365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 11

365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 11 – Seven Men at My Gate

They came to the Vanguard gate at 4 p.m.

+watched them from a fourth-floor window, because I am apparently still enough of a coward to want a wall

between me and my own blood.

Two SUVs. Five men out of the cars. My father in a suit he’d clearly slept in, and four of my brothers – Asher, Fletcher, Landon, Colton. Declan and Hudson were in a hospital forty miles east with a collapsed lung and a

shattered femur between them.

My father hadn’t shaved. Marcus Vale has shaved every day since 1989.

“Commander,” Flora said behind me. “You don’t have to see them. I’ll tell them you’re deployed.”

“Go down,” Echo said. “Not for them. For your mother.”

I went down.

They were standing in the courtyard with their hands empty and their spines straight, the way our House trains you to stand when you’re being judged.

Asher saw me first.

I watched my oldest brother – thirty-one years old, six-four, the man who taught me to ride a bike and who once broke a boy’s nose at a regatta for calling me flat-chested – I watched him look straight at my face and not recognize me for a full second, because of the hair, and the uniform, and the eight inches of distance in

my eyes.

Then he did recognize me.

And Asher Vale made a sound I’ll hear on my deathbed and went down on one knee on the gravel.

“Get up,” I said.

“Ro-”

“Get up.” My voice came out like an ice pick. “You do not kneel in this courtyard. It belongs to the Crown, not

to you.”

He got up.

My father hadn’t moved at all. He was just looking at me. Looking at the crown on my collar. Looking at the

bar on my sleeve.

“You’re a Vanguard Commander,” he said.

Yes.

“You’re eighteen years old.”

“Yes.”

“Rowan-”

“Do not,” I said, “say my name yet.”

And it was so quiet in that courtyard you could hear the flags.

“Thirteen months,” I said. “I lived in your boathouse for eight of them. I ate breakfast alone at your table two hundred times. I asked my mother for one afternoon, twelve separate times, and she said I’m busy twelve separate times. On the night of the board dinner you toasted your children and you named six.”

Fletcher made a small, broken noise.

“I pulled my own file out of your archive. Do you know what the last entry says?” I looked at my father. “R. turned seventeen today. That’s it. That’s the whole record of my existence, in your handwriting, in your house.”

“I know,” my father said. His voice was gone, sanded down to a rasp. “I know what it says.”

“The King told me why.”

“Then you know-”

“I know you had a reason,” I said. “I know it was a good reason. And I need you to understand that it doesn’t undo a single one of those three hundred and sixty-five days, because I lived them not knowing. I lived them believing I was worth so little that seven people who share my blood could look through me like glass.”

I let that sit.

“You didn’t protect me,” I said. “You protected the secret. And you decided a scared girl was an acceptable loss.”

My father’s face broke apart.

Marcus Vale, who has stared down cartels and boards and hurricanes, stood in a courtyard and cried in front

of his sons.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. That’s exactly what I did.”

Th Cora Something in my chest, some old locked thing, twisted at the sound of my father’s voice doing that. I hated it. I hated that after everything, a part of me was still eleven years old and sitting at a small desk in his office,

waiting to be looked at.

“Where’s Mom,” I said.

Asher stepped forward with a phone.

“They sent this ninety minutes ago.”

A video. My mother, on a chair, in a room with no windows. Her hair down. A cut on her cheekbone.

And behind her, a man in his sixties with silver hair and a signet ring – Cyrus Hallow, head of the House that killed Marguerite Vale – leaning down to speak into the camera.

“Marcus. Old friend. I’ve been patient for a very long time.”

“Your wife tells me you have no daughter. Your archive says the same. Your staff say the same. That’s very good work – I nearly believed it.”

“But girls talk, Marcus. Especially girls you throw away.” He smiled. “I have it on excellent authority that a Rowan Vale scored the highest intake results in the history of the Vanguard, and that she can end a two-year land war in ninety-four minutes by asking two questions.”

“Two questions, Marcus. From a stranger. In a field of ninety armed men!”

“You know what she is. So do I.”

“You have until midnight to hand her to me, or I’ll send you Giselle in pieces and take the girl anyway.”

The video ended.

My whole unit had come down behind me. Nobody spoke.

“Rowan,” my father said. “You are not going to that meet. I came here to tell you that we’re handling it. I came here to make sure you were behind these walls.”

I laughed. God help me, I actually laughed.

“You still don’t get it,” I said. “You spent a year trying to hide a weapon. You should have spent it training one.”

I turned to my Captains.

“Flora, Beck – vehicles. Enzo, drone package. Mara, get me every property Hallow owns within four hours of that coast road, filter for no windows and no cell signal.”

Chapter 11-Seven Men at My Gate

“Yes, Commander.”

“Marek.” I didn’t even have to look. He was already there. “I need six of yours.”

“You’ve got twelve and me.”

I finally turned back to my father and my brothers, standing in that courtyard with nothing left to give.

“Get in the car,” I said. “You’re not in charge. You’re not consulted. You’ll do exactly what I tell you or you’ll si

in a van and listen.”

“Ro,” Asher whispered. “Why are you helping us?”

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m helping her.”