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Todos os capítulos de The Substitute Husband's Secret: Capítulo 61 - Capítulo 70

72 Capítulos

The Warehouse

The first thing I knew was the cold.It came up through the soles of my shoes and the metal against my spine and the damp, heavy air in my lungs. Not the clean cold of snow or wind. The deep, bone-aching cold of a place that hadn't been warm in years. It had a taste. Rust and wet concrete and something sour underneath, like old fish.I opened my eyes.Darkness. Gray, fading to a shapeless black. Somewhere above me, very far up, a dim line of light stood against the dark. A broken skylight, I realized slowly. Rain was pouring through it in a thin, steady stream and splashing onto the floor with a sound like a faucet someone had forgotten to turn off.My head throbbed.I tried to lift it and the whole world slid sideways. My neck wouldn't hold. A thin line of pain ran from my temple to my jaw where something had struck me in the van, or maybe I'd struck it myself. I couldn't remember. There was only a gap in my mind, black and smooth as glass, where the last hour should have been.*I'm

Demand In The Dark

Wu told me at 6:09.I was in the garage, in the back of Cole's SUV, with the engine running and the wipers beating a useless rhythm against a windshield that showed nothing but a concrete wall. We'd gotten as far as the ramp. The street beyond it was a river. A police cruiser had stalled in the intersection with water to its door handles, lights spinning blue and red in the flood, and Cole had put the car in park and looked at me in the mirror and said, very quietly, *Sir, there's no road.*My phone rang.*OPS CENTER.*"Mr. Cross." Wu's voice was thin. Breathless. A boy's voice, I realized, for the first time. He couldn't have been twenty-five. "I'm so sorry. I was watching the feed. The one from the motel. I had it on the corner monitor and I looked away for a second to get coffee, I only looked away for a second...""Wu.""Two men. They went up the stairs at 5:58. One was huge. They had a key. I saw the door open." A tiny, ragged sound. "I couldn't hear anything. The feed doesn't ha

The Artist And The Steel

The screen went dark, and the silence rushed in.I sat in the circle of white light with the echo of my own voice still ringing off the rafters. My throat was raw. My wrists burned where I'd torn at the ties. I'd thrown my whole body against them, and the chair had rocked, and the plastic had bitten down to the bone, and somewhere in the roar I'd heard a hand close around my shoulder and drag me back.Now I was panting.*He heard me.**He heard.*I couldn't stop shaking. Not from the cold. Something else, something bright and hot and impossible rose through the fear like a flame through ice.*I read the book,* he'd said. *I know everything.**I'm coming.*I wanted to laugh. I wanted to sob. I wanted to say his name aloud into the dark just to feel what it was like to be heard."Well," said Sebastian pleasantly. "That was unexpected."He closed the laptop with a soft click.He stood a few feet away, hands folded in front of him. His smile hadn't moved. But something in his posture had

Mobilizing The Bloodline

The screen stayed black for eleven seconds.I counted. It was the only thing I could do. I sat in front of a dead terminal with both palms flat on the glass desk and my own reflection hanging in the dark of the monitor, a gray-faced man in a ruined tuxedo with blood on his bandage, and I counted the seconds the way I'd once counted floorboards in a stranger's house.*Don't do it, Damien! It's a trap!*Behind me, nobody spoke.I heard Imani's keyboard begin to tick again, very softly, a rhythm like rain on a window. I heard Victoria's breath. I heard, from somewhere in the operations center, the small flat chirp of a phone that nobody answered."Damien," Victoria said at last."Don't.""We have until noon.""I know.""We could comply. We could put the signatures on paper, tie it up in litigation afterward. Every document signed under duress is voidable. Our lawyers...""He'd still be dead."I said it without turning."Sebastian doesn't leave witnesses to a bargain he's already won. You

Tracking The Signal

Victoria went white at 7:58.I saw it happen from across the operations center. She stood at the third terminal with her sleeves rolled and her hair coming down, scrolling through a column of system logs she'd been reading for ten minutes, and her fingers simply stopped. Her whole body went still, the way a bird goes still when it hears something in the grass."Damien.""What is it?""I need you to come here. And I need you not to be angry with me."I crossed the room.Alessandro's men had spread out across the long curved desk, laying out dark kit in neat rows. Black gloves. Radios. Compact headlamps. Someone was checking a coil of line with the tender, absorbed care of a man packing a parachute. They moved around one another without speaking, a quiet, practiced dance, and not one of them looked up when I passed.Victoria's screen held a single entry, highlighted in yellow.*SAFEGUARD ALERT NETWORK. UNIT 0417. LOW-CONFIDENCE PING.**Received 07:52. Queued for review.*I read it twice

Reconnaissance At The Docks

The harbor was white.I'd never seen it like that. We came out of the marina at Sunset Park at 8:34, two black rigid hulls slipping across a sea the color of old pewter, and within a hundred yards the shore had vanished. The fog sat on the water like a lid. It muffled the engines to a low, steady purr. It beaded on my face and soaked into my collar and gave the whole world a hushed, dreamy, underwater stillness, as though we were crossing the surface of a very large, very quiet thought.I crouched in the bow of the lead boat with my back against a bulkhead and my right hand resting on the grip at my hip.Beside me, Alessandro sat as easily as a man on a park bench.He had a pair of binoculars around his neck and a small waterproof tablet balanced on one knee, and every few seconds he lifted a hand to the radio at his collar and murmured something in low, clipped Italian. His men answered in the same quiet shorthand. Not one of them looked nervous. Not one of them looked like anything

The Breach

I listened to Sebastian Moreau for four minutes.It was the longest four minutes of my life. I lay on my belly on the cold iron grating, with the rust biting through my coat and my cheek an inch from a bar slick with pigeon droppings, and I watched the man who'd taken Felix pace back and forth across a pool of light with a phone against his ear."No," he was saying. His voice carried up through forty feet of dark, thin and clear and perfectly at ease. "No, Pierre, let him sweat. Cross hasn't called. He'll call at the last minute. They always do."A pause."Two hours. A little less. Is the notary ready?" He listened. Smiled. "Good. Have the documents at the Aldrich by eleven. I want the transfer on the wire before noon."He ended the call.He put the phone away. Smoothed the front of his coat. Then he turned, unhurried, and walked back toward the chair.He stopped in front of Felix.I couldn't hear what he said. The words were lost in the hum of the halogen. I saw his head tilt. I saw

The Standoff

I screamed his name into the dark.I don't know why. It was the only thing I had. The explosions had stopped ringing in my ears and left behind a high thin whine, like a wire stretched too tight, and in the black beyond that whine, the world was all flashes and shadows. Yellow light stabbing out of nowhere. The crack of gunfire, bouncing from wall to wall until I couldn't tell which direction it came from. The smell of smoke, thick and sour and chemical, clawing at the back of my throat.I'd seen him.For one second. Through a torn gap in the haze, forty feet above me, in the rafters. A shape on an iron grating, pale face turned down, a hand pressed against a rail. I couldn't have said how I knew. Some part of me had felt it before my eyes did, the way you feel a warm room before you've opened the door.*He's here.**He came.*Then the lamp had burst, and the dark had fallen, and I'd screamed."*Damien!*"Nobody answered.The ties bit into my wrists. The chair rocked. I twisted agains

The Ultimate Choice

Everything stopped.That was what I noticed first. Not the silence, though there was silence, vast and ringing, the kind that comes after a bell. It was something deeper. As though the building itself had drawn a breath and was holding it. The smoke hung motionless in the flashlight beams. The last pigeons had settled. Even the water, lapping at the pilings beyond the walls, seemed to wait.Ten feet.That was the distance between my pistol and the man's head.It wasn't a head. It was a head and a head. Sebastian Moreau crouched behind the steel chair like a man behind a barricade, one arm hooked around Felix's throat, one knee braced against the frame, so that a thin pale slice of his face showed over Felix's shoulder and nothing else. A cheekbone. A gray eye. A temple, dewed with sweat.And a barrel, black and enormous, pressed into the soft hollow behind Felix's ear.I had the angle.I'd have called it three inches. Four. A fraction of a second, if my hand held. I'd practiced on a r

The Line Of Fire

*Take me instead.*The words hung in the smoke.I heard them. I heard every one of them, as though they were being spoken very slowly in a vast empty church. *Take me instead, Sebastian. Leave him out of this.* The voice was so calm, so level, so terrifyingly quiet that for a second I didn't recognize it.Then I did.*No.*I'd said it with my lips. I'd said it with my eyes. I'd poured every ounce of what I had into that one silent syllable and flung it across ten feet of smoke at the man standing there in the ruined light with his hands open at his sides.*No. No. Please. Don't.*He looked at me.For a heartbeat, his eyes softened. Something moved in them, a small, helpless tenderness, a smile that wasn't a smile. It was the look of a man who has heard a plea and understood it and has no intention of obeying.*Damien.**You idiot. You beautiful, stubborn, impossible idiot.*Behind me, Sebastian was breathing.I could feel it. The hard, ragged heave of his chest against my back. The ar

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