Todos os capítulos de Thirty Days To Doomsday:My Cheating Ex Begs At My Vault Door: Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

POV: Odalys "Auntie," I said. "Did you tell someone where I was?"Ilsabet did not answer. She stood in the control room doorway in her quilted robe, one hand pressed flat against her sternum, as if she were trying to hold something inside her chest. The monitors painted her face in sickly blue light. Behind me, the radio went on repeating its rumor to nobody."Odie." Her voice came out cracked. "I only meant—""Did you tell someone?""Yes."One word. It dropped into the room like a stone into a well, and I waited to hear it land. The floor did not move. The lights did not flicker. Somewhere in the walls the ventilation fans kept up their steady, indifferent whisper, as if nothing in the world had changed. But something had. A thread I had trusted for twenty-five years had just come loose in my hands.I did not shout. I do not think I could have. The sound I made was a small, flat breath, the kind a person makes when a stair that should have been there is not. Ferran Ashgrove had gone

POV: OdalysI asked Ilsabet to sit down at the long steel table, and then I made her a cup of tea, because I did not know what else to do with my hands.She watched me do it. Her eyes were swollen. She had not stopped crying since the hatch closed, and now she sat very straight in her quilted robe with her fingers laced together on the tabletop, like a child waiting outside the principal's office. Biscuit the cat had climbed onto the chair beside her and, with the strange diplomacy of cats, settled her orange weight against Ilsabet's thigh.I set the cup in front of her. I sat across from her. Ferran leaned against the doorway with his arms folded, and I was grateful that he did not leave."Tell me," I said."Odie, I—""All of it. From the beginning."She drew a long, shaky breath. "It was the Tuesday after your hearing. Marguerite called me. I didn't want to answer. But she was crying, Odie. Truly crying. She said that her son was ruined, that she had lost her sister's trust, that sh

POV: Odalys They reached the hill with the dead thirty yards behind them.On the monitors, they scrambled up the slope, gasping, clawing at the grass. Marguerite Vale was being half-carried by her brother-in-law, Desmond, a heavyset man in his sixties whose face had gone the color of raw liver. Her pearls had snapped. They lay scattered down the hillside like drops of milk. Cordelia, her pink coat torn off one shoulder and her mascara running down both cheeks, was shrieking her husband's name. Ambrose Whitlock ran beside her without answering, his jaw set, his eyes on the ground.And at the front, the two I had been waiting for.Lorcan reached the vault door first. He threw himself against the steel, hammering with both fists. Pia stumbled into him from behind, and I saw that she had lost both shoes and that one of her feet was bleeding on the stone. Her silver dress was torn from hem to hip. Her hair, which she had spent fifteen years of friendship teaching me to envy, hung in a mat

POV: Odalys"The liner's cracked," said Ferran. "It has to be."We were crowded in the maintenance corridor with the access hatch open at our feet. A square of black, damp air breathed up from the shaft, smelling of wet stone and rust. Ilsabet knelt beside it with Thaddeus's engineering binder spread across her knees, running a pencil down the index. Ferran was holding a flashlight on a length of cable that vanished into the dark."The tremor shifted something," Ilsabet read aloud. "Here. 'In the event of liner failure, the upper casing joint at forty feet may separate. Sediment and surface seepage will enter the water column. Repair requires direct patching of the joint with hydraulic cement.' It says there's a bucket, a trowel and six bags of cement in the tool room.""There's also a section," Ferran said grimly, "about how nobody over sixty should ever go down that shaft.""Then it's a good thing you're not going," I said.He turned the flashlight on me. "Odalys.""You have a bad k

POV: Odalys I did not mean to eavesdrop. It only happened that I was awake.It was past two in the morning, and the fortress was dark except for the amber glow of the standby lights. I had come down to the control room because I could not lie still, and I had found myself, as I always did, twisting the dial on the crank radio, drifting from band to band through the static in the hope of hearing a voice that was not mine.I found one. Quite suddenly, at the very bottom of the citizen's band, a hiss resolved into words."—no, you listen to me. I did not sit through a decade of charity luncheons to be spoken to like that by a stable boy!"I stopped turning.It was Marguerite Vale. There was no mistaking that voice, the brittle, aristocratic whine, sharpened by exhaustion. The reception was poor, a crackle and fade, but I could hear every word. She was speaking into a handset somewhere very near. Brannock's feed store, I realized, must have had a base station. An old trucker's rig, the k