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Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Man Who Was Supposed To Die: Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 20

35 Kabanata

Chapter 11

Nobody in that car moved.Not Marcus, not Daniel, not me, and certainly not Damien, who was sitting completely still in the front seat with his eyes fixed on the window and his hands resting on his knees like two stones.Roland stood behind the glass and looked at us, and we looked at him, and the whole street held its breath around us.He did not look surprised.That was the thing that made my skin go cold.A man who comes home unexpectedly and finds a car full of people parked outside his house should look surprised. He should look confused, or alarmed, or at the very least curious. Roland looked like none of those things.He looked like a man checking that his order had arrived."He knew we were coming," I said.My voice came out steady, which was impressive considering what my chest was doing."Yes," Damien said."Delia," I said. Not accusingly. Just putting it together out loud. "He found out she messaged me. He read the messages.""She said he checks her phone," Marcus said quie

Chapter 12

The drive to the hospital took nine minutes.I know because I watched every single one of them tick past on the dashboard clock, my hand wrapped around the door handle, my knee bouncing without my permission, my mind doing the thing it did when I was scared, going very fast and very quiet at the same time, like an engine running too hard with the sound turned off.Damien was on the phone the entire way.He spoke in short, clipped sentences to three different people, his voice even and controlled, not a single word wasted. Listening to him work when everything was falling apart was like watching someone build a wall while a storm was hitting it. Fast and precise and completely focused.I wanted to say something to him.I did not know what.So I watched the city go past the window and held the memory card so tight in my left hand that the edges left little marks on my palm, and I told myself that my mother was fine, that she had just wandered to a different floor, that there was a simpl

Chapter 13

My father's name was Thomas Ward.He left on a Tuesday morning in October, when I was seven years old, with one bag and no explanation and the particular efficiency of a man who had been planning his exit for longer than anyone around him realised. I remembered standing at the top of the stairs in my pyjamas, watching the front door close behind him, thinking he had gone to buy milk.He had not gone to buy milk.He had gone for good.My mother cried for three months and then stopped, the way strong women stop, not because the pain was gone but because life required her to keep moving and she loved me too much to let me watch her fall apart completely. She never spoke badly about him. She never explained. She just kept going, and I kept going beside her, and after a while the space he had left behind became just a shape we moved around without mentioning.I had not seen his face in fifteen years.And now here he was, in the background of a photograph, standing in a room with my sick mo

Chapter 14

The dress I chose that morning was deliberate.Not the quiet, careful clothes I had been wearing since arriving at the estate. Not anything that said I am paying attention and I have been watching you for years. I chose the pale blue dress I had arrived in, the one that still smelled faintly of the life I had before all of this, the one that made me look exactly like what Roland had always believed I was.Small. Soft. Easily managed.I stood in front of the mirror in the guest room and practiced the expression. The slightly uncertain eyes. The hands that did not quite know where to rest. The way I used to hold my shoulders, curved inward, like I was trying to take up less space in a room that had not invited me.It came back faster than I wanted it to.That scared me more than Roland did.Damien was in the hallway when I came out.He looked at me for a moment, taking in the dress, the expression, the whole careful performance, and something moved across his face that I could not name.

Chapter 15

I sat down on the corridor floor.Not gracefully, not deliberately, just straight down, back against the wall, legs giving up on me without any warning or permission. Damien looked at me for a second and then sat down beside me, right there on the floor of his own estate like it was the most natural thing in the world, which somehow made everything slightly more bearable."He used me to get to you," I said."Yes," Damien said."The whole thing. My mother's illness, the surgery, the money, the marriage. None of it was about the shares." I paused. "It was about getting someone inside your world that you would not look at twice.""A young woman with no money, no connections and a sick mother," Damien said quietly. "The last person anyone would suspect of having an agenda."I pressed the back of my head against the wall and looked at the ceiling.Roland had seen me so clearly. He had looked at everything I was, everything I lacked, every vulnerability I carried, and he had built an entire

Chapter 16

I did not sleep that night.I lay on top of the covers in the guest room with my phone face down on the pillow beside me and the ceiling above me and my father's message sitting in my chest like a stone that had been dropped from a very great height.I know what Roland is really looking for inside that estate.Tell no one. Not even Damien Voss.Lives depend on it.I turned those three sentences over and over in my mind the way you turn something sharp over in your hand, carefully, trying to understand the shape of it without cutting yourself.My father had been hiding for fifteen years. He was connected to Roland. He was going by a different name. He had stood in a room with my mother and let Roland use him as a prop without once, as far as I could tell, trying to warn her.He was not a good man.But he was also, possibly, the only person who knew what Roland was actually after.And he had come to me.Not to Roland. Not to anyone else. To me.That meant something. I just did not know

Chapter 17

"I know where it is."Four words.That was all he said before the line went quiet, and I stood in that cold alley with my phone pressed to my ear and my heart doing something loud and unsteady, waiting for him to say more."Damien," I said carefully. "Are you sure?""I hid it myself," he said. "Two weeks before the accident. I was not going to forget."I exhaled slowly.Seven months in a coma, and his memory was already finding its way back to the things that mattered most.Roland had been searching for months.Damien had remembered in four days."Come back to the estate," Damien said. "Now."I walked fast.The morning streets were busy around me, people moving in every direction, the city doing what cities do, carrying on completely indifferent to the fact that everything in my small corner of it was unravelling and rebuilding at the same time.I thought about my father sitting in that corner with his back to the wall.I thought about the apology he had offered with both hands and th

Chapter 18

Damien read Delia's message over my shoulder.He did not panic.He just turned to Marcus and said, "Lock the estate down. Nobody in or out without my direct approval."Marcus was already moving before the sentence finished.I looked at Damien. "What do we do now?""We wait," he said. "Roland knows the evidence is out there but he cannot stop it. It has already reached too many people. What he can do now is damage control, and the only way he knows how to do damage control is to come after the person he thinks is responsible.""You," I said."Or you," he said.We looked at each other."Call Delia," Damien said. "Get her out of that house right now."I called Delia three times before she picked up.When she did, her voice was low and very careful, the way voices get when someone nearby cannot hear what you are saying."He got a call twenty minutes ago," she whispered. "He has been in his office since then. Sera, I have never seen him like this. He is not calm anymore."That hit me harde

Chapter 19

The news broke at seven in the morning.I was sitting at the kitchen counter with a cup of tea I had not touched, watching the small television mounted above the refrigerator, when Roland Quinn's face appeared on the screen.Not in handcuffs.Not being led anywhere.Just his face, calm and composed, in a photograph the news station had pulled from some business event three years ago, while the presenter read out the charges in a voice that made a decade of financial crime sound almost boring.Delia was sitting beside me.She had slept in the guest room next to mine and come downstairs at six thirty in yesterday's clothes with her hair pulled back and shadows under her eyes, and she had sat down without saying anything and poured herself coffee and we had watched the morning together in a silence that felt, surprisingly, like the beginning of something."He is going to get bail," she said quietly, eyes on the screen."I know," I said."His lawyers are the best in the city.""I know tha

chapter 20

Fighting, it turned out, looked nothing like I expected.I had imagined something loud and dramatic. Press statements, courtroom scenes, Damien standing behind a podium with his lawyers lined up beside him. The kind of fighting that looked like fighting from the outside.What actually happened was quieter and more precise than that.Damien called a meeting.Not in the estate. Not anywhere connected to the Voss name.He booked a private room in a members club in the centre of the city, a place with dark wood walls and deep chairs and the particular hush of somewhere that had absorbed decades of serious conversations and was prepared to absorb several more.He brought his lead lawyer, a sharp woman named Clara Holt who wore reading glasses pushed up on her head like she had forgotten they were there and spoke in sentences so precise they felt like they had been measured before leaving her mouth.He brought Marcus.He brought me.I had not expected to be included.When Marcus told me to

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