All Chapters of Ex Husband, Prepare To Burn : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

64 Chapters

Chapter 51 - Not Worth a Bullet

Elara's POV"She doesn't spook," the stable owner said, handing me the reins. "Crowds, flags, gunfire on film shoots. Nothing moves her unless you move her.""What's her name?""Justice." He said it without a trace of irony, checking the girth strap a final time. "The previous owner had a sense of humor."I didn't laugh, because the previous owner was Morticia. That lady had anything but a sense of humor.The bridle path ran exactly as the deed said it would — service road, then trees, thirty years of nobody, branches grown low enough that I rode the first kilometer bent over the mare's neck. Through the leaves the Haverton came up in pieces. White chairs. The drone hanging over the lawn like a patient insect. Three hundred guests and a string quartet playing something that had been played at my own wedding, ten years and one ocean ago.My phone had gone to Liam four times since dawn. Four rings each, then nothing. Ivy couldn't raise him. Marco said Thursday, a pushed fitting, a note,

Chapter 52 - What You Can't Change About Camila

Ian's POV"Get out of the car, Camila."She hadn't moved in twenty minutes. The bridal car had brought her back to the house because no one else would take her — her own security had peeled off before the Haverton gates, the planner wasn't answering, Petra's phone went straight to a voicemail that no longer said Vale Group — and now she sat in the back seat in the dress, in the driveway, while the driver stood as far from the vehicle as the job allowed.I opened the door myself. She stared straight ahead through the windshield at nothing.She didn't move for twenty minutes. Just sat in the back seat in the dress, in the driveway, while the driver stood at the far end of the gravel with a cigarette.I opened the door myself. She stared straight ahead through the windshield."They're saying I confessed," she said. "The clips. They've cut it so it sounds like —""You did confess.""They edited —""Three hundred phones, Camila. There is no edit. There's just you." The last of the light ca

Chapter 53 - The Letter

Elara's POV"Madam, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I only turned around for —""Mrs. Adele." I took both her hands before the rest of the sentence could break her. "Look at me. Where are Noah and Emily?""Upstairs. Sleeping. The police lady is with them — they wouldn't sleep, and then they did, all at once, the way they do." Her hands were cold in mine, twenty-two hours after, still cold. "Madam, the garden — I only went in for the sunscreen, Claire wanted her yellow hat, and when I came back the gate —""You went in for sunscreen because it was hot and she is four and burns in twenty minutes. You did your job." I said it slowly, once, and watched it fail to land, and knew it would need saying a hundred more times before it did. "Now I need everything. From the beginning, in order."The house didn't feel like my house. Fourteen hours in the air and I'd walked through my own front door into a place with two federal officers in the kitchen, a technician doing something to the landline, and

Chapter 54 - Hawkesbury

Elara's POV"Read it to me again.""Elara, you've heard it four —""The last paragraph, Avery. Again."Static and paper on the other end of the world. Then Avery's voice, careful, level, reading a dead-tired man's handwriting for the fifth time down a phone line: "If it goes wrong, it goes wrong because I got close. Don't look for me where I parked — look at what's forty minutes past it. He booked nothing. Men like this don't fly out with cargo, they drive to water. E — the boats. It was always boats. — L.""Forty minutes past Parramatta," I said. "Toward water.""That's the Hawkesbury," Danvers said from across my kitchen table, already pulling the map around. Three days now she'd worked out of my kitchen, and the table had disappeared under charts of a coastline that had more hiding places than a coastline had any right to have. "River systems, private moorings, oyster leases, four hundred places to put a boat you don't want found. But." She tapped the map twice. "It cuts the search

Chapter 55 - The Search

Elara's POV"Mooring nine."Danvers said it from the bottom of my stairs at six in the morning, phone still in her hand.I came down fully dressed, and behind me Ian appeared in the hallway with both phones like he'd never gone to bed at all."A cruiser, forty-foot, registered to a shelf company in Brisbane eleven weeks old. Thermal picked up one adult male on board at four a.m. One." Danvers held my eyes while the number landed. "We go in thirty minutes. You can be at the staging point. You cannot be on the water. That's the deal.""Take it," Ian said quietly behind me, before I could bargain. "Elara. Take the deal."The staging point was a boat ramp with a public toilet block and a view of grey water folding itself over and over. I stood at the bonnet of Danvers' car with a radio I wasn't allowed to speak into and watched two inflatables cross the river in the flat dawn light like they had nowhere urgent to be, which is how professionals cross water. Ian stood on the other side of

Chapter 56 - Hillary Handley

Elara's POV"You look terrible," Sullivan said."You collapsed in your own boardroom and I flew here from a crime scene. Between us we've had quite a morning." I pulled the chair to his bedside and sat, and his hand found mine on the blanket before I'd finished sitting, which told me more about the last twenty minutes than any chart could. "The nurse said you were holding the doctors hostage.""Negotiating." His color was wrong — grey under the tan, the tan itself thinner than it had been on a screen last week. Wires ran from him to three machines that each had opinions. "There's a scan this afternoon. There's a specialist flying up from Melbourne tonight. There's a word they keep almost saying and then not saying, and I've decided I'll hear it after I've said mine, because mine's been waiting six months and theirs can wait four hours.""Sullivan —""Dave." He said it and then looked almost embarrassed, an expression I'd seen on his face maybe twice in five years. "Or not. Or whatever

Chapter 57 - Book The Scan

Elara's POV"Sit down, Ms. Rhodes.""I heard you the first time."The doctor — Calloway, her badge said, careful eyes, a voice trained not to give anything away before the sentence was ready — didn't push it twice. She just waited until I sat, because some part of me had already understood that whatever came next needed a chair under it, and had sat down out of self-preservation rather than obedience."The aneurysm is larger than the original imaging suggested. Six years old, at minimum, possibly older — these don't announce themselves until they choose to." She turned her tablet so I could see the scan without pretending I'd understand it. A pale shape, a small swollen knot on a branch of grey lines. "Today's collapse wasn't the aneurysm rupturing. It was a warning shot — a minor bleed, contained, which is the only reason your father is currently awake and telling my nurse she has excellent bone structure."Something in my chest that had been braced for the worst word let go by exact

Chapter 58 - Protection She Thinks

Elara's POVThe envelope was already on the dining table when I got there, sitting inside a clear evidence sleeve.Danvers had gloves on, and Ian was standing close enough to it that I understood he'd been the one to physically intercept it from the courier before anyone official arrived."You touched it," I said."I photographed the courier's van and the driver's ID before I let him leave. Then I called Danvers before I opened anything." He said it steadily, already braced for the correction. "It's addressed to you. Personally. Handwritten. I wanted eyes on it the second it existed, not an hour from now when it's been sitting in a mail room."Danvers didn't look up from the sleeve. "He did it clean, for what it's worth. Chain of custody's intact." She turned the envelope in the light. No return address, my name in careful block capitals, postmarked two suburbs over from a mail centre that served half the western city. "We'll get nothing off a public posting box. Let's see what's insi

Chapter 59 - The Heiress Presumed Dead

Elara's POV"It's already out."Ivy said it the second I picked up, no preamble, which told me how bad it was before she'd said a single detail. "Sydney Morning Herald has it. Financial Review's picking it up within the hour. Missing SM Group heiress presumed dead is Dave Sullivan's biological daughter — that's the headline, word for word, someone at the hospital sold the boardroom collapse and the DNA both.""Both.""Both. And they've connected it to the wedding footage from New York, and to the gala five years ago, and someone's dug up the old obituary — yours, from five years back, they ran your photo next to Sullivan's collapse footage like a magic trick." Ivy's voice, usually a wall, had a crack of genuine alarm in it. "This isn't a story anymore, Elara. This is the story. There are three vans outside SM Group New York and I'm told two outside the Sydney office and I don't know what's outside your house because I'm afraid to ask."I looked out my own front window. Four vans. A fi

Chapter 60 - Hidden Things Don't Stay Small

Elara's POV"The imaging confirms it."Dr. Calloway turned her tablet the way she had four days ago, except this time the pale swollen shape on the screen belonged to me, and I made myself look at it the way I'd made myself look at everything else that week — straight on, no flinching, the flinching done later, alone, if at all."Same vessel family as your father's, though yours sits differently — closer to the areas responsible for memory consolidation. That's not a certainty of harm. It's a location that makes harm more likely than his does." She said it plainly, the way she'd promised. "The Melbourne specialist agrees. Surgical risk is manageable. Memory risk is real. I'd put it at meaningful odds — not a coin flip, but not something I'll pretend away either.""Numbers," I said."He'll want to give you those himself, in person, when he flies up Thursday. I won't hand you someone else's number secondhand." She closed the tablet. "What I can tell you today: it needs to happen soon, s

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