All Chapters of The scent of her revenge : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Chapter 11: The Voice Through the Iron"Ellie?" Julian's voice slid through the metal like warm oil. "I know you can hear me, darling. You always did hear everything."Elara did not move. The cobalt bottle was cold in her palm. Beside her, Rhys had gone as still as stone, his gray eyes fixed on the door."I'm not angry," Julian went on. "I want you to know that. I was frightened when I woke to an empty house. I thought something had happened to you." A pause, soft and wounded. "Then I heard you'd been arrested. I came straight to the station. They told me you'd gone with a man.""Spare us," Rhys said."Mr. Calloway. How good of you to join the conversation." The warmth never faltered. "I'm told you've taken a vulnerable woman into your family's house in the middle of the night. People will have opinions.""She is my wife."A beat. A very small beat."Your what?""Contract signed at dawn," Rhys said coldly. "Filed by nine. You are speaking to Mrs. Calloway, Mr. Hart."The silence on th

Elara did not reach for the bottle.She lifted it instead, high, and held it over the stone floor between two fingers."Tell your man to take his hand off the tube," she said, "or I let go."The cellar went still.Conrad Hart tilted his head, the way a teacher might when a student surprises him. "That glass holds twenty years of work, my dear. If it breaks, you lose your answer.""I already have my answer." Her voice did not shake. She was astonished by that. "You've smelled like that fire since I walked in. It's in your coat, your hair, your skin. A man doesn't carry a smell for decades unless he can't stop returning to it."Something flickered behind the professor's smile. It was small and quick. She knew it at once, because she had smelled it on Detective Brandt not three hours ago.Fear.He was afraid of the bottle. Not of what was in it, but of what it would prove.Conrad lifted two fingers.On the phone's bright screen, the man in the gray suit stiffened, then slowly drew his ha

"That is not possible," Rhys said again, and his voice cracked on the last word.On the screen, the corridor had gone empty. Elara pressed the phone to her ear. "Priya, where did they go?""A car outside the east entrance. A black one. No plates." Priya's breath came fast. "We're tracing it. Elara, I don't know what's happening, but if that was Augustin Calloway, then someone has been lying to this family for a year.""Sixty seconds," Marguerite said hoarsely. She had gone to the iron door and was staring up the stairs. "Theo's men are in the cellar corridor. They'll come down."Rhys turned from the screen. The shock was gone from his face. In its place stood the cold stillness Elara had met in the interrogation room, and she understood now what it cost him to wear it."The back stair," he said. "Aunt Marguerite, lead.""Where are we going?"He was silent for a heartbeat. "If my grandfather is alive," he said slowly, "and if he came to Paris, there is one place on this estate he would

"Rhys!"The scream tore out of Elara before she knew she had drawn breath. It rang through the nave, cracked and ragged, and above her in the loft a boot scraped stone.She did not look up. She pressed both hands over the wound in Augustin's chest, and warm blood welled between her fingers."Stay with me," she begged. "Please. Stay with me."A door banged somewhere overhead. Footsteps pounded down a hidden stair, fast and light, and faded. The shooter was gone.The chapel door crashed open.Rhys came down the aisle at a dead run. He did not shout. He did not slow. He dropped to his knees beside the pew, and for one dreadful second his hands hovered over his grandfather's body as if he were afraid to touch him."Grandfather.""Not so loud," Augustin whispered. His eyes fluttered open, cloudy and blue-gray. A faint, dry smile touched his lips. "I am not yet dead. It was a poor shot. Through the shoulder, I think. The lung, perhaps.""Priya's men are on the road," Rhys said hoarsely. He

The shot was deafening.Elara flinched, expecting pain. It did not come. Rhys's back was still a wall in front of her, solid and unmoving. Above them, the great stained-glass window above the altar exploded outward in a glittering rain of red and blue and gold.The bullet had gone high.Edmund Calloway stood with the gun still raised and his burned face slack with shock, staring at his own hand as if it belonged to someone else.Then a second shot cracked from the organ loft.Edmund jerked. The revolver clattered across the flagstones. He pressed his gloved fingers to his shoulder, and dark red seeped between them, and he sank slowly to one knee in the doorway, breathing hard."Father!"Rhys was across the nave before Elara could stop him. He caught the older man by the arms as he swayed. It was instinct, clean and unthinking, the way a boy catches a parent who has fallen. Edmund stared at him in dazed disbelief."Don't," he whispered. "I shot your grandfather.""I know." Rhys's voice