บททั้งหมดของ The Wife They Wanted Dead : บทที่ 31 - บทที่ 40

CHAPTER 32 Neither of us moved. The portrait just hung there. Patient. Like it had been waiting for someone to finally stand still long enough to see it properly. "Tell me I'm wrong," I said. Caius didn't answer. That was its own kind of answer. "Look at it." I stepped closer to the damaged section of the painting. "The height. The way the shoulders sit. The way he's standing at the edge of the frame like he's already halfway out of the room." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Tell me that doesn't match." Caius moved to stand beside me. Close. He looked at the portrait the way he looked at security footage — methodically, starting at the top and working down, not letting the weight of what he was looking at change what his eyes were actually doing. I watched him look. "The height is consistent," he said finally. "Given the scale of the other figures in the painting." "And the build." "Yes." "And the posture." A beat. "Yes," he said. I pressed my fingers against m

CHAPTER 34 "What does that mean?" My own voice came back to me off the walls of that room and I realized I'd said it twice now — first as a question, then as something closer to a demand. My father was still looking at me with that fear I'd never seen on him before tonight and it was making everything worse because I didn't know what to do with a frightened version of him. I only knew how to be angry at the careful one. "Explain it to me," I said. "Right now. In this room. Whatever you think I can't handle — I've already handled worse." My father looked at his hands. "When you join something like that," he said slowly, "you don't sign a contract. There's nothing written down. Nothing that could be used against them in a room like this one." He paused. "What you sign is your silence. Your access. Your connections. Everything you know about everyone around you at the time you joined — that's what they hold. Not a document. Not a record. Just the knowledge that they could use w

CHAPTER 36 The alarm didn't stop. It filled every corridor — loud and flat and continuous, the kind of sound that overrides every other thought until the only thing left is move. The guard behind us was saying something I couldn't make out over it. Caius had my arm, not gripping, just directing, and I was moving because my body understood forward even when my mind was still in that room. My father's face behind a closing door. The half-breath before the name. "I need to go back," I said. "No." Caius didn't slow down. "He was about to—" "I know what he was about to do. Keep moving." We moved fast. By the time we reached the side exit the guard who'd let us in was already holding the door open, face tight, not saying anything that wasn't absolutely necessary. We went through. The door opened directly onto the staff car park. Our car was at the far end — the only civilian vehicle in the row, sitting under a light that had gone out sometime in the last hour. The alar

CHAPTER 38 We drove back in silence. Not the comfortable kind — the kind that comes when both people are thinking too hard to speak. Outside the window the city was doing that thing it did in the last hour before dawn — too still and too lit at the same time, streets empty in a way that made every traffic light feel unnecessary. I watched Caius's hands on the wheel. Controlled, no wasted movement. But there was something underneath the control tonight that I didn't usually see. Something working harder than usual to stay in place. "What's his name?" I said. "Mercer." He said it without hesitation. "Head of security. Been with me for three years." Three years. I didn't say it out loud. "He was with you when you rebuilt the team," I said. "After the gala." "He helped me rebuild it." A pause that carried more weight than the words around it. "He was the one who vetted the others." I looked at him. "So if there are others inside the network who shouldn't be—" "T

CHAPTER 40 He still hadn't answered. The silence had weight to it — the specific kind that existed between what someone was going to say and what they decided to say instead. I'd learned to read that weight in this house. I'd learned what lived inside it. What lived inside this one was something I didn't have a name for yet. "Caius," I said. "If you leave this house without protection—" He stopped. Something moved through his jaw. He started again. "The organization is active. They've moved twice tonight. The note alone tells us they're not finished." His voice had gone careful in a way it hadn't been thirty seconds ago. "The moment you're outside these walls without cover, you become accessible in a way you aren't right now and leaving tells them something. Right now they don't know exactly how much you've uncovered. They're moving carefully because of that uncertainty. The moment you walk out of here — that uncertainty ends. You become something different to them than y