Lahat ng Kabanata ng Vows of vengeance: His contract wife : Kabanata 61 - Kabanata 70

( Rhoswen)Graham had asked to see me at the house on Calle de Velázquez, the one that used to be his, that would have been mine, in the version of my life that had died at the lake along with everything else. It still smelled the same. Beeswax and old paper and, underneath, something colder that I'd never been able to name as a child and could name perfectly well now.I'd almost sent Mateo up ahead of me, the way security always insisted, and then decided against it. There was a version of this meeting where I needed a witness, and a version where a witness would only give Graham something to perform for. I chose to face him alone and hated myself a little for how easily the old instinct came back to the daughter who still, after everything, wanted him to see her as brave rather than frightened.He'd aged since the garden confrontation. Prison had thinned him, though he wasn't in prison currently, out of a technicality his lawyers had engineered before the trial date, wearing an ankl

(Rhoswen)I watched him cross that courtyard and thought, absurdly, of the first time I'd seen him at the rooftop mixer, composed and unreadable in a way I'd found almost insulting at the time, a man who'd clearly never had to scramble for anything in his life. There was nothing of that man in front of me now.Torin arrived before Mateo had even got me back to the car, striding across the courtyard with his tie loose and his face doing something I'd never seen it do: not composed, not careful, just raw, stripped down to something that looked almost like fear."I need you to hear me out before you say anything," he said, crouching in front of the bench where I sat, close enough that I could see he hadn't shaved that morning, a detail so small and so human it nearly broke whatever composure I had left. "Please. Give me that much."I'd imagined this moment a hundred different ways over the years, some version of Torin confessing a secret, and none of my imaginings had prepared me for how

(Torin)She told me about the Wren name over breakfast, which was, in hindsight, a mistake on my part, because I was holding a coffee cup at the time and I put it down harder than I meant to, and the sound of china against wood is not something you can take back once it's happened."You reacted," Rhoswen said. She wasn't eating. She'd pushed a piece of toast around her plate for the length of the conversation without lifting it once. "Just then. I said the name and you put the cup down like it had done something to you.""I was surprised.""You weren't surprised. Surprised looks different to you. I've had four months to learn the difference." She set her fork down too, precise, deliberate, the way she did everything when she was building toward a point she didn't want to lose the thread of. "You still went. The way you still go when you're deciding how much of something to say out loud."I could have denied it. There was a version of this conversation, a shorter and easier one, where

( Rhoswen)My father's will had been read to me once, years ago, in a lawyer's office with too much beige furniture, and I remembered almost none of it. I'd been twenty-three, freshly grieving, and the words had washed over me the way legal language does when you're not yet ready to hear what it costs.I'd told Torin I needed an hour alone before I could talk about what Beatrix's mother had said, and he'd given it to me without argument, which was new enough between us that I'd noticed it and said nothing.I read it properly for the first time that night, at Torin's desk, with the lamp pulled close and a copy of the document Priya had pulled from the estate registry spread across the wood. Beatrix's message sat in the back of my mind like a stone in a shoe. A name that isn't hers. The same name on your father's will, if you ever bother reading past the first page.I'd never read past the first page. Nobody had ever needed to. The first page told you everything the family wanted to tel

(Rhoswen)Neither of us had said much since the kitchen, since the words I love you had finally left our mouths and settled into the room like something too large to fully absorb before the next crisis arrived. I kept catching Torin's eyes in the reflection of the car window, checking the way you check a wound to see if it's actually stopped bleeding.I read Graham's message four more times in the car, looking for a trick in the wording, some hidden edge I could use before I even arrived. Meet me at the lake house. Come alone, or don't come at all. He'd never once, in four months of careful cruelty, been this direct. It frightened me more than any of the anonymous texts had, because Graham unmasked was a Graham who believed he no longer needed the mask.Torin sat beside me in the back seat, jaw tight, his hand wrapped around mine so firmly I could feel his pulse through it. He hadn't argued about coming. I hadn't expected him to try; some battles you learn not to fight twice in one re