Page 10 of Three to Fall

He was right. Annette might have looked like Kara, but she was different in every other way. She hadn’t been warm and sweet the way Kara was. Annette hadn’t liked public displays of affection, so we’d never kissed or hugged. Not even at home. I’d fallen for her because I was attracted to her and the sex had been good, but we’d never been affectionate with each other. We’d both been too busy for that. Me getting my degree and working long hours at the hospital. Her and her sister running their business and often away on trips.

I’d enjoyed her ambition, the money, and the curves of her body.

But she was nothing like Kara. She had none of Kara’s softness. Her sweetness. Annette had been selfish.

I had been, too, so it had worked.

But I wasn’t that man anymore. The work I’d done in Saint View, volunteering at that clinic every week and seeing how much people suffered, had put things into perspective for me.

If I was sappy now, it was a good thing. Not the insult my brother seemed to think it was.

But it didn’t mean I could just let him go. He might have given Kara back to me, but he’d still broken the one rule we’d set in place a lifetime ago, back in foster care when he’d killed his first victim and realized he liked it.

He and I had made a promise that day, and it was one each member of our group had sworn to as they’d come to us over the years. No one wanted a life in prison. Or an institution. So we’dvowed that if one of us got out of control, the others would put him in the ground.

Trig had killed innocent people. My wife. Her sister. Alice. All three of their deaths had been by strangulation, which had always been Trig’s weapon of choice. His name was written all over them.

He’d left me no choice.

“Whip, I need a gun.”

The words hurt to get out around my bruised throat. My voice was barely more than a hoarse whisper, but there was no staying silent. I’d been quiet for years, never getting my chance to look my wife’s killer in the eye and tell him exactly what he’d taken from me. I hadn’t even told the guys what he’d done. I’d kept every detail to myself, knowing that it needed to be me who ended him.

Trigger rolled his eyes when I got to my feet and Whip put his gun in my hand, silencer already fitted to the end, which was unexpected but probably shouldn’t have been, considering who Whip was.

A stone-cold killer. All the men in this room were. And I was just the idiot who’d wanted to help.

I’d always known it would come back to bite me. I raised the gun, pointing it at Trig.

He leaned on the window, looking about as bothered as if he had a fly buzzing around his head. “Well, this is dramatic. You even know where the trigger is on that thing, Gray?”

“Why Alice?” I knew Kara needed closure before this could end.

Trig tilted his head to one side. “Who?”

Kara’s voice trembled from behind me. She moved slightly to the side, so I wasn’t completely blocking her from Trig’s view. “My sister. She was killed in an alley outside a nightclub in the city.” She flicked the cord that hung round her throat like anecklace. “A cord just like this one wrapped around her neck and the life strangled out of her.”

Trig shrugged. “That wasn’t me. That cord is sold in every hardware store from here to Texas.”

“Bullshit!” I shouted, wincing again at the pain in my throat, but an anger so thick and strong spreading through me it couldn’t be ignored. “It was the exact same way you killed Annette and Portia. The way you kill all your victims.”

Trig folded his arms across his thick chest. “I take full responsibility for Annette and Portia. Those bitches deserved to die. And while I’m confessing my sins, there were another two, a set of twins I caught up with just recently once I got back here. Acquaintances of your wife. Left them in the woods for the animals because they didn’t deserve a burial.”

Whip swore under his breath. “One of them was a curvy brunette? Strangled in the woods?”

Trigger nodded. “Caught up with her sister a few days later.”

Whip mused over that. “Probably the woman I found.”

Her twin sister would have been the woman my contact at the morgue had texted me about.

Trigger cocked his head to one side. “But neither of them were named Alice. And I didn’t kill no woman in an alley. And outside a nightclub in the middle of the city? Ew. No. There are fucking rats there. You know how I feel about rats. I hate the city.”

I blinked, remembering the rats that had crawled over us during the nights our foster parents had kept us in cages in their filthy basement. How Trig had woken screaming one night after being tied up and left for the rats to bite at when he couldn’t shoo them away.

My fingers trembled remembering the horrific abuse that had turned him into the man he was.

And me into…this. A man forced to murder his own brother in cold blood.

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