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Chapter 16 Lot Seventeen
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2026-11-05 05:35:29
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REBORN BEFORE THE END: MY EX'S FAMILY WILL STARVE FIRST Chapter 20 Pruitt's Price
Walter Pruitt did not look like a man who had spent twenty years helping a wealthy family steal from women. He looked like a nervous accountant. A thin, gray, rumpled man in his sixties with a nicotine-stained moustache and a briefcase he held on his lap like a shield, sitting in the leather chair across from Imogen's desk at nine o'clock on Tuesday morning, sweating through a good wool suit. "Before we begin," he said, in a thin, reedy voice, "I would like it on the record that I did not know about the drugs." "Noted," said Imogen coolly. "Though I have trouble believing you drafted a power-of-attorney for a woman you thought was healthy." "I drafted what I was told to draft." He mopped his forehead. "I'm a lawyer, Ms. Falk. Not a physician." "No. You're a lawyer who stands to lose his license, his pension, and possibly his freedom. Which is why you've come to us." Imogen folded her hands. "Mr. Pruitt, you have one chance to make that worth my client's time." I sat very s
REBORN BEFORE THE END: MY EX'S FAMILY WILL STARVE FIRST Chapter 19 Dock Nine
I watched it on the laptop, wrapped in a blanket in the passenger seat of Idris's truck, with a thermos of coffee going cold in my hands. We were parked two hundred yards from the warehouse, behind a stack of shipping containers, in the dark. The cameras gave us four views in grainy green and gray: the front door, the loading bay, the aisles between the pallets, and the empty lot behind. Four men had arrived at two a.m. in a white panel truck. They were not subtle. One carried a crowbar. Another carried a bolt cutter. The third, a heavy man in a dark hoodie, waited in the cab with the engine running. The fourth, who walked in front, had his hood pulled low and a cigarette burning in his fingers. "That's not a professional," Idris murmured, watching the screen. "That's somebody's cousin." "Rory Hale," I said. My voice sounded strange. "Garrick's cousin. He used to make fun of my weight at family parties." Idris glanced at me. "Then enjoy this." I did, a little. On the screen, R
REBORN BEFORE THE END: MY EX'S FAMILY WILL STARVE FIRST Chapter 18 The Tail
The gray sedan followed us for eleven miles. I counted them on the odometer, because counting was better than thinking about the ice-cold fist in my stomach. We went north on the avenue, west on the ring road, and south down a long, ugly stretch of warehouses where every light was red. Idris drove with both hands on the wheel and his eyes flicking between the mirrors, utterly calm. Twice the sedan closed in so tightly that I could see the driver's face: young, unshaven, chewing gum with grim concentration, as if this were a job interview. "They're not good," Idris said, after a mile. "They keep braking too early." "Is that supposed to comfort me?" "It's supposed to inform you." He took a left without signaling. "Amateurs. Hired, not trained. They're following the truck, not you. Which means they don't know what you look like in the dark." "That is not helping either." "Hold on." He turned into an alley so narrow that the side mirrors scraped the bricks. Behind a shuttered ba
REBORN BEFORE THE END: MY EX'S FAMILY WILL STARVE FIRST Chapter 17 Learning to Take Up Space
At six on Saturday morning, I stood in the parking garage beneath my building in leggings I had bought three years ago and never worn, feeling like a sofa in a gym. "You're doing it again," said Idris. "Doing what?" "Making yourself smaller. Shoulders in. Arms tight. You look like you're apologizing to the concrete." I let out a breath. He was right. I had spent so many years folding myself into corners that my body no longer knew another shape. Winnifred used to say that a lady should never take up more room than her chair. Garrick used to say it with a smile, when he thought I wasn't listening: Dess could stand to get smaller. I had believed them for so long that I'd stopped hearing it as an opinion. It had become weather. It had become the way the world simply was. Now, in a cold garage at six in the morning, a man with a scar through his eyebrow was telling me, calmly, that I was allowed to be exactly as large as I was. It had been my idea. That was the strange part. The n
REBORN BEFORE THE END: MY EX'S FAMILY WILL STARVE FIRST Chapter 16 Lot Seventeen
Prescott & Vane settled on the second of January. I'd expected a long winter of letters. Imogen had said weeks, maybe months. But she had underestimated what a managing partner will do when he is faced with a federal prosecutor he is not sure exists, a firm audit he can't control, and a general counsel who has not slept in four days. The offer came by courier at nine in the morning, in a thick cream envelope. I read the cover letter standing in my kitchen with a cup of coffee going cold in my hand, and then I read it again, slowly, because I did not believe it. Prescott & Vane Financial, without admission of liability, offers restitution in the amount of $18,500 toward the losses incurred by Ms. Marlowe, together with legal fees and a formal letter of apology. Eighteen thousand five hundred. It wasn't sixty-one. It wasn't close. But it was real money, in a real account, from a real firm that had signed its name to it. And the apology, a single sentence at the bottom of the seco
REBORN BEFORE THE END: MY EX'S FAMILY WILL STARVE FIRST Chapter 15 The Man Who Doesn't Share
"My name is Bram Castellane," said the stranger. "And you are trespassing on my family's mountain." Idris did not lower his arm. "She's on public land." "It's public until I say otherwise." Bram's smile never moved. "But I'm in a generous mood. And I think the lady and I have the same enemy." I stepped out from behind Idris's arm. I did it deliberately. Slowly. I had learned in the last two weeks that men like to decide where a woman stands, and that the only cure was to stand somewhere else. "I don't know you," I said. "No." His dark eyes moved over my face with an interest so frank it should have been rude. "But you will." Castellane. I knew the name. Everyone in the city knew it. The Castellanes were an old family, shipping and real estate and consulting, and the kind of private security that never put its name on the door. Newspapers called them respectable. People who actually knew called them something else. And their heir, a thirty-year-old with a reputation for charm
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