บททั้งหมดของ The Wife They Wanted Dead : บทที่ 11 - บทที่ 20

Chapter 12 I hadn't planned on going straight to the prison. I'd planned on sitting with it a while longer, maybe talking to Caius again, maybe just breathing. Instead I found myself in the car an hour later, my phone in my hand, the photograph pulled up on the screen — a quick, clumsy shot I'd managed to snap before Caius took the original back, not even properly framed, just enough to keep something of it with me. You'll hate your father too. I didn't understand it. I needed to. I kept turning Caius's face over in my mind the whole drive there — the way it had gone unguarded in that doorway, the way his voice had cracked in half on the word father. Whatever this was, it wasn't something he'd invented to control me. I was starting to understand that much, even if I didn't understand anything else. They led him in the same as always, cuffs, orange fabric hanging looser on him than it had the last time I'd seen him, like the weeks in there had been eating at him from the i

Chapter 14 I don't know how long I sat there on that dusty floor before my legs finally agreed to move. The letter was still in my hands, folded back along its own crease, my mother's shaking handwriting pressed into the paper like she'd written it in a hurry, like she hadn't trusted herself with more time than that. I read it again standing up, my mother's painted face still watching me from the wall of that hidden room, like she already knew I'd end up right back here eventually. I made myself leave the room behind — past the nursery, past the crib and the broken music box exactly where I'd left them, out through the door and into the main hallway, past the old family portrait with its scratched-out face, the one that had started all of this weeks ago. I didn't decide to go looking for him. My feet just carried me there, the same way they'd carried me into that locked wing in the first place. He was in the study. Of course he was. He seemed to live in that room whenever the

Chapter 16 "Don't move. They're here for you." The words hadn't even finished leaving his mouth before he moved, fast, sure, like his body had been waiting the whole conversation for permission to stop talking and start acting. A third shot cracked through the dark, closer than the last two. "Caius, what's happening—" "Later." His hand found the small of my back, not gentle this time, pure momentum. "Move when I move." I'd never seen him like this. The man who measured every word before he let it out, who stood at windows with his hands folded like stillness was armor — gone. In his place was someone who moved through pitch black like he'd memorized every inch of it years ago, who steered me around furniture I couldn't even see without once hesitating. We reached the far wall of the study. His fingers found a seam in the paneling I would have sworn wasn't there, and the wall gave way soundlessly, swinging inward onto a narrow black passage that smelled like old stone and colde

Chapter 18 I woke up to a ceiling I didn't recognize. Not the mansion's carved plaster, not the too-tall windows, not anything familiar at all — just a flat, water-stained ceiling and a single bare bulb, and my own heartbeat pounding so hard in my skull it took a full minute before I could separate it from whatever had happened to get me here. My wrists weren't bound. That was the first thing I noticed once I could think again. My ankles weren't either. I was just sitting in a chair in the middle of a bare room, unrestrained, like whoever had brought me here hadn't thought it necessary. The room smelled faintly of dust and old paint, the kind of smell that meant nobody had lived here in a long time. Somewhere beyond the walls I heard traffic, distant and ordinary, which felt obscene given everything else happening around me. That scared me more than ropes would have. "You're awake." A man's voice, calm, almost pleasant, coming from a doorway I hadn't heard open. He stepped insid

Chapter 20 The door burst open before my mother's voice had even finished fading out of the speaker. Caius filled the doorway like he'd torn it open with his bare hands, chest heaving, tie gone crooked, a scrape along his knuckles I hadn't noticed before. His eyes moved through the room in half a second — me, the chair, the man who'd shown me the folder, and then Sophia, still holding the little device with my mother's voice trapped inside it. I understood, later, that his men had traced the man in the Ravaryn uniform from the service corridor footage all the way to this building. But in that first second, all Caius saw was Sophia standing over me, calm, in a room I hadn't chosen to be in, and his mind clearly went somewhere fast and unforgiving. "You." Caius's voice had gone somewhere I'd never heard it go, low and lethal, already moving toward her. "You took her." "Caius, wait—" "You had someone drag her out of a locked room in my own house—" "Caius, stop!" I was up out of t