Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Husband Married Me For Revenge : Kabanata 31 - Kabanata 40

Audrey's POVThe world came back to me in pieces. Sound first, a high thin ringing that swallowed everything else, my own pulse hammering somewhere underneath it. Then the smell, concrete dust and something chemical and wrong. Then a hand closed hard around my arm and hauled me sideways before I'd even managed to open my eyes."Up. Audrey, up, now."Reid's voice, wrecked and close. I got my knees under me and he pulled the rest of the way, and for one suspended second we just stood there swaying together in the smoke, the back wall of the warehouse blown open into a jagged black mouth. Fire had already found a stack of old pallets and was climbing them fast, throwing long orange light across the concrete.I looked for him. The man in the doorway.He was gone.Not fled. Not scrambling for cover the way the guards were, half of them running toward the blast, half away, nobody sure anymore whose orders they were following. He was simply gone, the space where he'd stood as empty as if he'

Audrey's POVThe fire took the roofline about the same time the first cruiser turned onto the access road, and for one strange, suspended second I watched both, the flames climbing black against the sky, the red and blue smearing wet across broken asphalt, and felt nothing about either.Reid's hand found the small of my back. "We can't be here when they arrive.""I know.""Audrey.""I know." I finally looked at him. "I'm not running toward the sirens. I'm not stupid enough to think anyone in this town owes us the truth just because we ask nicely."He almost smiled. Almost.We went the way the engine hadn't, east, along the fence line, through a gap in the chain link somebody had cut years ago and never bothered to fix, like the whole property had been built with its own exits in mind. Maybe it had. Maybe that was the family business.Neither of us spoke until the sirens were behind us and the only sound left was our own breathing and the far off complaint of the fire eating through so

For a moment I couldn't make my body do anything at all.The woman in the corner booth had my mother's cheekbones, my mother's habit of tilting her head when she was thinking, the same slight downward pull at the corner of her mouth that I used to think meant she was sad, before I understood it was just how her face sat when she wasn't performing anything for anyone. Nineteen years since I'd seen that face across a breakfast table. Eleven months since I'd stood at an empty coffin and told myself grief was supposed to feel like this, hollow and unfinished, because there'd been nothing in the box to make it real."That can't be her," I said, and heard how thin my voice sounded even to myself."Audrey." Reid's hand was still on my arm, steady in a way that told me he was working just as hard to sound calm as I was. "We don't know anything yet.""I know her face, Reid. I've known that face longer than I've known yours."He didn't argue with that. He just looked at me for a second, the str

Audrey's POV My mother's hands had stopped shaking. That was the part that scared me, more than the words themselves. Twenty years of silence, and she said it like she'd rehearsed it in her sleep, in some room I'd never been allowed into. "Took what," I said. She didn't answer right away. She turned the coffee cup a quarter turn on the table, like she needed something to do with her hands now that they'd gone still. The radio behind the counter kept playing too low to make out, some song from another decade, and I remember thinking it was strange that the world could keep humming along like this while mine came apart at a Formica table. "His proof," she said finally. "Not money. Not a person. Proof. A ledger he kept himself, in his own hand, because men like that don't trust anyone else to keep their secrets for them. Names. Dates. Every person he'd had disappeared and made to look like an accident, going back further than either of your fathers knew him." She looked at me, not R

Audrey's POVNobody spoke for the first four blocks. Dawes drove like a man who'd done this before under worse circumstances, both hands steady on the wheel, eyes flicking to the mirror every few seconds instead of every few minutes.My mother sat pressed against the door, staring at nothing, her hands finally still again in the way that used to comfort me and now didn't. I understood why. Stillness wasn't peace. It was calculation."He knew things he shouldn't know," she said finally. "About the account. About the copy.""Or he wanted you to believe he did," Reid said from the front seat, not turning around. "That's the easier trick. Make you doubt the one thing you've been sure of for twenty years, and you stop trusting your own judgment right when you need it most.""I know what I copied," Elena said, sharper this time. "I was there. I held the pages in my hands.""Nobody's saying you're wrong about that." I reached forward and put my hand over hers on the seat between us. "He's sa