All Chapters of Tempted by my brother-in-law. : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

PHOTOGRAPHPOV: HazelI looked at the photograph for a long time.My mother. Young, maybe twenty, standing outside the Varyn estate gates in a coat I did not recognise with her hair shorter than I had ever seen it and her face carrying none of the things the years had put there. She was looking at the camera with the expression she had when she was thinking about something else, present but distant, the specific look of a person whose mind was somewhere the photograph could not follow.Iris shifted against my shoulder.I held her and looked at the photograph and thought about my mother telling me this morning that she had applied for her own deportation. That she had controlled the method. That she had buried things in paperwork. That she had left me a safety net and a solicitor in Edinburgh and a name.Vera's name.She had worked for Vera before any of it. Before Reeve, before my father, before me. She had stood outside those gates young and unknown and she had gone inside and she ha

BUYERPOV: NikolaiThe name on the screen was Vera Varyn.I stood in the middle of the cabin and looked at it and looked at Hazel and looked at it again and the specific quality of the silence in the room said that everyone present understood what they were looking at and nobody wanted to be the first to speak.Reeve spoke first."I did not know," he said.I looked at him."The distribution list was managed by Petra," he said. "I set the logistics chain up and I handed it to her and I did not audit the buyer list directly. I had a figure at the end of each season and a chain that did not connect to my name and I did not look further than that.""You did not know Vera was buying the extract," I said."No," he said.I looked at Petra.She was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and the expression of a woman who had just run out of things to trade."How long," I said."Since the beginning," she said. "The first season. She contacted the logistics chain six weeks after the faci

SOLICITORPOV: HazelI looked at her for a long moment."You have been holding my mother's account for eleven years," I said."Yes," she said."You are the solicitor in Edinburgh," I said."I have an office there," she said. "I maintained it after my husband's death for exactly this kind of purpose. Something that existed outside the Varyn name and outside Sky Shade City and outside any structure Reeve could find if he went looking." She set her tea down. "Your mother trusted me with it because I was the only person she knew who had both the means to protect it and enough distance from Reeve's network to do so safely.""And you sat in this house for a year," I said. "Watching me survive inside a marriage I did not need. Watching me pull at threads trying to find something I already had access to.""Yes," she said."Why," I said. "If you had the account and you knew who I was and you knew why I was here, why did you not tell me."She held my gaze."Because you needed to be ready," she

ISABELLAPOV: NikolaiShe came through the door between two investigators and she looked like herself.That was the thing I noticed first. After a day that had taken pieces off everyone in it, after a mountain and a cabin and a library full of things that could not be unsaid, Isabella came through the door of the Varyn estate looking exactly as she always looked. Composed. Upright. The specific armour of a woman who had decided thirty years ago that appearance was its own form of power and had never stopped believing it.She looked at me first.Then at Hazel.Then at Vera, who had come out of the library when she heard the cars and was standing at the end of the entrance hall with her hands folded, waiting.The two investigators were a man and a woman, both in their forties, both with the particular quality of people who had been doing this long enough to read a room without showing that they were reading it. They introduced themselves and showed credentials and asked if there was som

TABLEPOV: HazelMy mother cooked like she was angry at the kitchen.Not actually angry. That was just how she cooked, with the focused intensity of someone who needed all of it to go right and was not going to leave that to chance. She moved between the stove and the counter and the refrigerator with the efficiency of a woman who had spent years making do with whatever was available and could produce a meal from almost anything.She had found the Varyn estate kitchen fully stocked.This pleased her in the specific way that good raw material pleased someone who knew what to do with it.I sat on the counter and watched her and Iris sat in a high chair that Kaden had produced from somewhere in the house with the expression of a man who had not known the chair existed until he needed it and was not going to comment on that.Iris was eating something my mother had given her and was largely wearing it."She does that," my mother said without turning around."I can see," I said."She gets i