Semua Bab My Precocious Triplets Brought me a Husband For Christmas : Bab 51 - Bab 59

“Who took my charger?” Bryan demanded from the kitchen doorway.“I didn’t take it,” Perry answered immediately.Tyler didn’t bother to look up from his cereal. “Then stop yelling like you just did.”“I’m not yelling.”“You are. You just don’t hear It.”Peter turned off the kettle and put down his coffee. “Everyone pause.”They froze, not from fear, but from habit. He had earned that.“Bryan, your charger is in the living room. You left it plugged in under the couch.”Bryan blinked. “How do you...”“You said it yesterday when it slipped and sparked.” "Oh” Bryan scratched his head. “Right.”Peter had learned the house by sound before he learned it by habit. The way Bryan clears his throat before asking questions he already knows the answers to. The rhythm of Perry's footsteps when he's trying not to look nervous. The silence Tyler employed as a punctuation.There was a little scratch against the morning’s silence.Perry propped himself on the counter. “Can we go now We’re already late

"The wire transfer bounced. You have seventy-two hours."Before Catalina could respond, the line went dead.She was immobilized in her penthouse, phone at her ear, Manhattan’s pre-dawn light shining in through the windows. Two hours of sleep. Maybe less. Her Louboutin heel was poised on the marble floor, caught in that instant between balance and falling. Her reflection in the glass was that of a stranger; polished surface, fractures beneath radiating like spider webs frozen in ice.The voice had been male, calm, expensive. That kind of politeness which precludes destruction. That modulated politeness was what made it deadly, threats enrobed in velour still slice just as deep.She'd asked what he wanted. He'd been exact,  obedience, silence, and payment in full, by Friday.When she’d said impossible, he’d told her she was wrong. "Only inconvenient."The distinction seemed irrelevant now.Nearly broke.The phrase preyed on her mind like a predator on injured prey. She had based her lif

“Something Happened at work?”Peter asked casually , the way you'd ask about traffic or weather, the way you asked when you were not trying to pin down the truth but you felt it sliding just out of your grasp, lurking in the shadows waiting to be brought into the light.Stephanie paused at the sink.The tap was running."No," she said a beat too late. Then she stretched out her hand and switched the water off, slowly, deliberately, as though the movement itself necessitated reflection. As if turning off water had been turned into something difficult. "Just tired."Peter looked not at her face but at her reflection in the kitchen window. It was a habit he’d unconsciously picked up. Observing angles more than faces, gestures more than spoken language. Eye contact in the mirror tells a different story than gaze in real life. They reveal things a person isn’t aware they are showing. The boys were in the living room, loudly bickering over which had cheated while playing the board game spl

“You’re telling me the system did that on its own?” Stephanie didn’t raise her voice. She didn't need to. The stillness in her tone was sharper than anger or rage.From the other end of the secure video line, the compliance officer sat up straighter in his chair. He was young, too young for the sort of anomalies blinking across her screen and it showed in the way he cleared his throat before answering."Following step the system automatically logged it,” he said. “There’s no manual override. No place where a human has entered the system that we can track.”Stephanie eased back slowly, fingers interlaced beneath her chin. The light of three monitors was reflecting in her eyes, copy and timelines running into each other.“Systems don’t hallucinate,” she said. “People do.”A pause.“Yes, ma’am.”She exhales through her nose. ‘Take me through it again. From the top. Slowly.”The officer complied. Dates. Jurisdictions. Compliance triggers Each word stacked tidily on top of the last, neat