Todos los capítulos de Married to My enemy's son: Capítulo 21 - Capítulo 29

The headlights cut through the darkness like blades, blinding and merciless. I stood frozen, Sarah behind me, my father beside me, Damien in front of me. His body was a shield between us and the cars that had materialized out of nowhere, his shoulders squared, his jaw tight. The doors opened. Men spilled out. Suits. Guns. The kind of men who didn't need to speak to make themselves understood. And then Karem stepped out of the lead car. He was wearing a dark coat that billowed slightly in the night wind, his silver hair catching the light like a crown. He looked like he had just stepped out of a boardroom, not a battlefield. His hands were clasped behind his back. His smile was serene. Like he had been waiting for this moment his whole life. "Hello, son," he said, his voice smooth and warm. "I told you. You can't escape me." Damien didn't move. His body was rigid, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his jaw was working lik

The meeting point was a cafe on the edge of the city, the kind of place that served burnt coffee and day-old pastries to people who didn't want to be seen. We got there early, because Damien said we should, and because I wanted to watch the door before we walked through it. I wanted to see who came in, who went out, who lingered too long, who looked at us twice. Nobody looked at us twice. Nobody looked at us at all. That was either a good sign or a very bad one, and I couldn't decide which. We took a booth in the back corner, the one with a view of both exits and a wall behind our heads. Damien sat across from me with his back to the door, which I hated, but he insisted it was better if he couldn't see who came in, because his face gave too much away. I didn't argue. I just kept my eyes on the door and my hands wrapped around a cup of coffee I had no intention of drinking. My father had stayed at the cabin. He hadn't wanted to. He'd stood in the doorway with that hollow look on his

We went out on the water again with the sun still up, because Nikolai wanted us to see the path with our own eyes before we tried to climb it in the dark, and because he said that anyone who tried to climb that cliff without seeing it in daylight was already dead and just hadn't found out yet. The water was calmer than it had been the night before, which was something, but the sky was grey and the wind was cold and I stood at the rail with my hands wrapped around the metal and my eyes fixed on the rock face, and I tried to see the path the way Nikolai had described it. The crack by the waterline. The thin diagonal line climbing left to right. The ledge halfway up, hidden from the house. The last stretch, smooth and narrow and leaning out over the drop. I could see the crack now. That was the first thing that surprised me. In daylight, the crack was obvious, a dark vertical line in the rock maybe four feet above the water, wide enough to get both hands into. And once I found the crack

The cold hit me first. I went over the side of the boat and the water closed over my head and for a second I couldn't tell which way was up. I came out gasping, treading hard, and Damien was right there beside me with his hand already on the rock, and my father was behind us lowering himself into the water with his jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscles working in his neck. "Thirty seconds," Nikolai whispered. "Then I pull back out. Flash twice when you're ready for me." We moved. Damien found the crack first and pulled himself up, and I followed, and the moment my hands left the water the cold turned into something sharper, something that bit into my fingers and made them slow and clumsy. I climbed anyway. I found the shelf, I found the diagonal, I found the rhythm, and for the first section it was almost easy, almost like the daylight scouting had taught my body what to do. Then the path thinned out, and everything got worse. The holds got smaller. The rock got slicker.

Sarah wouldn't look at me. That was the thing I couldn't get used to. Not the silence. Not the not-eating. Not the way she flinched when a door closed somewhere in the shed. It was the eyes. She looked at the wall, at the floor, at the door, at my father, at Damien, at Anton, at the ceiling. She looked at everything except me. I sat down next to her on the second morning and put a cup of water on the floor between us. She didn't touch it. She just kept staring at the door like she was waiting for someone to walk through it and take her back. "Sarah." Nothing. "Sarah, I need you to drink something." She reached over and picked up the cup, and for one second I thought maybe we were getting somewhere. Then she put it back down without drinking from it and went back to staring at the door. I wanted to scream. I wanted to grab her shoulders and shake her and ask her why she wouldn't look at me. But I didn't. Because I knew why. She had told me without telling me, every time she avoid