My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 10

My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 10 – The Card on the Floor

We drove back through the night.

I sat in the front with a dead man’s rifle in an evidence case between my boots and my brother’s message burning a hole in my pocket.

They’ve known for six days.

Six days, and nobody had come for me. Which meant either they were still

–

assembling – or somebody had told them to wait, because taking me at Sable House would start a war.

We got in at 4 a.m. I unlocked our stairwell door and swung my light down.

Marisol’s playing card was lying face-up on the third step.

Nobody said a word. Sixteen people came up those stairs like water rising, and we cleared that wing room by room, and on my desk, on the top floor, we found what they’d left for me.

A photograph.

Me, aged nine, in a yellow dress, sitting on the floor of my grandmother’s study with a phone receiver too big for my head.

That photograph existed in exactly one place on this earth: the Hart family album, in a fire safe, in the basement of Kade & Ainsley, Coldwater.

On the back, in blue ballpoint, in handwriting I had seen on birthday cards for twenty years:

She always did answer the phone so nicely.

June caught the photo before it hit the floor. I don’t remember letting go of it.

“Commander,” Priya said, very carefully. “Sit down before you fall down.”

I didn’t sit down.

I walked out of our wing, down two flights, and hammered on the west wing door at four in the morning, because I was finished being polite and finished being a rumor.

The door opened.

Roman Voss, in a t-shirt, hair wrecked, weapon down along his thigh, looking at me with an expression I would have enjoyed under literally any other circumstances.

“Someone’s been in my wing,” I said. “Twice, minimum. Through a locked stairwell door forty feet from where your people sleep. I need to know if anybody here saw anything.”

He was already reaching for his boots.

Here’s what I learned about Roman Voss in the next four hours: for a man who’d spent ten weeks making jokes about a Commander he assumed was a rich kid’s son, he did not waste one second on his own embarrassment. He had his entire unit working before dawn.

By seven we had it. Two entries, both between 0200 and 0300, both on nights my unit was off-site. Both using a valid contractor credential and a master key.

“That’s not a break-in,” Roman said. “That’s staff.”

We were in the empty mess hall by then, two coffees, grey light coming up over the wall.

“Vale,” he said, turning his cup in a circle. “Or is it Vale.”

I looked at him for a long moment. Steady eyes. A man with actual discipline, which I hadn’t seen in a very long time.

“Hart,” I said. “Evangeline Hart.”

He didn’t flinch. He went completely still, which was worse.

“Adeline Hart’s granddaughter.”

“Yes.”

“The one they buried in February.”

I set my cup down. “How do you know that?”

Roman looked at the door. Then he told me the thing he’d been sitting on for ten

weeks.

“Because I’m not a recruit and I never was,” he said. “My father ran this House for twenty years. Sable is my godfather. There’s a sealed file in this building called MERIDIAN, and I’ve read it, and three weeks before you rode up to that gate, Sable reopened it.”

“Say the name.”

“Devereux,” Roman said. “Ambrose Devereux. Great-grandson of the man who married Iris Hart in 1974 and took her apart in five years. He doesn’t marry them anymore – he brokers. He keeps the records, he matches the families, he takes a percentage. Your husband didn’t find you at that gala, Evangeline. He was handed you.”

The mess hall was very quiet.

“They know I’m here,” I said, “The shooter knew. Somebody inside this wall is reporting me.”

“Then we find them today.” He stood. “Does your brother know what’s coming?”

And that

that was the moment something in my chest finally broke open after

four hundred and twenty-six days.

Eleven letters in a drawer.

I know you’re alive.

I took out my phone with hands that didn’t feel like mine, and for the first time in fourteen months, I called my brother.

It rang once.

Theo picked up before the second ring, and he was already crying.