Page 118 of A Love Most Fatal

“You’re surrounded,deartháir,” Sean says. I hear anguish there. His own brother.

Cillian pulls me so that my whole body shields his own. To kill him, they would have to shoot through me first.

“She will die, then.” Cillian pulls the hammer of his revolver back and I wince but don’t close my eyes. I won’t let the last thing I see be blackness when my family is here.

“Okay! Okay.” Mary lowers her gun first, and one by one, the rest of the family follows suit, Nate last. Cillian begins to inch down the aisle, the gun still against my head and my back against his chest moving us towards a door. He shoulders it open and shoves me inside.

44

NATE

As soon aswe hear a door slam shut behind them, Mary curses and springs into action. Everyone does, either stalking to a different corner of the church or, in the case of Willa and Maxim, taking out their phones and making calls for backup.

“Nate,” Mary barks, and I follow behind her. Willa wouldn’t let Mary take her arm out of the sling that secures her elbow to her torso, but Mary is a pretty good shot even with just one hand. She looks like a ball of wrath, so I hurry.

“We split up. You take that staircase, I’ll go outside,” she says. “Whoever finds the bastard first gets to shoot him.”

I nod in agreement and slink away. There was a small battalion of men outside when we got here, but Maxim and Mary are fucking beasts and took out ten of them on their own. Willa and Sean, too. Between the four of them, there was only the man inside the church left by the time we set up the explosives, and he got taken out by Maxim as soon as the bombs went off.

My heart has been jackhammering in my chest, but my options are do nothing and let him take Vanessa, or dosomethingand hope it’s enough.

I creep up the stairs and hold my breath once I reach the door they disappeared into. I can’t hear anything on the other side,but that doesn’t mean Cillian isn’t waiting with his gun still to Vanessa’s head. I hold up my gun, and before I can count all the way to three, push the door open in a rush.

It’s quiet, no movement, nor sign of life other than a heavy wooden door left ajar on the other side of the room.

With the windows shattered and a slight evening breeze slipping through, the room feels haunted. I gulp and take another slow step forward into the room.

Still nothing. Their dad’s pistol is heavy in my hand and the handle is hot from my grip, but I keep it ready to shoot.

There are a few pews here, and an ornate wooden confessional booth. I step past all of them and peer through the door. This one leads down a narrow hallway with old creaking stairs down and out of the church.

I am alone in the outdoor corridor, only one of Cillian’s men lying face down in a patch of darkened grass. I look around me and my arms shudder involuntarily.

From here I see only a small building that must be the priest’s apartment, and what looks like the entrance to. . . a cellar?

I storm for that door, pulling it open not at all gracefully before stomping down the few stairs until I reach a stone hallway. Not quite a cellar, unless cellars are old stone corridors beneath old stone churches. Tunnels.

When I force myself to still for a moment, I hear something—a scuffle, a voice—quiet, but here, underground.

I curse and follow it, moving as quickly as I can without stomping like a horse. I have to use my phone’s flashlight as I get farther away from the light of the entrance. There are lights on the walls but they’re all off, and when I come to an intersection of crossing paths, I hold my breath, listening for anything at all other than my jackhammering heart.

There.Something like footsteps, down the hall to my left. I turn course and follow, speeding up slightly. The hall turns once more and—how long have I been walking? We’ve most certainly extended beyond the church grounds. Geography has never been my strong suit, so unless I close my eyes and retrace my steps mentally, I’m not even sure which direction I’m headed.

With one last turn, I stifle a gasp and halt my steps. At the end of this corridor, a yellow light emits from behind a cracked door. I can hear footsteps and the low murmuring of a voice I am almost certain belongs to Cillian.

I turn off my flashlight and silence my phone before creeping as quietly as I can forward towards the room. My shoe hits something like a pebble that skitters across the floor and I freeze, but the sound in the room goes uninterrupted.

Stepping carefully, I venture closer. And if I hold myself against the stone wall, I can just barely see inside the room—a chamber? Nothing down here looks like it was built in the last century, save for the addition of electricity.

“I’ll call them off,” Vanessa says. “I’ll explain it to them.”

“You won’t need to explain anything to them because they’ll each have a bullet in their skull?—”

“Can you blame them for being worried? You didn’t let me call them, or even try to convince them.” Vanessa’s frantic voice breaks. “I’ll fix it, I promise they’ll listen to me. Just, please don’t hurt them.”

Cillian is quiet, and I worry I’m breathing too loud, or that he can just intuit that I’m in the hallway. But after a moment, he steps just into view, prowling towards where I imagine Vanessa stands. He doesn’t look murderous, he looks calculating.

“If you kill them and you take over the business, you’ll lose everyone’s trust. It might take years to get that back, if you ever do,” Vanessa says. “I will help you spin the narrative.”

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