Page 81 of Dublin Beast

The crack of her neck echoes in the room and I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a more satisfying sound.

She goes limp in my arms, and I drop her back onto the mattress like the garbage she is.

It’s done.

It’s fucking done.

My heart is thundering, and yet everything inside me is silent—still. I take out my phone, snap the picture of her lifeless body, and send it with a text to the family group chat.

Bryan: It’s done.

Sean: Well done, B.

Brendan: Fuck, yeah!

Tag: Safe home, B. Time to celebrate.

Satisfaction curls through my gut. A dark triumph. A ghost buried. But then?—

“Youkilledher?” Harper’s voice cuts through my buzz like a blade.

She’s standing in the doorway, eyes wide, mouth open, and face pale. She looks like I just ripped her soul out and crushed it beneath my boot.

She stares at Siobhan, her eyes welling up with tears, then at me. “But… your code. Oh, god… I helped you. She’s dead because of me.”

My victory turns to ash in my throat.

Fucking hell.

* * *

Harper

I back out of the doorway, my pulse pounding so hard in my chest that the world is spinning around me. The woman is sprawled on the motel bed, her body limp, her neck twisted at a sick angle, her eyes half-lidded in death.

Bryan shifts around the end of the bed, his palms up. “I told you to stay in the truck!”

Of course he did. He didn’t want me to see.

I meet the cold fury in his emerald gaze and fear clamps around my heart with an icy grip. Reality hits me like a right hook to the face.

This is my fault. I found her for him.

Something inside my heart shatters like glass. I look at him and my gaze drops to his hands—so big, so strong.

How could those hands be so gentle and bring me so much pleasure and then be so brutal as to snap a woman’s neck to end her life?

The world swims as I sway on my feet. I can’t do this. I stumble when I turn away, my steps uneven and sloppy as I cross the parking lot.

I fight against the tremble in my hands, the nausea crawling up my throat. I can’t breathe. My fingers scrape against my throat, expecting to find something restricting my airflow, but there’s nothing. I’m wearing a loose-fitting hoodie and an unzipped raincoat.

I bend at the waist, bracing my hands against my knees, and fight to pull oxygen into my lungs. My eyes clamp shut, but I still see her, the brutal image etched into my mind’s eye.

I can’t wrap my head around it. He killed her.

He broke her neck.

The man I’ve been flirting with, trusting, maybe even starting to feel something real for… just killed a woman in cold blood.

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