Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Husband Married Me For Revenge : Kabanata 121 - Kabanata 127

Reid's POVHe didn't run. That was the first thing wrong.He turned like a man leaving a dinner and walked along the bleachers toward the east wall with the coat swinging open. I went after him with the tire iron raised and the flashlight in my other hand. The beam jumped across bolted rows of wood, a flat basketball, a faded banner for a team that stopped existing before I could drive."Reid." Audrey, behind me. "Don't.""Stay with Thane.""Reid."I kept going. The beam found a fire door at the end of the wall. Push bar. The green exit sign above it was dead. He was already there, one hand resting on the bar, still not looking back."Nine o'clock," he said.It was my voice. Not close to it. Mine. The flat one, the one I'd used ten minutes earlier when I told him I wouldn't ask twice."Don't be late."He leaned and the door opened onto black air that smelled of wet leaves. I got there as it swung shut and hit the bar with my shoulder.An alley. Chain-link the demolition crew had hung

Reid's POVI drove the first three blocks with the headlights off and my hands at ten and two, like a boy taking his test.Nobody told me to stop. Sterling named each camera before we reached it, in the flat voice of a man reading a grocery list. The bank on the corner. The laundromat with the cracked dome. The dead light at Ninth, where I slowed to a crawl and then turned the headlights back on.The key sat in my coat pocket. It had been warm since Dale's house, and it was still warm. I knew that was only my own body heat. I kept noticing it anyway.In the mirror, Audrey sat with her phone dark in her lap. Thane was beside her, staring at his window. Neither of them looked at the other. Between them, my father's gray coat lay folded on the seat, and every few blocks Audrey's eyes dropped to it and came back up.I had asked her once what she was thinking when she went quiet like that. She'd said, "Nothing you'd want to hear." That was three years ago, and I had believed her. I took it

Reid's POVI was in the hall before the third ring ended.I don't remember deciding to move. Behind me a chair scraped, and Audrey said my name, and my father said something I didn't catch. I kept walking. The study door stood open, and the black phone sat on the desk with its cord on the carpet, dead as a stone.It rang a fourth time.It wasn't the phone. The sound came from behind the bookcase, small and tinny, a ring trying very hard to be the one I'd grown up with. My father had owned that telephone since before I could read. I used to lie on this floor and listen to it ring.I knelt and looked.The black box was still taped to the junction, but a red light the size of a pinhead had come on in its corner. A speaker grille no bigger than a thumbnail was ringing at me."It's not connected to anything," Sterling said from the doorway. He had followed me, and Audrey was behind him with her hand on his arm. "Reid. It's a recording.""I know.""Then don't touch it."I didn't touch the b

Reid's POVI had spent six years building a speech for this man.I rehearsed it in boardrooms, in the car, in the shower. Every version began with Thane Whitlock sitting exactly where he was sitting now, unable to look at me. None of them had a green light in it, or my mother beside Sterling holding a dish towel like a rope."Go on, Thane," the voice said again from behind the clock. Soft, patient, wearing Thane's own warmth. "Tell them why."Thane flinched. It was small, but I saw it travel through his whole body, and I understood something I hadn't wanted to. Hearing his own voice come out of that box was the cruelest thing the man had done all night. He knew exactly where to press."That isn't me," Thane said.Nobody answered."It has my voice. It doesn't have me." He spoke toward the clock but looked at Sterling. "I'm not telling this to you, whoever you are. I'm telling it to him."The light stayed green and steady."Good," Audrey whispered beside me. I hadn't noticed her move so