Page 187 of Carnal Wagers

“I won’t let you kill him.”

“I’m doing this for you.”

Again, she raised her knife, aimed at him, and I kicked out at her stomach. Her huff gave me time to reach the compact, lightweight firearm taped beneath Cillian’s desk. I racked the slide, disengaged the safety, then levelled it at her.

“Don’t,” I warned as she clambered to her knees. My grip shook around the gun.

“You won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No. I know you won’t.” Maeve shook her head, so sure of herself. “You’re my soul sister. That means more than anything.”

She really believed that, and it would’ve been true half an hour ago. I shot the floor between her feet, the crack of the bullet breaking something between us, then pulled my aim back up to her chest.

“Please. I’m begging you.” My vision watered. “Just stop this. Let it go.”

“How can you ask me that?”

“We deserve to be happy, Maeve. That means letting the past go. It’s time to move on.”

My voice broke, and her face hardened. She wasn’t getting it. She didn’t want to. Or maybe it was because I didn’t believe my own words. What kind of future did a serial killer have?

“I was only ever happy with you,” she said. “Don’t you get that? I like the past. You were mine. I love us the way we were.”

Pounding thumped in my head, or maybe it was somewhere else in the apartment. The small gun grew heavy and sagged in my clammy grasp.

“We can’t ever go back to the way we were. Not after this.”

“Don’t say that.”

Tears poured down my cheeks with shaky sobs as I tried to find the old Maeve in her. The smiling one. The witty one. The snarky woman who always knew what to say or do to make the world brighter. But it was like looking through a broken mirror and realizing that everything I knew was distorted. It was all a fractured illusion of the person I wanted to see.

“You’ve killed dozens of women, Maeve. You’re trying to kill the man I love. What else am I supposed to say?”

“What about him? How many has he killed? How many has your brother killed? What about Erel? Why are their kills acceptable compared to mine?” She thumped her chest. “All mine deserved to be punished. They had to die. That’s what a blood feud is.”

“And me? Don’t I deserve to die?”

“If you’d rather be with him than me, maybe you do. Maybe I was wrong.”

Again, that pounding rang in my ears because this hurt. It clawed at my chest and ripped my heart out with the reality that there was no way out of this. I lost either him or her today, and the choice was mine.

When she advanced with that knife raised, I made it. The gun banged between us and recoiled in my hand. At the same time, she dropped.

“You missed,” she muttered.

Blood pooled from a bullet wound in the right side of her abdomen, creeping outward in an arc. Quickly, too quickly. I had hoped by aiming right below her lungs, she would have a chance.

“I never wanted you dead.” The gun clattered to the floor beside me.

She reached a hand out along the floor, and our fingers grazed each other. “I’m glad you’re here. With me.”

My chest heaved with heavy sobs, searing me in pain as the stab wound in my back woke up. I barely felt her touch, and that hurt more than the stabbing.

That incessant pounding in the background finally broke in three sharp cracks.

“Killy,” an accented voice yelled. Liam? I chased the sound with a languid twist of my head.