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She shrugged. “I could, but I’m done with it all.”
She worried her bottom lip and he stared at her some more. This was no criminal mastermind in disguise. This was a woman who’d been broken beyond repair. A woman for whom the façade had dropped and all that remained was this wizened, shattered shell.
He began to stand up when her head jerked suddenly and she gazed at him fully. “When will I see you again, Caelan?”
“Soon,” he said, “very soon.”
“I wanted you to kill her to make it better,” she said, “but nothing will ever make it better, will it?”
He slowly shook his head. “I’ll come back. Soon. I promise.”
“Good, I’ll have something to look forward to.”
Damn him, but he wondered if he might actually return.
As he emerged into the bright daylight of another beautiful summer’s day, he wondered at Blake, at Jimmy, at his mother, and at other more recent matters.
They were all of them corrupt in their own ways, but he wasn’t. In spite of everything, he’d made a promise to himself a long time ago to never be like them.
Caelan had been incorruptible from the day he became a blade, vowing to always put duty above all else. Duty had been the thing that’d kept him sane when everything else had felt alien.
That duty had made him feel like less of a damned soul.
That duty would get him through this, too.
He put his phone to his ear and a male voice answered. “Is it what we thought?”
“Aye.”
“Okay, we proceed to the next stage.”
“Aye.”
“You okay, son?”
“She’s got nothing. No fight left in her.” It shocked Caelan that he felt sorry for her, seeing her like that, so obviously reliant on medication these days to get through the day. “Almost seems cruel.”
Blake sighed down the line. “You have your mate Eric to thank for that, he did her over all by himself.” Caelan grunted. “There’s nothing left but twisted hate inside her. Always been the same, nowt new there. The extravagance she’d become accustomed to was the veneer that covered up the ugliness. Now it’s on full display, whereas before it was hidden. It’s as simple as that.”
Caelan grunted down the phone, not wanting to get into it. “It’s so fucked up.”
“I know.”
The man hung up.
Chapter Thirty-Three
~ Flora ~
Three am and four bottles of wine later, we sat at the small cast-iron picnic table in her back garden drunk and wrung out. A couple of empty wine bottles were rolling around the patio with the breeze and the sad strains of Belinda Carlisle rang out from her phone, not loud enough to upset the neighbours, but certainly loud enough for her to look a little pathetic as she mumbled along to the words. Sophie’s face was tearstained whereas I was just drunk and angry. Angry and drunk. A mix of the two. She could barely keep herself upright. Mind you, she’d drunk most of the wine. I’d only had about a bottle because Logan wasn’t fully off the boob yet.
We’d talked through everything.
Everything.
She’d listened as I’d described the hottest sex of my life, the threesome, then the dead bodies, the chaos. How it was a wonder I hadn’t been hauled in for questioning yet. What moves Caelan had likely had to pull in order to cover up certain actions of ours.
“I’m thinking of making a run for it,” I said, but she only flapped her hand around, eyes rolling with drink. She’d be of little use to her kids come morning. Maybe she’d needed this blowout and knew I’d take care of them even if she ended up paralytic. “I’m thinking of flying someplace none of them would imagine. Then I’d get in a car and drive and end up somewhere else so he couldn’t track me.”
