Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 141 - Chapitre 144

After Bella died, Mark started to live with Henry.It was not a gentle upbringing.Henry’s new apartment was the same shabby, defeated place it had always been — the same bottles, the same smell, the same television flickering at nobody. The difference now was that there was a boy in it, growing up inside all of that, absorbing it the way children absorb everything around them whether anyone intends them to or not.Henry was a thief. He had always been a thief — small jobs, opportunistic crimes, the particular moral flexibility of a man who had decided long ago that the world owed him something and had been collecting informally ever since. He drank too much and worked too little and loved his son in the only way he knew how, which was imperfectly and with conditions attached.But there was one thing Henry planted in Mark with complete consistency, watered every day, tended with more care than he gave anything else in his life.Hatred.Zara Ashford, he told him. The woman who called

Outside in the garden, Marcus reached for another piece of meat off the grill and said, almost as an afterthought: “Oh — and apparently the footage they found shows someone in a mask and specific gloves. That’s all they have.” Mrs. Ashford waved her hand. “Marcus, please. Don’t ruin a perfectly good meal with that. Let them find whoever they need to find. That’s their job.” Marcus shrugged and let it go. The barbecue continued. In the bedroom, Zara looked at the two men standing in the middle of her floor and let the silence sit for a moment before she spoke. “Your mother,” she said to Mark, “thought she was being clever. Paying someone to poison my food.” She tilted her head slightly. “But the girl she chose told me everything. Every word of it.” She paused. “So I returned the favour. A simple gas leak. I made sure you and your father were out of the house first — made sure you were safe. Your mother was alone because that was her own choice that evening.” She looked at Mark