“He has me,” Josie said.
“Not for long,” Margaret said. “He’s going to lose you just like you’re going to lose that brat of yours.”
“You just shut the hell up,” Josie warned the woman, her temper fraying from the threats and insults directed at CJ. “Don’t ever talk about my son.”
Margaret chuckled, so Josie struck her. She’d hoped to knock the gun from the petite woman’s hand. But the older lady was surprisingly strong. She held on to her gun and swung it toward Josie, pressing it into her heart—which was exactly what her insults and threats had been hitting.
“You get involved with a killer, sooner or later you’re going to wind up dead,” the woman said. “Too bad for you it’s going to be sooner.”
Wasn’t it already later—since Margaret had first tried to kill her four years ago? But Josie kept that question to herself.
“YOU’RE THE KILLER,” Brendan corrected Margaret. So she would have no compunction pulling the trigger and killing Josie. It was what she’d intended to do from the moment she’d forced her inside the house. That was why she’d confessed to her—because she planned to make sure Josie could never testify against her.
“If you had really turned over proof to the district attorney, the police would be here already,” Margaret said. “You have nothing.”
“You confessed to Josie.”
“Just now,” she said. “And she’ll never live to testify against me.”
“No,” he said, “you confessed to her four years ago.”
Margaret laughed. “She doesn’t even know what evidence you had. I think she damn well would have known had I confessed to her.”
“You weren’t confessing,” Brendan admitted. “You were trying to convince her of my guilt. You told her that it must have been someone he trusted since my father had never pulled his gun.”
Josie gasped. “And all the other reports—except for the official police report—claimed he’d been killed with his own gun.”
Since Dennis O’Hannigan was legendary for turning a person’s weapon on them, it had been the height of irony that he’d had his own gun turned on him.
Brendan shook his head. “But all his guns were in their holsters.” He’d learned from his father to have more than one backup weapon. “Only the killer would know that he hadn’t pulled any of them, that he’d trusted his killer.”
Margaret snorted. “Trusted? Hell, no. Underestimated is what he’d done. He thought I was too weak and helpless to be a threat.”
“And he would have considered me a threat,” Brendan said, because his father had known what his son had become. What he really was.
So why had he left him the business?
“You underestimated me, too,” she accused Brendan. “You never considered me a threat, either.”
He hadn’t realized just how dangerous she was—until she’d turned her gun on the woman he loved. “It’s over, Margaret.”
“On that flimsy evidence?” she asked, nearly as incredulous as the district attorney had been.
“No, on the confession that the FBI has recorded.”
She glanced at Josie as if checking her for a wire.
“When your security system was hacked, the house was bugged. Every intercom in the place turned on like a mike.”
She glanced around at the intercom by the door and another on the desk behind her.
“You’re under arrest for the murder of Dennis O’Hannigan,” he said, “and the attempted murders of Josie Jessup and—”
The woman raised her eyebrows and scoffed. “You’re arresting me? On what authority?”
“FBI,” he said. “I’m an FBI agent.”
Josie’s eyes widened with surprise. He’d hoped that she might have figured it out, that she would have realized he was not a bad man.
“You are not,” Margaret said. “You’re bluffing again, treating me like a fool just like your father did.”
With his free hand he pulled out his credentials, which he hadn’t been able to carry for the past four years, and flashed his shield at her. “No. Game over.”
She stubbornly shook her head and threatened, “I am going to pull the trigger.”
“Then so will I,” he replied. And he was bluffing now.
“You won’t risk her life.” Margaret knowingly called him on his lie. “I saw how you were when she disappeared four years ago. You were as devastated as you were when your mother disappeared.”
He couldn’t deny the truth—not anymore.
“So you’re going to step back and let me leave with her,” Margaret said.
“And what do you think you’re going to do?” Brendan asked. “Talk her into taking you to our son?”
Margaret’s gaze darted between him and Josie. That had been her plan—all part of her deranged plan.
“She’ll never do that,” Brendan said. “You won’t be able to kill all the O’Hannigans. And even if you thought you did, you still wouldn’t be the last one.” He chuckled now at how incredibly flawed the woman’s plan was. “You’re actually not even a real O’Hannigan.”
Anger tightened her lips into a thin line. “I married your father.”
“But it wasn’t legal,” he informed her.
She glared at him. “I have the license to prove it, since you’re all about evidence.”
“It wasn’t legal because he was still married,” he explained.
“What?” she gasped.
“My mother isn’t dead.”
“Yes, she is,” Margaret frantically insisted. “Your father killed her. Everyone knows that.”
“He’d beaten her….” Which Brendan had witnessed; he’d been only eleven years old and helpless to protect her. “He sent her to the hospital, but she didn’t die. She went into witness protection.”
But still she wouldn’t testify against him. Not because she had still loved the man but because she’d loved Brendan. And to protect him, she had struck a bargain with the devil.
Maybe he would have to do the same to protect Josie.
“You’re lying,” Margaret said. She was distracted now, more focused on him than Josie.
He shook his head, keeping her attention on him while he tried to ignore Special Agent Martinez speaking through his earpiece. Brendan was calling the shots now. And he wouldn’t do that until Josie was out of the line of fire.
“Where do you think I ran away to when I was fifteen?” he asked. Thank God he hadn’t wound up living on the streets, which he’d been desperate enough to do. He’d found a place to go. A home.
“I didn’t think you really ran away,” Margaret said. “I know you tried, that you stole one of your father’s cars. But that car was returned that same night—without you. And you were never seen again.”
As he relived that night, his heart flipped with the fear he’d felt when his father’s men had driven him off the road and into the ditch. At fifteen he hadn’t had enough experience behind the wheel to be able to outmaneuver them. And when they’d jerked him from behind the wheel and left him alone with his father, he’d thought he was dead,