My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 06

My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 06 – Ten Weeks

Ten weeks. That’s what they gave us before we went live.

the best

We took the east wing of the annex. The west wing belonged to Unit One

team in the House, nine years operational, run by a man named Roman Voss, and in ten weeks I never once had a conversation with any of them.

That was strategy, not shyness. My people ate on our own floor. We ran at 5 a.m., before the yard filled up. We were a rumor.

And the rumor said Commander Vale was a man.

I know, because the stairwell in that building carries sound like a church.

“Anyone actually met Vale?”

“Carrow says he’s some rich kid’s son. They always are.”

“Careful. Whoever it is topped every module in the House record.”

That last voice was Voss. Low, dry, amused at his own people.

I never corrected them. Do you know how rare it is to be underestimated usefully? let them build a man in their heads for ten weeks while I got very, very good.

In week four I told my unit everything.

All sixteen, in one room, with the door shut. Who I was. The clinic. The headstone dated November twelfth. The eight hundred million. The nine families.

It was the biggest risk of my life and the best decision I’ve ever made.

Priya went digging that same night. Nadia – who’d studied estate law before she studied anything else – came to me at 3 a.m. with a printout and a face like ash.

“Commander. Iran the pattern you gave me. Heiress, no living parents, marriage inside eighteen months of the inheritance, death or declared incompetence within five years.” She put the page down. “I found nine. Then I widened the date range.”

“And?”

“There are forty-one,” she said. “Since 1974. Forty-one women.”

The room went very quiet.

“They all have something in common,” Nadia said. “Every single estate was administered by one of four law firms. And one name appears on twenty-two of them as trustee or co-counsel.”

“Which name?”

She turned the page toward me, and the world tipped about four degrees.

KADE, W. – Kade & Ainsley, Coldwater.

Walter.

Uncle Walter, who gave me my first watch. Who carried my grandmother’s coffin. Who called me sunshine on the phone when I was nine years old and answered the house line before the adults could get to it.

“There’ll be an explanation,” I said, and I heard how thin my voice was.

“Commander-”

“Log it. Move on.”

That was my first real mistake.

We graduated two weeks early – the first unit in nineteen years. Sable gave us four

days before we went operational. On the second day I let Marisol cut my hair to my jaw, because I was done looking like a wife.

On the fourth day, Nadia came up our stairs wrong.

I know what everyone’s feet sound like. Hers were wrong.

She came into our kitchen shaking, shoved a box of files at June, and went straight

Ezra, who’d been in love with her since week two and had waited

into Ezra’s arms

like a gentleman.

–

He held her while she cried, and between the sobs she got it out.

She’d gone down to the main archive without her unit jacket. Halloran – a founding partner, twenty-two years in the House – had stepped into the doorway and blocked it.

He told her he wanted her in his suite at nine. He was specific about what she’d be wearing, which was nothing.

She said no.

He smiled and said that if she wasn’t there, he’d file a competency note to the founder on Monday saying she was unstable – and who did she think an eighty-year-old man would believe? A partner of twenty-two years, or a twenty-four-year-old girl from a unit nobody had ever heard of?

Ezra’s voice came out of him like something tearing. “I’ll kill him.”

“No,” I said.

Every head in the room turned. I heard my own voice – flat, arctic, unrecognizable.

“Nobody touches him. Nobody in this unit walks anywhere alone until I say otherwise.” I looked around the room at nine women. “Has any other partner tried this with any of you? Ever? Speak now.”

Silence.

“Good.” I stood up and picked up my jacket. “Monday morning I sit my first partners’ meeting. Sable will be in the room.

I got to the door.

“Halloran is mine.”