All Chapters of The merger contract ( ex-wife's signature): Chapter 11 - Chapter 16

THE BARHenry | POVThe engine turned and I pulled out of the compound without knowing where I was going.That was the truth of it. No destination, no plan, just the specific need to put distance between myself and that house and the conversation I had left sitting on the living room coffee table next to a plate of untouched biscuits. I drove with both hands on the wheel and the radio off and New Jersey moving past the windows in the particular way it moved at night, familiar, indifferent, entirely unchanged by the fact that my life was currently falling apart in it.I ended up at McCready's.I hadn't been there in years. It was the kind of bar that didn't try, low lighting, sticky counters, the specific smell of a place that had absorbed decades of bad decisions without judgment. I used to come here when I was twenty-three and had nothing and thought everything was ahead of me. I parked outside and sat in the car for a moment and then went in.The bartender didn't know me. Good."Whi

CHAPTER THIRTEENBREAKFASTHenry | POVThe tie was giving me trouble, I stood at the mirror and worked on it for the third time, my fingers not cooperating the way fingers don't cooperate when the head they belong to is somewhere else entirely. The bandaging was gone, I had taken it off myself at five this morning because I was not walking into a nine o'clock contract meeting looking like a man who had lost a bar fight, which I was, but which nobody needed to see evidence of. The stitches were visible if you looked closely. I intended to make sure nobody looked closely.I got the knot halfway right and stopped.Hands came around from behind me. I know it was Rinnah, her fingers found the tie and took it from me without a word, her chin at my shoulder, her eyes finding mine in the mirror briefly before dropping to the knot. She worked it slowly. Correctly. I watched her hands in the mirror and said nothing.She finished the knot and smoothed it flat against my chest and left her palm

CHAPTER FIFTEENRinnah | POVThe waiting room chair was hard against my back.I sat with my bag on my lap, legs crossed, phone face up, and watched the door at the end of the room. The doctor had gone through it nineteen minutes ago. I had not looked at anything else since.My phone buzzed.Henry.‘Rinnah. I'm serious. Call him off. If anything happens to her or Zenya I will not be able to protect you from what comes after. Do you understand me?’I read it. Set the phone face down on my knee.Protect you from what comes after.I uncrossed my legs. Crossed them the other way. I looked at the door.My father had called at seven this morning. Two minutes, maybe less. He didn't waste time on calls — never had."It's handled," he said."The girl and the child," I said. "Don't touch them.""Understood.""I mean it.""Rinnah." Just my name. The way he said it when he wanted me to stop repeating myself."Aurora simply finds New Jersey uncomfortable," he said. "People leave uncomfortable plac