บททั้งหมดของ The Wife They Wanted Dead : บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

Chapter 22 Someone in her own contacts. I stood there staring at Sophia's face going through every stage of realizing that at once — confusion, then something closer to nausea — and I understood, with a cold, sinking certainty, that we weren't going to solve that tonight. Not standing in a room that still smelled like whoever had held me here. Not with a prison visit already burning a hole through everything else I could think about. "I need to go," I said. "Now. Before I lose my nerve." Caius didn't argue this time. He just fell into step beside me, close enough that his hand found the small of my back the second we hit the stairs, like some part of him needed the contact more than I did. The visitation room hadn't changed. Same bolted-down table, same fluorescent hum, same guard standing near the door like he'd been carved out of the same gray concrete as everything else in that building. It felt wrong that a room could stay exactly the same while everything happening around it

Chapter 24 – Two Mothers, One Face Neither of them lived long enough to say it. The words sat between us in the cold, heavier than anything either of us had said all night. I didn't know what to do with a sentence like that, so I just stood there, my breath fogging in front of my face, watching Caius watch something I couldn't see. "There's something I need to show you." He said it like it had taken him this long to work up to it. "I've never shown it to anyone. Not even my father knows I kept it." "Kept what?" He didn't answer right away. He reached into the inside pocket of his coat, careful, the way you'd handle something that might fall apart if you weren't gentle enough, and pulled out a photograph small enough to hide in one closed hand. "This was my mother's." His thumb brushed the edge of it before he handed it over. "I found it after she died. I've carried it since I was a boy. I never understood what it meant until tonight." I took it with hands that weren't quite ste

CHAPTER 26 He still hadn't answered. The ledger was still on the screen. My name sitting there in clean, unhurried type like it had every right to exist in a system I hadn't known existed until tonight. Ardenne, Seraphine. The entry's date was the thing I couldn't stop coming back to. Not the weeks I'd spent inside this house. Not the arrest, not the wedding. Years before any of it. Long before any moment I'd ever used to mark the beginning of this. "Can you trace who created it?" I asked. "The credential. Is there a log of who built it into the system?" Caius was already trying. I could tell by the way he moved through the screens — not the slow deliberate pace from earlier but something tighter, faster. Hitting a result, reading it, moving to the next. "Every angle gives me the same wall," he said. "The title exists. The clearance is real. The access is active across every system in this house." He stopped on one screen longer than the others, then closed it. "And there

CHAPTER 28 He turned his hand over. A small, oval-faced pocket watch sat in his palm. It was made of old silver that had lost its shine. The metal was dull and smooth from years of being carried and handled every day, its surface worn down by constant use. I didn't know it. But something about the way he was holding it — with the specific care people give to things that can't be replaced — made me go completely still. "Where did that come from?" I asked. He looked at it for a moment before answering. "The night your father was arrested," he said. "After he was processed and placed in his cell — before you'd visited him the first time. Someone entered the facility through the staff entrance using the credentials of a night-shift maintenance contractor. Those credentials passed the initial checkpoint automatically, which is what made it difficult to catch quickly. But the real contractor had clocked out two hours earlier — meaning two valid entries existed for the same ide

CHAPTER 30 He still hadn't said the name. He was looking at me the way people do when they're giving you one last second before something lands — and I'd had enough of those moments in the past few weeks to recognise one when it arrived. "Say it," I said. "Seraphine—" "Caius." My voice came out flat. "Just say it." He looked at the paper one more time. Then at me. "S.H.," he said. Two letters. I knew exactly one person with those initials. I'd known her since we were sixteen. She was the person I called first when anything fell apart — the one who showed up without being asked, who never needed the full explanation before she was already on her way. She was down the hall. And she had known the man who took me. "It's not confirmation," Caius said immediately. "S.H. are two of the most common initials. This alone doesn't—" "But you looked at that paper and you thought of her." I turned to face him. "That's why you went quiet." He didn't deny it. I pressed m