Her Fatal Valentine, Part 8

We round off our…well, Round Robin, Her Fatal Valentine, with Part 8 by Wendy Soliman.

“You!” Lauren and Carter said together.

“Were you expecting someone else?”

Lauren stood up, too angry and shocked to care that the gun Megan had probably used to kill the two policemen with was now trained on her.

“How did you get in here?” Carter asked, placing his large body in front of Lauren.

“Aw, how sweet. In spite of everything, he still wants to protect you.” Megan’s features, the mirror image of Caroline’s, hardened. “Shame he’s going to fail.”

“Don’t be stupid, Megan.” Carter reached for the gun. “You can’t hope to get away with this. The place will be crawling with cops soon.”

“Who said anything about getting away with it? I just want you two to suffer the way I have.”

“You?” It seemed the only word Lauren was capable of uttering. She cleared her throat and tried again. “You killed Caroline, your own twin sister. And now Kyle. Why?”

“You just don’t get it, do you?”

“I thought we were friends,” Carter said. “You were there for me when Caroline died and yet all the time…”

“And friendship’s all you ever wanted from me. I was the nice twin. Unlike Caroline, I didn’t have a spiteful bone in my body but the worse she treated you, the more you wanted her.” Megan shook her head. “I loved you from afar for so long, but I meant nothing to you.”

Megan’s hand, the one holding the gun, wobbled. Carter noticed it too, Lauren was sure, but before he could make a move she got herself together again.

“I’ve always respected you, Megan,” Carter said.

Lauren inwardly groaned. The last thing a deranged woman like Megan needed to hear was that she was respected and the word hung heavily in the ensuing silence.

“I got tired of seeing the way Caroline treated you, so I did you a favor and got her out of your life. You were supposed to turn to me for consolation…me! Instead you kept banging on about how wrong you’d been to ditch my other sister for Caroline.” She fixed the pair of them with a malevolent glare. “Do you know just how demeaning that is?”

Lauren was stunned. She and Megan had never been close and she’d seen little of her over the past few years. She’d had no idea she felt that way about Carter, and less idea how to get the pair of them away from her before she fire that damned gun, which she was bound to do the moment reinforcements arrived. Damn, she could hear sirens in the distance. Megan heard them too and turned her head fractionally.

Carter slammed an elbow into Lauren’s gut, sending her crashing to the floor. In the same deft movement he grabbed Megan’s gun arm, and they struggled. Winded, Lauren watched from the floor as the man she’d never stopped loving endeavored to fight off a mad woman imbued with superhuman strength. Their tussle seemed to go on forever but could only have lasted for a second or two before the gun discharged and the smell of cordite filled the air.

Lauren felt relief rather than sadness as she saw blood spreading slowly across Megan’s chest. Her sister was ill—mentally ill—but she was also evil. For now Carter was her only concern.

“Are you all right?” she asked, crouching beside him as he clutched his arm and blood seeped through his fingers.

“Damned bullet grazed my arm and then hit her. We were so close together that—”

“Shush, it doesn’t matter.”

Nothing mattered anymore. She would grieve for her sister later and probably feel guilty for not realizing just how sick she’d actually been. But right now she had more important matters to attend to. Like kissing the man of her dreams witless…

                                            

Thanks for reading our Valentine’s story. Did you like the ending? If not, how would you have preferred for it to have finished?