All Chapters of The Zombies Apocalypse Brought Me Back To My Fiancee : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Victor’s study had never felt small before, but crowded with five people and the weight of what Daniela Prieto had just told them relayed secondhand, it felt barely large enough to contain the tension filling it.“A client,” Victor repeated slowly, like saying the word again might make it clearer. “Hale answers to a client.”“That’s what she told us,” Vanessa said. “No name. Just deference, in a way she’d never heard from him before.”Victor sat down heavily behind his desk, something in his posture collapsing slightly, the careful authority he usually wore like armor cracking at the edges in a way Vanessa had rarely witnessed in her entire life.“I’ve known Hale for twenty-two years,” he said quietly. “I recruited him myself, out of a junior analyst position, watched him climb through director level faster than almost anyone else in this organization’s history. I never once considered that his ambition might belong to someone else’s agenda.”“None of us considered it,” Adrian said. “

Neither of them moved for a long time after that, the war room settling into a quiet that felt different from every other silence they’d shared, heavier, more exposed.“Can I ask you something now,” Adrian said eventually, voice low.“After what I just put you through, you’ve earned several questions.”“Why did believing me scare you more than doubting me did?”Vanessa opened her mouth to deflect, some easy half-answer ready on instinct, and found she couldn’t actually make herself say it. Not to him. Not after everything.“Because doubt is safe,” she said slowly, working through it as she spoke. “If I doubt you, I don’t have to risk anything. I just stay guarded, keep you at arm’s length, protect myself from ever being wrong about someone the way I was wrong about Ethan. Doubt doesn’t cost me anything.”“And belief does.”“Belief means I’ve handed you something I haven’t handed anyone in two years. It means if I’m wrong about you, it’s going to break something in me I don’t think I’l

“We need an inventory,” Victor said, already moving toward the door, the urgency in his voice cutting through the lingering shock of the news broadcast. “Full assessment of our supplies, immediately. If the quarantine zone reaches us, I need to know exactly what we’re working with.”“I have an inventory,” Vanessa said.Everyone turned to look at her.“You have an inventory,” Victor repeated, something skeptical in his tone that she chose, generously, not to take personally given the circumstances.“I bought supplies the night I left Ethan. A lot of supplies. They’re still in storage, mostly untouched, because nobody’s needed them yet.” She was already moving, pulling out her phone, scrolling to the photos she’d taken that first chaotic night of doomsday shopping weeks ago. “Rice, beans, water purification tablets, medical supplies, fuel. I have receipts.”“How much supply are we discussing,” Victor asked carefully.“Enough for roughly six months for two people. We have considerably mo

“Full lockdown,” Victor’s voice came through every radio in the compound at once, stripped of its usual careful calm. “All personnel inside the perimeter, now. Checkpoint Two, fall back to the main gate immediately.”Vanessa was already moving before the order finished, Adrian half a step behind her, both of them taking the stairs down from the balcony two at a time.“What’s the actual protocol,” she called over her shoulder. “For sealing the gates. Is there a protocol?”“There’s a protocol. I haven’t used it since a training drill four years ago.”“That’s not reassuring.”“I didn’t say it was reassuring. I said there’s a protocol.”The main courtyard had transformed into controlled chaos by the time they reached it, guards moving in practiced but visibly tense formation, Reyes directing two of them toward the heavy outer gate controls while Park sprinted past with an armload of equipment that looked, alarmingly, like it might be explosives.“Those better not be explosives,” Vanessa s

Ethan, it turned out, adjusted to bunker life with all the grace of a man who’d never once in his privileged existence been asked to do anything inconvenient.“There’s no WiFi,” he said, staring at his phone with the particular devastation of someone receiving genuinely tragic news. “None at all. Anywhere in the building.”“There’s a global catastrophe unfolding,” Vanessa said, not looking up from the supply manifest she was reviewing. “WiFi is not currently a priority.”“I understand that, logically. I’m simply processing the emotional reality of it.”“Process it quietly.”He wandered off, visibly aggrieved, and Vanessa caught Adrian’s eye across the room, both of them sharing a long-suffering look that required no words to fully communicate the shared exhaustion of having this particular man back in their immediate vicinity.“I give him two days,” Adrian murmured, “before he tries to negotiate for a private room.”“I give him one day before he complains about the food.”The food com