All Chapters of Vows of vengeance: His contract wife : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

(Torin)Marguerite Devereux comes back, and this time I let her through the gate. She sits across from me at nine in the morning, dressed like she's attending a funeral, and opens with a sentence that rearranges the last decade of my life."Graham Calloway didn't act alone," she says. "My family funded him."I keep my face still on reflex, though my chest has gone cold. "Why.""Because ten years ago your father owed my family a debt he had no intention of repaying, and Graham offered a faster route to collecting than the courts ever would." Her hands stay folded in her lap, composed in a way that unsettles me more than shouting would. "The lake house was never only about Rhoswen, Mr. Blackwood. It was about you. About what her death staged or otherwise would do to your position, and to the debt your father left behind.""My father's been dead for six years.""Debts don't die with the men who owe them. They pass to whoever's left holding the name." She leans in. "Which one are you? Whi

( Rhoswen)I don't answer. I let it ring out, watching my own hand shake slightly as I turn the phone face-down, and Torin doesn't push me to explain why. He just moves closer, hand settling at the small of my back, anchoring me to the room.We will go to the Ashworth Foundation dinner three nights later because canceling would draw more attention than showing up. I spend the whole evening half in the room and half tracking Torin, three feet to my left, laughing at something a board member said in a way that doesn't quite reach his eyes. I've learned to read that now. The set of his jaw when he's worried and hiding it. The way he touches the back of my hand, briefly, whenever the conversation drifts toward the lake house, as if reminding both of us I'm still here.It happens during the second course. A string quartet is playing something unbothered and slow, and Torin leans down to murmur some dry observation about the man across the table meant only for me and I turn my head at the s

(Rhoswen)The swab kit had been in my handbag for nine days, and I still hadn't decided what kind of person that made me.It looked harmless. White cardboard box, one sealed tube, two forms. I'd read the instructions so often I could have recited them on a stage. No food or drink for thirty minutes. Rub the inside of the cheek for thirty seconds. Sign here to confirm the donor is willing.Willing. That was the word I kept catching on.Torin had asked me about it that morning, standing at the counter with his jacket already on. "Where are you going today?" Not suspicious. He never was. He asked how other people check the weather."Delphine's. Then a lab." It came out before I could dress it up. "I'm getting a DNA test."He stopped buttoning his cuff. "Hers.""Hers.""Does she know why?""I'll tell her it's paperwork." I heard how that sounded and lifted my chin at him, daring him to say it. "Go on. Tell me it's cold.""I wasn't going to." He crossed the kitchen and set a coffee in fron

(Rhoswen)I hadn't slept properly in six days. I'd lie down at eleven and watch the ceiling, and the same sentence would loop through my head, the one I'd written on the legal pad. Who else knew? I'd drawn a circle beside Torin's name because I couldn't bring myself to do anything else, and I'd been ashamed of it all week. He hadn't mentioned the pad. That was the terrible part. He'd simply started leaving doors open around me, physically, as if to prove he had nothing behind them.The lab had rung that evening. A repeat run on my sample, they said, routine, nothing to worry about. Three more days. I hadn't told Torin yet. Some part of me was afraid that if I said it aloud, he'd have a look on his face, and I'd know something I wasn't ready to know.I found him at ten past two on the sixth night, and it took me a full minute to understand what I was looking at.I'd come down for water. That was all. The house was dark except for a strip of light under the study door, and I told myself

( Rhoswen)I chose the café near the Retiro because it was public enough that Callum couldn't make a scene and quiet enough that nobody would overhear one if he tried anyway.I'd rehearsed the opening line in the car and forgot every word of it the second I saw him at the corner table, jacket too formal for a Tuesday morning, the way he used to overdress whenever he was nervous and wanted no one to notice.He was already there when I arrived, two coffees ordered, mine black the way I used to take it before I became someone who drank it with milk to be polite at other people's tables."You remembered," I said, sitting.He'd chosen the table by the window, the one we used to sit at years ago when this café was just a place we liked and not a place I'd had to choose deliberately for its witnesses. I noticed that before I noticed anything else about him. Callum had always been a creature of small, sentimental habits, and I used to find that endearing. Today it just made me tired."I remem