Page 171 of Riordan's Revenge

The two women’s eyes rounded.

Riordan squinted down at me.

“What? Ye put me on the back of your bike. That was a proposal. I consider us engaged.”

Shade hummed. “Agreed. I hear that’s the law.”

Everly laughed softly.

I was hooked on the expression in my boyfriend’s eyes. It told me he liked my words. It spoke to the need I saw in him over and over again to be claimed. To be loved and adored.

My heart thumped out of time, and I managed to shrug. “By all means ask me formally one day, but this thing is happening.”

His tight hold on me was all the answer I needed. It took a solid minute before I could get back into the conversation going on around us.

“Will the cops do anything about the murderer reveal swap?” Genevieve was saying.

Arran gave a single shake of his head. “Dixie’s attack didn’t even make the press. Nobody knows another attempt was made, and as far as the public is concerned, the dangerous Four Miler gang was responsible, and as a result, they were annihilated. Parts of the city are still burning. All the attention has gone there and on hating the drug dealers who caused the problems.”

I peered at the window where the city sparkled beyond the glass. “Then the heat is off us?”

He confirmed it, and some tight kernel of pressure in my chest eased. I hadn’t been kidding when I said I loved the warehouse. I was skeleton crew now, and I’d do anything to defend my home and the people who worked here.

Everly asked the question about opening the clubs this evening.

Arran’s phone rang while he was replying, and he answered the call and set it on loudspeaker. “Kenney. What do you have for me?”

The chief constable griped about the hours he’d had to work then got to the point. “We still don’t have sign-off on entering the church building, though the fire is out. I’ll give you a body count when I can. But that knife you turned up, Bronson’s one, scoreda hit for Rachel Dench with others yet to be identified. It’s the hit we needed to put this to bed like where I’m heading now.”

My brain joined the dots. The knife in question was the one from when I’d disarmed Moniqua. I’d told Arran to find it when we left the riverside. He must have given the blade a cover story as belonging to Bronson, rather than Moniqua, and handed it to Kenney because the cops had the DNA records of the deceased women to test against.

Rachel Dench was Alisha’s real name. Fuck. Moniqua hadn’t been entirely delusional.

Arran hung up the call. “Moniqua is the killer. She told the truth.”

She had. And with her gone, plus the Four Milers disintegrated, calm had been restored to Deadwater. There were other gangs in the city, smaller ones who would scramble to fill the gap Red and his people had left, but right now, none had the strength to challenge us, and I didn’t doubt Arran and Shade would move quickly to put them in their place.

With his arm around me, Riordan tensed up.

I peeked up at him. “Are ye okay?”

“I befriended a monster.”

I released a sigh. “I gave her a job.”

On the opposite couch, Genevieve shook her head. “I tried to be nice to her. We can’t blame ourselves for anything we did as good people trying to be kind.” She twisted to peek up at her fiancé. “If Alisha’s blood was on that, she can’t have cleaned it very well. Almost as if she wanted the trophy of it, you know? I meant to ask, whatever happened to the knife Riordan got caught with that could’ve had my DNA on it?”

Shade answered for him. “Kenney returned it to us, and we destroyed it. Unlike Moniqua, we run a tight ship.”

If Moniqua had done the same, we couldn’t have been sure. In her sloppiness, she’d done us a solid.

The next couple of hours, we went through all that had happened. Each death. Everything Moniqua had told us about why she’d killed the women. We said their names. We considered how different their lives would’ve been if they hadn’t fallen victim to a deranged murderer.

We raised a toast to each, and lastly talked about helping Dixie, though Moniqua never gave a reason for hurting her.

After, Arran gave Riordan the night off, though the clubs were busier than ever, and the two of us went back to bed. We ordered in food and hid away. There was so much still to be sorted and considered, but we had answers enough to plague us.

More, we just wanted to feel the relief of being whole. Together. Safe.

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