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Home / Romance / The Bride They Buried Alive / Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Bride They Buried Alive : Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

78 Kabanata

Chapter 21: Before You Told Me

I found Damien in the library the next morning. Not by accident. I had checked the dining room first, then the corridor near his room, then here. I moved through the house like it wasn't deliberate. He was by the window. Papers on the table beside him, though he wasn't looking at them. He was looking at the grounds. "You wanted to ask me something last night," he said, without turning. I pulled out the chair across from him and sat down. "How did you know the timing. When Victor came back." He turned then. Looked at me steadily. "There's a camera on the gate," he said. "I can access the feed from my laptop." "Victor's camera." "Yes." I held that for a moment. "So Victor can also see what his camera shows." "Yes." "Which means if he checked it..." "He'd see the timestamp of your car leaving and the timestamp of his own return." Damien set his pen down. "Twenty-two minutes apart." Twenty-two. Not twenty. I'd remembered it wrong. I kept it. "He'd also see me le

Chapter 22: Patterns

I didn't go straight back to my room. I went to the kitchen instead. Made tea I didn't want and stood at the window with the cup warming my hands and looked at the grounds the way I'd been looking at them for three weeks. The hedge line. The cameras. The east wing. He had the address before I gave it to him. I kept coming back to that. Not because it changed what I'd done... the sample was already at the pharmacy, Dr. Reeves already had it. But it changed something. I had thought I was building something independent... a route that was mine, that no one had touched before I built it. He could have found it himself. Or someone told him. I put the cup down. The gardener came around the far corner of the hedge and started his route again. Victor appeared at the kitchen doorway at half past ten. He didn't come all the way in. He stood at the frame the way Damien sometimes stood at frames... present but not committing. The difference was that when Damien did it, it felt like s

Chapter 23: Two Years Minimum

The results came back on day nine.I was in the east corridor when my phone buzzed. I stopped near the window at the far end... the morning light coming in grey and flat behind me... and read it there.Ms. Vale. Results attached. Please review at your earliest convenience. We recommend you seek independent medical counsel regarding the findings.I opened the attachment with my thumb and read it standing up.The compound identified was a nerve-disrupting agent administered in low, consistent doses over an extended period. The document named it precisely the kind of clinical language that left no room for interpretation. Not a natural supplement. Not a legitimate medication. A slow-acting agent designed to mimic the symptoms of spinal nerve damage while suppressing the body's ability to recover.I read it twice.I didn't move for a moment. Just stood there with the phone in my hand, the screen still lit, not quite deciding what to do with what I'd just read.Then I locked it and put it

Chapter 24: A Witness

Chapter 24Victor left for the board meeting on Tuesday at eight.I was in the dining room when he came down with his overnight bag. He set it by the front door, kissed my cheek... the same practiced warmth as always... and told me Mrs. Hale had instructions for the week. He said it the way someone says it when they have already accounted for every variable. Then he was gone.The car disappeared through the gates.I stood at the dining room window and watched the cameras track it and then stop.Damien appeared in the doorway behind me ten minutes later. He was dressed... properly, not the way he sometimes was in the mornings, still moving slowly from a bad night. He had his phone in his hand and he was reading something on it as he crossed the room toward me."He'll be back Thursday evening at the earliest," Damien said. "Friday if the second session runs.""You know his schedule.""I know his contact at the firm. The meeting was extended yesterday. Two extra agenda items."I looked a

Chapter 25: The East Wing

I didn't sleep between dinner and eleven.I lay on top of the covers fully dressed and listened to the house. Victor was gone but the house didn't feel different without him... not yet. His presence had settled into the walls too long for a single night to change it. The cameras still blinked. The locks still held. Mrs. Hale was somewhere in the servants' quarters, following instructions he had left before departing.At ten forty-five I got up, checked the corridor through the door crack, and walked to the east wing.No lights. Just the wall lamp at the junction, which I had stopped switching off weeks ago because the dark felt more conspicuous than the light. My footsteps on the floor. The fourteen steps I had counted twice in the daylight and didn't need to count now.Damien was already there.He was outside the door, not in his wheelchair... standing. Not fully upright, one hand against the wall for support, but standing. He had the key in the other hand and he was watching me come

Chapter 26: What Comes After

Wednesday came in quietly.I was awake before the house was. I lay in the dark and listened to it settle… the pipes, the distant sound of Mrs. Hale moving in the kitchen below, the particular hum of the security system that I had stopped noticing and then started noticing again sometime around week four of being here. The cameras outside. The gates. All of it still running exactly as Victor had left it.I got up and dressed slowly. No urgency. That was the thing about today… there was nothing to do yet. The east wing was locked again. The USB drive was where it was. Thursday was tomorrow. All I had to do was move through the house the same way I had been moving through it for weeks, which was harder now than it had been before.Knowing changes the weight of everything.Breakfast was quiet. Just me and Mrs. Hale, who brought toast and coffee and left without speaking beyond what was necessary. She had a way of managing absence… being in the room without being present in it, the way a p

Chapter 27:Thursday

Thursday arrived the way significant days often do... indistinguishable from any other.I woke at six, the sky still pale. Dressed. Went downstairs. Mrs. Hale was already in the kitchen. The coffee was made. The house hummed at its usual frequency, cameras blinking, gate closed, everything exactly where Victor had left it.I ate breakfast alone.Damien came down at half past eight. He was in the wheelchair today... deliberately, I thought. The decision of a man who understood what kind of day this was and had chosen not to draw attention to anything new. He sat across the table and drank his coffee and didn't speak for a while."Today," I said, not as a question."This morning." He set down the cup. "My contact will have it by noon."I nodded.Outside the window the gardener appeared at the far end of the hedge line and began his first pass of the morning. Same route. Same unhurried pace. The rain had finally come overnight, light and persistent, and the gravel of the path was darker

Chapter 28: Ahead Of Schedule

The gardener made his second pass at eleven forty-three. I knew because I'd been watching the window for the last twenty minutes, not from nerves... or not only... but because the rhythm of the grounds was one of the few things in this house that hadn't been arranged by Victor, and I found it steadying. The same path. The same pace. Head down against the rain. I turned from the library window when I heard the footsteps in the corridor. Not Damien's. Too quick, too light. One of the housekeeping staff... Marta, I thought, from the particular way her shoes caught the floor at the turn. I sat back in the chair and opened the book I hadn't been reading and waited until the sound passed. Eleven forty-six. Damien had said tonight. East wing. Eleven. That was still hours away and the house was already doing something different... I could feel it the way I'd learned to feel things here, not sharply but as a change in pressure. Victor was due back tomorrow. The file was already out. And s

Chapter 29: Confirm Her Identity

Victor was in the dining room when I came downstairs. Not his study. Not the terrace. The dining room, lights on, papers spread across the table he never used for papers. He looked up when I appeared and his face did the warm thing... no delay, no adjustment. "Lila. Sit down." I sat across from him. Window at my back, papers angled toward him. "I came across something while I was away." He reached into the stack and turned a single printed page toward me. "It made me think of you." An industry newsletter. Productions, casting notes, career movements. Halfway down, a short item with a photograph beside it. *Liora Vale. Confirmed for Meridian Theatre's spring programme. First public engagement in eighteen months.* I looked at it at the pace of someone reading something mildly familiar. The photograph was professional... good light, an event I remembered without letting that surface anywhere on my face. "Is that someone you know?" Victor asked. "The name's familiar. From before."

Chapter 30: The Map He Drew Before We Moved

I was awake before the house was. Not from a sound. Just the quality of a mind that hadn't fully stopped... running the same sequence since I'd put the phone down the night before. What Victor knew. What he was doing with it. How much time remained before those two things met. The briefing pack would arrive this morning. I'd read the courier confirmation three times before I slept. I dressed and went downstairs. Victor was in the entrance hall. Signing for the courier envelope when I reached the bottom stair... the Meridian's return address on the upper left corner. He completed the signature, passed the clipboard back, and stood for a moment with the package in his hands. Not reading it. Holding it with the stillness of a man for whom this moment had already been built into an earlier part of his morning. Then he looked up. "Good morning." He held the envelope out. "This came for you." I took it. "Thank you." "Press materials, I'd imagine." He turned toward the dining room. "C

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