Page 100 of Three Irish Kings

“Thank you.”

Is it really her? Really Maggie Sullivan? After all this time we’ve had Isla kidnapped, is this finally going to prove she is who she says she is without a shadow of a doubt?

I slowly walk up to the covered body and slip the blanket off the face.

Though there are clear differences, especially now I have spent too much time with Isla, Maggie still looks too much like Isla for comfort. It’s nearly uncanny.

I ask the nurse for a moment alone with “my sister”.

She nods. “Of course.”

As soon as she leaves, I pull out my phone and take a few pictures to have as evidence to show Ronan.

That bullet hole in the middle of her forehead, a forehead so much like Isla’s, makes me flinch.

I put the phone away in my back pocket.

Looking at the doppelganger to the woman I’m starting to have feelings for lying here on a stretcher, lifeless, murdered, is making my stomach roll.

I mumble a Gaelic blessing and cover her face once more, unable to keep looking down at her pale, dead expression.

Stepping out of the morgue, I thank the nurse and leave the hospital as fast as I can.

Over three hundred. That’s how many people have met their end by my hand. And though I hate it every single time, none of them has shaken me up so bad as this stranger.

I’m supposed to go back to the hotel, check in with Dare, and then drive back.

I’m supposed to be happy this is the real Maggie and that Isla was telling the truth.

I’m supposed to not care about her being dead.

And in a way, I don’t. Maggie being dead means I don’t have to be the one to end her life. That I don’t have to drag her back to Ronan and watch the man I love like a father blur yet another line.

But for a second there, it wasn’t Maggie on the stretcher; it was Isla, and that almost destroyed what little was left of me.

I have to go back. Now. I have to see her, Isla, make sure she is safe, she is alive. She is still mine, even if just a little.

I can’t get Maggie’s dead face out of my mind.

Maybe she’d been a traitor, but she didn’t deserve to die.

I get into my car, taking off for home, knowing the hours ahead will seem like days, but I just need to see Isla. Need to make sure she’s really there and not lying on a slab at Burberry morgue.

Because seeing that just made me realize something important.

I’m just as crazy about Isla as Dare is, maybe more. I’ve never felt this way about a woman, and even though I can never tell her, at least I can be honest with myself.

She’ll never choose me, anyway.

I unlockthe door to the safehouse, and my jaw drops to the floor.

Isla is cuddled up with her head on Liam’s shoulder, his arm draped around her. And he’s... asleep. Liam Hayes, of all people, asleep wrapped up with a target.

A target that now, we have no reason to keep.

Ignoring the pangs of jealousy shooting through me, I shake Liam awake.

“I've got news.”