All Chapters of Vows of vengeance: His contract wife : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

( Rhoswen)Security rang up at ten to eleven. There was a woman in the lobby, the night guard said, who wouldn't leave and wouldn't sit down, and she'd given her surname as Ashworth.I was alone on the thirty-first floor with a cold espresso and a spreadsheet I'd been reading so long the columns had started to drift. I said, "Send her up," in my boardroom voice. Then I sat there while my pulse did something I hadn't authorised.Two years. I hadn't spoken to Delphine in two years, not since the morning the papers printed her signature beside the transfer that gutted my father's estate. I'd rebuilt my whole life around not saying her name. New wardrobe. New office. A husband, on paper. And now the lift opened and out she came with her hair wet and her coat done up wrong, one button too high on the left, as if she'd dressed in the back of a moving car.Her hair was loose. It always is. Mine's been pinned since I was twenty-three, because a loose thing can be grabbed."You've got some ner

(Rhoswen)Graham came on the anniversary, the way he always does. Six years since Dad's funeral, and every year he turns up at the Calloway house with white lilies and a paper bag of shortbread from the bakery on Harcourt Street, and every year he stands in the hall and says, "I won't stay."He stayed three hours.I should explain what he was to me. Not what he is, I'm still learning that word and I don't care for it, but what he was. When Dad died I was nineteen with a suitcase and a tremor in my left hand I couldn't stop, and Graham appeared at the end of the hospital corridor with his silver hair perfectly combed and his eyes wet and said, Come here, little one. And I went. He held me while I shook. He drove me home. He sat up with me every night that first winter and taught me how to read a balance sheet at the kitchen table, so patiently that I never once felt stupid.After the coast road, when I woke up in a hospital bed with stitches pulling under my collarbone and my whole lif

(Torin)I don't believe in luck. I've built a career on the theory that men who talk about luck haven't done the reading. But when Rhoswen looked at me across that table with her grey eyes wide and hurt and waiting I wished for it anyway. A fire alarm. A power cut. A bomb.I gave her half the truth instead."I was there," I said. "That night. Not in the car. Near it." My voice sounded like it was coming from across the room, dry and steady, a liar's voice, the one I'd practised for nine years and still hadn't got right. "I came on the wreck before the ambulance did. I pulled you out."Which was true. It just wasn't the truth.She stared at me, laying each piece against the last, testing for gaps with that cold precision of hers. I held still. I've sat across from men twice my size while they decided whether to ruin me, and not one of them had ever made my heart do what it was doing now."You never said anything "I've been married to you for eleven months, Torin.""I know.""You chose

( Rhoswen)Marguerite Devereux is nothing like I braced for. Not a rival in any shape. I recognize an elegant, tired woman in her fifties who asks politely for water before she'll say a single word. Torin has her out within twenty minutes, security flanking her like she's dangerous rather than simply inconvenient, and I don't get to hear a syllable of what she came to say. I only get his face afterward, arranged carefully into nothing at all.That's not the part of the story that matters tonight, though. The part that matters happens three nights later, at a gala, when Anders Kroll, silver-haired, four drinks in, smiling the specific way men smile right before they say something cruel and call it a joke, leans toward me at the bar."Careful with that on an empty legacy," he says, low enough for only me. "Wouldn't want the second Mrs. Blackwood ending up face-down somewhere. Like the first almost did."It takes a second to land. He means me. He means the lake. He means two years of bei

(Callum)Six times tonight I told myself I wasn't going to do this. Here I am anyway, standing in a hallway I have no legitimate reason to be in, inside a house that belongs to a man I've spent two years quietly hating for reasons I've never let myself look at directly.Security let me in an hour ago on the pretext of dropping papers for tomorrow's shareholder call. That much is true. Everything since has been a lie of omission, a language I've gotten fluent in since Rhoswen came back from the dead and wrecked the careful life I'd rebuilt without her.Voices from the study. Hers, low and cracked in a way that stops me cold. His steady, always steady, man was born incapable of panic. I should leave. Every functioning brain cell tells me to leave. I stand in the dark instead and listen to Rhoswen tell her husband about her father, and something twists in my chest I don't have a name for and don't want one.I came here to tell her something I've carried for two years. Since the week of t