Page 1 of Carnal Wagers

Prologue

A woman once bedded by an O’Leary man was likely to live. Twice was a toss-up. Three times or more, that was a death sentence.

My knife pierced her belly like butter, and she bled so prettily. Drip, drip, it fell to the marble tiles of my living room in a perfect macabre painting. I’d never felt as alive as I did when I wrenched the blade out of her and her blood splattered in a spray.

Strands of auburn hair escaped her balaclava, but aside from pained, angry brown eyes, her facial features remained hidden. She had an average build and height, wasn’t too thin, and had no other defining features visible beneath her head-to-toe black ensemble.

The masked serial killer circled around me, desperate for an exit. Every step led her farther away from Sarah, her newest target and my latest fling, drugged and tied to a chair.

It would take only one more lunge forward to skewer her heart with my knife, but I didn’t want the game to end too quickly. For twenty years, the Love Knot Killer stalked my family and murdered every woman my da, my brothers, and I got involved with. Now I was owed pounds of her flesh in return to show her exactly what O’Leary mercy meant.

I hunted her through my penthouse condo and watched with glee as she hobbled in panic out the front door and to the fire escape. Her mewls of pain buzzed through my bloodstream. With one kick to the back of her knees, she tumbled down the stairs. Each pound and smack of her body against the steps, each cry of agony, composed the finest tune as she bled like a stuck pig, splashing it everywhere. All I had to do was follow the trail.

I ambled down after her, toying with my knife, as she scrambled to her feet and stumbled, bit by bit, down the rest of the stairwell. Her blood seeped into the air. Her groans sang in echoes with each skidded step, and I relished every second she thought she had a chance at escaping me.

Therein lay my mistake. I thought I held all the cards…until she limped into the open, onto the Boston Harborwalk, and pitched herself into the Boston Harbor. She sank like a rock, leaving nothing but a murky red sheen where she’d fallen in. I paced that small section of the Harborwalk, tapping my gun against my thigh, in the middle of that snowy night without a coat, waiting for a sign she would surface.

Snow covered my hair and beard and soaked through my shirt. The wind chilled my skin and froze my breath to crystallized puffs.

She didn’t reappear. There were no bubbles of air in the water, no rippling of small tidal waves, no sign of her at all. She left nothing behind for divers to find either. O’Leary men monitored the police radio frequencies and put out feelers in case she surfaced. For hours we searched, but we were left with bugger all. The only thing we had was her DNA, but even that led us nowhere.

That night, I returned to my condo to find Sarah alive, trembling in shock, exactly where I’d left her. It felt like divine intervention. She’d been just a passing fancy, a woman I’d dared to stick my dick in more than once. I should have left it at that and let her get back to her life, away from me, away from my family, but I’d always been a controlling bastard. What I wanted, I got. Call it my twisted view of fate, but she’d survived when no other woman had and that meant something.

When days turned into weeks without word of a floater in any part of the Massachusetts Bay, I began to relax. When my da bedded several different women more than once and none ended up stabbed and branded, I started looking beyond the next day. When my hypercautious brother Brody risked a relationship with his first love, I thought we’d won, and it was finally over. I let the thrill of winning overcome every hard lesson ingrained deep in my bones—never let your guard down. I embraced the prospect of a future and a family and let it override my caution. For the first time in my life, I tried my hand at emotional intimacy.

A year later, my contacts still had no new information to share. I checked. Double-checked. Triple-checked. We were in the clear. So I proposed and got married. I should have known the curse of my sins would catch up with me.

Exactly five hundred thirty-nine days after she disappeared, the Love Knot Killer returned with a vengeance. Every lover my brothers and da had over the previous year and a half died within one month. Not a clue, trace, or lead was left behind.

Thirty-nine days into our marriage, Sarah was no exception. I found her tied to our bed covered in her own vomit. Blood drenched her chest from the single stab wound to her heart, and the brand of a Celtic knot was burned across her face. Poisoned, stabbed, and branded—the Love Knot Killer’s signature.

It was a bleeding mad name. Journalists, without a whit of cultural awareness, heard about heart-shaped burn scars on the serial killer’s victims’ faces and coined the term two decades ago, but they hadn’t done their research. The victims’ branding was a bastardization of a Celtic motherhood knot, not a love knot.

There was something to be said about coming home to find the mutilated body of your wife and realizing you felt nothing at all. Not anguish at the loss. Not rage at the invasion of privacy. There was no burst of emotion when I found her corpse. No burn of tears. No feeling of a noose around my neck. Just a bone-deep resignation, like this was exactly the outcome I expected. As if I’d known I was living on borrowed time for an ideal I had no right to and hadn’t really enjoyed.

My wife was dead, and I wasn’t grieving. Hadn’t grieved since I found her body. Couldn’t. Maybe even wouldn’t. Maybe that made me a worse monster than her murderer. Fuck if I cared.

Exactly two months later, I was about to remarry. I had a good guess what would happen to this wife too.

Chapter 1

Alizé — twenty-three / Cillian — twenty-eight

Wedding Day

It was far too cheery a day to get married. Where only rare clouds crudely splotched the bright sky, it should’ve been raining. That would’ve suited me better. That way, there would’ve been no false pretenses, no bliss and smiles. Under melancholic showers, we could call this exactly what it was: a mutually beneficial agreement none of us really wanted.

I spun my folded karambit knife around my finger, and the hooked blade clipped shut as I collapsed my head against the edge of the headrest.

My empty eyes stared back at me in the tinted car window, as our driver took us from the airport to the Lyon City Hall. Each old-as-shite French apartment building we drove past looked no different from the next. They were all dainty and overembellished. Every baroque detail and fancy balcony was an eyesore, repeating themselves over and over, with no end in sight. None had a lick of charm like Dublin’s rich character or like Boston’s robust blend of old and new. I couldn’t wait to get back home.

A meaty hand slapped over my shoulder, and I jerked against the touch, lost in thought. I spun around, fist raised, stopping short of Liam’s—my youngest brother’s—nose. The little shite peeked around my fist and grinned.

“Jaysus, son,” our father groused. “Calm it down.”

Da turned his phone around. The screen blazed in the darkened space, jerking up and down as his hand tremored, but he pretended not to notice. Angus O’Leary had always been good at pretending problems didn’t exist, and he took letting this one go undiagnosed as long as possible very seriously. Well, he could wallow in it for all I cared.

“Alizé De Villier, your bride. Get a good look at her face.”