All Chapters of The taste Of Revenge: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

XAVIER'S POVMy collar feels two sizes too small, and I've checked it three times already, certain it's shrunk in the last ten minutes from nothing but the heat building under my jacket."Stop touching it you fool," Noah mutters beside me with a wide grin. My best man, adjusting his own cufflinks. "You look like you're trying to strangle yourself before she even gets here.""I'm fine man.""But you've scanned the crowd six times in the last two freaking minutes."I make myself stop.‘Enough!’ I say, almost like a whisper though. The truth is I already know what I'm looking for, and she isn't there. Some small, humiliating part of me kept scanning the room anyway, like the eighth pass might rearrange the seating chart in my favor… Like reality owes me a rewrite.“Jesus christ…get a grip.” Selene didn't come…I don't know why I expected otherwise. What did I think was going to happen? that she'd walk in wearing something dark and devastating just to prove she could sit through the wrec

AURORA'S POVMy hairbrush catches on a snarl and my fingers won't loosen around the handle. Christ! My knuckles are already going white, a small tremor climbing from wrist to elbow like something trying to escape through my skin. I set the brush down and watch my own hand in the mirror, flat against the marble, my fingers spread wide, willing the shaking into stillness the way you'd will a struck match not to catch. It stops, eventually. It always stops if I wait long enough, if I remember to breathe through my mouth instead of my nose so the sound of it doesn't betray me to the empty room.Two mornings as a wife. My body hasn't caught up to what my mind already knows how to perform. I study my reflection the way I used to study every room before I decide where to stand in them, the practiced softness around my eyes, my mouth arranged into something that photographs as radiant. I built this face the way I built everything else I own. Brick by careful brick, over years, out of nothing

XAVIER'S POVThe thing about debt is it doesn't feel like debt when you're building something. It feels like fuel. It feels like the gap between the speed you're moving and the speed you need and you borrow the gap and tell yourself it'll close, because you've closed gaps before and because everything I've ever built came from exactly this kind of borrowed velocity, and what I built is extraordinary, which proves that the method works, which means the current gap is temporary, which also means it's contained and properly managed. I've been managing this for eighteen months and I'm good at managing things. It's the one skill nobody ever had to teach me. Control, containment, the discipline of never letting anyone see the load-bearing wall until it's already reinforced. I've managed boards, managed a couple women, managed myself, most days, into something that passes for stability. This isn't different…it shouldn't be.I tell myself that at two in the morning, and again at six, and aga

AURORA'S POVI hear the sound of the car before I see him. That specific crunch of gravel at six forty-three, which is quite early because Xavier doesn't come home before seven-thirty on Thursdays, sometimes eight, and I'm at the kitchen counter with a glass of wine and vegetables I've been pretending to prepare, and the sound of the car stops me mid-cut.I set the knife down on the counter and take few steps to properly listen.The front door doesn't open immediately, which is the second wrong thing I've noticed and I cross to the window and look out and his car is there. The engine off, and through the windshield I can see the shape of him in the driver's seat, not moving, just sitting in the dark with his hands on the wheel and his head dropped forward slightly like the weight of it has become something he's negotiating with. He sits like that for four good minutes. Yes, I've been counting.The door finally opens and he gets out and doesn't straighten immediately the way he usually

XAVIER'S POVThe Hadley deadline moved on a Thursday and I found out on a Tuesday which gave me forty-eight hours to compress the information into something I could carry without it showing, and I've gotten very good at compression, I have spent years perfecting the specific art of taking catastrophic things and reducing them to manageable-looking shapes, and sixty days is just another shape. That's what I tell myself at six-fifteen in the morning standing at the kitchen island while the coffee brews and Aurora is still asleep upstairs and the estate is quiet in the particular way that large houses are quiet when they're holding one person's secrets and calling it peace.Sixty days, not Q1. Sixty days from the date of the third Hadley letter, which puts the deadline inside the current quarter, which means Gerald's repackaged presentation needs to happen faster and needs to be better than anything we've produced before, which means I need to call Gerald this morning and tell him the ti