Ninety One

Celine's POVThe name dropped in the room and was here to stay.I saw it land on Caelum the way you see a thing hit water, the first splash and then rings spreading away from it, altering all it touched. He did not move for a moment. He sat with his phone in hand and the call already finished, staring at a point halfway between himself and the wall across.I did not speak. I had learned, in the time I had spent next to this man, that certain moments were ones you walked into with caution and that the first act was simply to be there in them without encumbering them.He told me what Chen had said in the unemotional flat style with which he delivered things that were too big to be matched by their delivery. His father. Victor Morano. Dead twenty five years, or rather dead, buried in a grave Caelum had stood beside at fifteen in a suit two sizes too big and with Vivienne's hand on his shoulder and no one standing beside him who was there for him instead of for the sake of her performance

Ninety Two

Caelum's POVI covered Celine as the third shot came through what was left of the front window and reaped a chunk out of the wall behind where we had been standing.It was loud with it, glass and plaster and the particular brand of chaos that belonged to the experience of being inside a building while under fire, how sound reverberated off hard surfaces and took on a plastic-wrapped quality that made it difficult to use as navigation. I flattened Celine behind the couch with my finger on my own weapon and made a quick assessment of the angles.Victor was at the secret stash, moving with an efficiency and speed that did not belong to a man who had spent twenty five years living quietly in a suburb but I opened for just a second the question of what those twenty five years had actually consisted of and then I closed it shut again because this was not the time."Expecting what exactly," I said."This." He found the window, opened it a crack and gazed out in the measured way of someone wh

Ninety three

Celine's POVI stared at the bonds for a long time and said nothing.Paper and numbers. The physical evidence of fifty million dollars that had once been Vivienne’s money, then become Victor’s dupery, now reached here as the attempt for something that a dead man could not name cleanly. Caelum sat opposite me with his hands flat on the table and his jaw set in that way it got when he’d already made his mind up about something.“I want to destroy it,” he told the committee."All of it.""All of it. I do not want his money. I do not want his amends. I do not want his any version in our life including the financial version.”I understood that. I experienced the gravity of that and I did not ignore it. But I looked at those bonds and thought of Hope sleeping in the next room, and the child I had been carrying silently for three weeks, which we hadn’t told anyone about yet."It is for Hope," I said. "That is what he said. It is not for you or for me. It is for her future."“His blood money

Ninety Four

Caelum's POVHope asked why Celine could not get up.I told her it three times over the first week, in different iterations, adjusted each time to what she appeared to digest and where she dropped the thread. The baby required close supervision right now, I told her. Mama was doing the most important work there was, and that work demanded she not move. She processed this information each time with the focused seriousness she applied to things that were vexing her, and each time come back to the same conclusion.She would carefully climb onto the bed and sit next to Celine, telling her she was doing a good job.The first time this happened Celine looked over Hope’s head at me with the kind of expression I didn’t have a word for. Something so close to being undone but on the right side of it.I had been managing the household for years in the operational sense, the logistics of safety and movement and security, but the daily texture of it, the meals and the laundry and getting Hope dres

In Love With The Dangerous Professor のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 91 - チャプター 94

Ninety One

Ninety Two

Ninety three

Ninety Four