All Chapters of VOWS IN THE WAR ROOM: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

I woke up because the house changed.Not the usual nighttime settling. Not a pipe complaining or a window flexing in the cold. This was the kind of quiet that feels arranged—like someone had asked the estate to hold its breath.I sat up slowly, sheets sliding off my shoulder. The clock on the bedside table glowed past two. My throat was dry, my mind still running in circles around Sabine’s warning from earlier.Including your brother.She’d said it with a smile, as if she were reminding me about a dinner reservation.I swung my feet to the floor and stood, careful not to let the mattress creak. My slippers were right where I’d left them, neatly aligned like the room expected me to behave.The door to my bedroom was closed. It shouldn’t have made me nervous. But it did.I reached for the handle and paused.A shadow moved on the other side… barely a shift, but enough.I didn’t ope

The key card sat on the library table like it belonged there.It didn’t.Gabriel laid it down with two fingers, careful, as if the plastic could bite. “Estate-level access,” he said. “Not a hotel card. Not a visitor badge.”Renaud didn’t pick it up. He didn’t need to. His eyes were already doing the work...cataloging, narrowing, stripping the room down to the ugly truth.“Who has these?” I asked.Gabriel’s mouth tightened. “Staff. Security. A few contractors, but those are tracked. This one wasn’t.”I watched Renaud’s hand curl once against his thigh, then relax. He never raised his voice, but the air changed anyway.“List,” he said to Gabriel. “Everyone. No exceptions.”Gabriel nodded and left without another word. His boots were quiet on the polished floor. That was the thing about him…you didn’t hear him m

The pendant sat in my palm like a pulse that did not belong to me.I stood in the war room long after Renaud had gone still at the sight of it. He had not tried to take it. That was what unsettled me. A man like Renaud Valois controlled rooms, people, and outcomes. But when I uncapped the metal tube and tipped the small carved pendant into my hand, he looked at it as if it had stepped out of a grave.“What is it?” I had asked.His jaw had tightened. “Not tonight.”That was all he gave me.Not tonight.Then he walked out with that rigid, measured stride of his, the kind that told the world he was calm while his mind broke furniture in private.So I stayed behind in the hidden room, staring at the old letter and the pendant, trying to decide which one frightened me more. The letter was written in a hand I knew only from birthday cards saved in a tin box upstairs in my old room at the factory house. My mother&rsqu

I went to the records office before I could think better of it.That was the only way to do certain things. If I paused, I would start sorting feelings into neat little boxes, and once I started that, nothing moved. My father’s words were still under my skin. My mother didn’t die the way you were told. It sat there like a splinter I could not reach.Gabriel drove.He did not ask questions for the first ten minutes, which was one of the reasons I trusted him more than most men who claimed to protect anything. Snow dragged grey light across the windshield. Québec looked tired under winter, all stone, salt, and breath. The city had a way of making secrets seem respectable.“You’re quiet,” Gabriel said at last.“You say that like it's unusual.”“It’s not. This is different.”I looked out the window. “My father said my mother didn’t die the way I was told.&rdquo

The first thing I noticed was that Gabriel stopped talking.That was never a comfort.A man like Gabriel could discuss routes, timing, weather, staffing gaps, and the moral decline of city drivers without missing a turn. Silence from him meant calculation. Calculation meant something had moved from possible to present.I sat in the back seat with Julien’s copied registry notes on my lap and watched the snow blur past the side window.In the front, Gabriel’s shoulders had gone still.I leaned forward slightly. “You’ve done that thing again.”“What thing?”“The one where you get quiet because you’ve seen something you don’t want me noticing.”His eyes stayed on the mirror. “Then I’m failing.”I followed his gaze.The black sedan was still behind us.Farther back now. Two cars between us. Calm enough to look innocent if you wer