All Chapters of SIGNED IN BLOOD SOLD IN BLOOD : Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

I knew where everyone would sit before the first guest arrived, because I had made the chart myself.Three hundred and twelve names. Forty-one tables. Julian at table one with the investors, my father on his right. Me on his left, where a fiancée sits. I had moved my own place card twice that afternoon and put it back both times. I'd slept maybe five hours a night since March, and somewhere along the way I'd gotten superstitious about leaving things where Julian had told me they belonged.The ballroom at the Marlowe smelled like lilies and floor polish. Over the stage hung a banner the width of a bus, the old orange Hale Freight logo with three words under it: A NEW CHAPTER. Julian's phrase. I had told him it sounded like a self-help book. He'd kissed my forehead and said that was exactly why he needed me, for the part of his brain that couldn't tell.Two years ago this company had been three weeks from closing. The port lease was pulled, the big contracts were gone, and two hundred d

The doorbell rang at 7:42.I know the time because I was standing in the hall in my one sensible gray dress, holding my car keys, trying to decide whether I could still make the clinic's billing office before it opened. I had been awake all night. I had done nothing useful with it. At four a.m. I'd made a spreadsheet of my mother's medications and their costs, which solved nothing, but it felt like holding on to a railing.The woman on the porch wore a charcoal coat with no logo and carried a tablet in a leather sleeve. She looked about forty. She had the posture of somebody who delivers things people don't want."Nadia Hale?""Yes.""Signature, please." She turned the tablet.I signed with my finger on the screen. I didn't read the header. I didn't look at who it was from. I have signed for other people's things for so long that my hand does it without checking with me, the way you flinch at a loud noise.She handed me an envelope, thick and cream, heavy as a brick, and said, "You'll

I signed at 11:57.I want to say there was a moment of clean decision, a great turning of the wheel. There wasn't. There was a wire that cleared twice, a postcard on my refrigerator, an empty infusion chair at Brightwater, and eight minutes. I did what I do when the numbers are bad. I stopped looking at the whole column and picked up the next line."I want my own pen," I said.Caleb Kane, who had been standing very still by the shelves since I'd hit him, said, "Of course."I took the contract from the folder, flattened the last page on the long table, and found the line marked *Bride*. I signed in black ink, *Nadia Ruth Hale*, and my hand didn't shake until the final *e*."There's a second part," Caleb said. He kept his distance. He had been keeping it since the elbow. "The ink binds you under the law you know. The other binds you under mine."He took a small flat case from his back pocket and opened it on the table. Inside, on gray foam, lay a steel lancet of the kind diabetics use,