Novels by Kelly

Aurora POVThe meeting ran two hours and fourteen minutes.Every clause. Every figure. Every restructured term my legal team had prepared went across that table and Henry's team accepted most of them and negotiated the rest and by eleven fifty-three we had a working framework that looked nothing like the document he had originally proposed and everything like what AME needed it to be.I shook Davies' hand. I shook Henry's hand last — brief, professional, the handshake of two people who have just done business and are both pretending that is the only thing that happened in this room today. His eyes held mine for one second longer than the handshake required.I looked away first.Joel was at my elbow before I reached the door."Car is ready," he said. "Elizabeth called twice during the meeting."I stopped walking."Twice.""Yes ma'am." His voice was even but his jaw was slightly tight. "I didn't want to interrupt the negotiation. She said it wasn't an emergency.""But she called twice."

CHAPTER FIFTEENRinnah | POVThe waiting room chair was hard against my back.I sat with my bag on my lap, legs crossed, phone face up, and watched the door at the end of the room. The doctor had gone through it nineteen minutes ago. I had not looked at anything else since.My phone buzzed.Henry.‘Rinnah. I'm serious. Call him off. If anything happens to her or Zenya I will not be able to protect you from what comes after. Do you understand me?’I read it. Set the phone face down on my knee.Protect you from what comes after.I uncrossed my legs. Crossed them the other way. I looked at the door.My father had called at seven this morning. Two minutes, maybe less. He didn't waste time on calls — never had."It's handled," he said."The girl and the child," I said. "Don't touch them.""Understood.""I mean it.""Rinnah." Just my name. The way he said it when he wanted me to stop repeating myself."Aurora simply finds New Jersey uncomfortable," he said. "People leave uncomfortable plac

CHAPTER FOURTEENTHE TABLEHenry | POVShe moved fast, her fingers were around my wrist and she pulled,sharp, deliberate, the way you pull something you want your full attention on and my elbow came off the table and I was looking directly at her face from eight inches away.I had never seen Aurora furious before.In the five years we were married she had cried. She had gone quiet. She had left the room. She had absorbed things with the specific patience of a woman who had decided that holding herself together was more important than falling apart in front of someone who didn't deserve the performance. The woman holding my wrist across a hotel restaurant table at eight fifty-three in the morning was not soft."You put her there." Her voice was low. Controlled in the way of something that is being held at a specific volume by considerable effort. "That woman at my door this morning. You put her there.""Aurora….""Answer the question, Henry.""No." I kept my voice even. "I didn't.""

CHAPTER THIRTEENBREAKFASTHenry | POVThe tie was giving me trouble, I stood at the mirror and worked on it for the third time, my fingers not cooperating the way fingers don't cooperate when the head they belong to is somewhere else entirely. The bandaging was gone, I had taken it off myself at five this morning because I was not walking into a nine o'clock contract meeting looking like a man who had lost a bar fight, which I was, but which nobody needed to see evidence of. The stitches were visible if you looked closely. I intended to make sure nobody looked closely.I got the knot halfway right and stopped.Hands came around from behind me. I know it was Rinnah, her fingers found the tie and took it from me without a word, her chin at my shoulder, her eyes finding mine in the mirror briefly before dropping to the knot. She worked it slowly. Correctly. I watched her hands in the mirror and said nothing.She finished the knot and smoothed it flat against my chest and left her palm

CHAPTER TWELVEAurora | POVThe knock pulled me out of sleep, I lay still with my face half buried in the pillow and told myself I had imagined it. Every part of my body was in agreement that it was not time to be awake and I was inclined to side with my body.The knock came again, I opened one eye, found my phone on the nightstand. I tapped the screen and it turned on, I looked at the time and it was just Six fourteen.The knock came a third time.I pushed the duvet back,my robe was on the chair. I pulled it on in the dark, tied it, found my slippers with my feet and moved toward the door.Downstairs the suite was dim. The whiskey glass from last night is still on the side table. Curtains holding back whatever New Jersey looked like at six in the morning. I crossed to the front door and leaned into the peephole.It was a woman.Young, dark hair pulled back, hotel uniform. Holding a coffee tray, single cup, small jug, napkin folded with careful precision.I had not ordered coffee, I l

THE BARHenry | POVThe engine turned and I pulled out of the compound without knowing where I was going.That was the truth of it. No destination, no plan, just the specific need to put distance between myself and that house and the conversation I had left sitting on the living room coffee table next to a plate of untouched biscuits. I drove with both hands on the wheel and the radio off and New Jersey moving past the windows in the particular way it moved at night, familiar, indifferent, entirely unchanged by the fact that my life was currently falling apart in it.I ended up at McCready's.I hadn't been there in years. It was the kind of bar that didn't try, low lighting, sticky counters, the specific smell of a place that had absorbed decades of bad decisions without judgment. I used to come here when I was twenty-three and had nothing and thought everything was ahead of me. I parked outside and sat in the car for a moment and then went in.The bartender didn't know me. Good."Whi