All Chapters of The CEO’s Ruined Bride: My Ex Wants Me Back: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

DesireThe chapel lay four floors beneath a bonded warehouse in Clerkenwell, and in nineteen years of service I had never once been summoned to it before dawn.A silent young man in a grey cassock led me down a spiral stair cut into bare brick, past three iron doors that opened at the touch of a palm I could not see. The air grew colder with each landing, and the smell of damp stone gave way to the thick sweetness of beeswax and old incense. When the last door swung inward, I found a windowless vault with a low arched ceiling, a single row of pews, and an altar hidden behind a carved oak screen so dense with leaves and thorns that no eye could pierce it. Two hundred candles burned in iron stands along the walls, and their light moved over the stone like something alive.I knelt in the front pew with my hands folded and my heart beating against my ribs with the slow heaviness of a bell. The telephone in my coat pocket held fourteen messages that I had not answered, and my skin still pr

TravisHale found the woman who had worn my wife's face at four in the afternoon, sitting in a rented flat above a theatrical costumier with a wig stand beside her and no memory of the last two days.She was a forty-year-old actress named Nell Garrity who had once played Lady Macbeth in Bath, and she had answered an advertisement for a private commission paying five thousand pounds for a night's work. A courier had delivered a black suit, a silver pendant, and a ring that she had been ordered to wear, and she had been given a glass of champagne at the end of the evening that had been laced with enough sedative to fell a horse. She wept when Hale described what she had done, and I believed her, because her terror carried the unmistakable stink of someone who had been used and discarded.I stood in her doorway holding the ring from the cemetery in my pocket and understood that I had been the fool in a very old game. Whoever had built the trap had counted on my suspicion more than on any

IsabellaTravis changed our plans at the hotel door, and I did not understand why until the car began to climb the mountain road.He had told the driver to pass the Beau-Rivage without stopping, and when I turned to ask him what he meant, he said only that Hale distrusted any building with a revolving door and a concierge who remembered names. The road wound up through terraced vineyards left bare by winter, and the lake dropped away beneath us until it looked like a shallow dish of dark glass. Snow began to fall near the top, soft and unhurried, settling on the pines with the hush of a held breath.The chalet stood alone at the end of a track that the plough had not yet reached. It had been built by his grandfather as a hunting lodge, with a roof of weathered shingles and shutters painted the green of old copper and a wide balcony that looked out over the lake and the lights of the town below. Hale and four guards took the gatehouse at the bottom of the garden, and Tomas settled into

ScottI had carried my sister's locket against my heart for six years, and I had never once opened it in front of another living soul.I sat at the table in a dead man's kitchen with the storm howling against the shutters and a woman across from me who carried my enemy's grandchild, and I understood that I was about to break the oldest rule that I had made for myself. The locket was a plain oval of tarnished silver on a chain so thin that it had snapped twice and been mended with jeweller's wire. I drew it from beneath my shirt and laid it on the scrubbed wood, and Isabella leaned forward with her hands folded as though she were about to receive a sacrament."She gave it to me on the night she was taken, and she put it into my palm while the men were still on the stairs," I said. "She told me that I was to keep it until she asked for it back, and I have been keeping it ever since, and she has not asked."I had never told the story from the beginning, not to Penhallow and not to the ea

TravisI watched the recording eleven times before the sun cleared the roofs of Southwark, and by the eleventh I could have drawn the cell from memory.I had left the cathedral without a word to Karina, who stood in the coloured light with her gloved hands pressed against her mouth and her shoulders shaking. She had not tried to stop me, and she had not defended herself, and the omission troubled me more than any plea would have done. I walked three streets in the thin cold before I understood that I had no destination, and then I sat on a wet bench beside the river with the tablet balanced on my knee and let the old man’s whisper fill my skull.Cease your resistance, my boy. Lucian Vanguard had never in his life asked me for anything. He had commanded and corrected and withheld, and he had once locked me in a cellar for a whole night because I wept at my mother’s graveside, but he had never begged. The man on that screen had a voice like paper tearing, and every time he said the word