was only eighteen. A man who was a decade older than her.”

“And was forced to move to the States with us, away from everything and everyone she knew.”

Another finger went up.

“Add in the fact that her dad was arrested and his assets frozen and then confiscated a month before Da had his affair with Jessica.”

A full hand of fingers up.