All Chapters of My Husband Married Me For Revenge : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Audrey's POV The headlights didn't die slow. They cut, both at once, like someone had made a decision. "Reid." "I saw it." His voice had gone flat, the same flat it went right before he did something reckless. "Dawes..." "I know." Dawes didn't take his eyes off the mirror. "Everybody down isn't going to help us on a straight road. Hold on to something instead." He didn't slow. He sped up. The dark shape behind us matched him for three seconds, then didn't. It dropped back, then swung wide into the oncoming lane, and for one long breath I thought it was going to come up alongside us and end this on a two lane road at eleven at night with my mother in law in the back seat holding a photograph of my mother's signature. It didn't pull alongside. It turned. Hard, into a side road we'd already passed, gone before Dawes even had to react. Nobody said anything for a full mile. "That's worse," Reid said finally. "Not better. Worse." "Why worse," Elena asked. Her voice had steadied s

**Audrey's POV**Elena gave Dawes the address without being asked twice. She said it like a woman reciting something she'd memorized specifically so she'd never have to write it down, a street name, a number, no city needed because we were already in it."How long have you had that?" I asked her."Since your mother signed the list." She didn't look away from the window. "Some addresses you keep because you might need to run to them. Others you keep because you might need to run from them. I never knew which this one was."Reid didn't say anything. He'd gone quiet in the particular way he did when he was doing math in his head that he didn't like the answer to. I'd learned that silence over three years of marriage, back when I still thought I understood every version of him. Tonight I was learning there were more versions than I'd counted, and I wasn't sure I'd met all of them yet.The drive took longer than it should have. Dawes kept checking the mirror out of habit even with the road

Audrey's POV The dog didn't stop, and worse, it didn't sound like it was in a yard anymore. It sounded like it was moving. Dawes was already at the window before I'd finished the thought, one hand pulling the curtain back just enough to see the road without giving anyone outside a silhouette to aim at. "Two cars," he said. "No headlights. Coming from the direction we did." "How long," Reid said. "Faster than fifteen minutes." The lawyer's face did something I hadn't seen on it all night. Not fear, exactly. Recognition. Like a bill he'd known was coming due and had hoped, right up until this moment, might somehow not. "That's not him," he said. "He doesn't send cars. He sends messages and lets other people do the rest." "Then whose are they," I asked, and nobody answered, which was its own kind of answer. Elena moved first. She crossed to the bookcase along the far wall, fast for a woman who'd spent the whole night moving like every step cost her something, and pulled at the s

Audrey's POVThe tunnel swallowed the light first, then the sound.By the time the passage narrowed enough that I had to turn sideways, the gunfire behind us had gone muffled, distant, wrong, like something happening in another building instead of the one I'd just left my husband inside of."Faster," Dawes said. He wasn't looking back at me. He was looking forward, counting steps the way a man counts things when counting is the only thing keeping him from doing something else. "Reid can hold two minutes. Maybe three.""That's not a plan, that's a guess.""It's the only guess we've got."The lawyer moved ahead of us both, laptop clutched now like it weighed nothing, like carrying it was the one task simple enough to keep his hands from shaking. He knew this tunnel. He'd known it existed before tonight, that much was obvious in the way he didn't reach for the walls, didn't stumble on the uneven brick underfoot. He'd walked this exact stretch of dark before."How far to the exit," I said

Audrey's POVThe tunnel spat me out into cold air and gravel, and for a second I just stood there, breathing, waiting for my legs to believe the running was over.It wasn't.Behind me the dark still smelled like the house, like smoke and old stone and something underneath it I didn't want to name. I could hear my own pulse louder than I could hear anything else, and for a moment the two sounds, the tunnel dripping somewhere behind us and my own heartbeat, were the only proof I had that any of the last hour had actually happened.Dawes came up behind me, breathing harder than I was, one hand pressed to a graze along his ribs he hadn't mentioned until now. In the little light there was, his face looked older than it had at the start of the night, like the last mile underground had cost him something he wasn't going to get back."You're hurt," I said."I'm upright. Tonight, that's the only category that counts." He straightened anyway, testing his own weight, and nodded toward the orange