My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 12

My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 12 – Uncle Walter

Priya’s laptop chimed behind me.

I didn’t turn around. I watched my brother’s face instead, because I already knew.

“Commander,” Priya said, very carefully. “There’s a Walter Kade on the archive digitization contract. Cleared eleven months ago. Night.access.”

A pause.

“He badged in at 6:14 this morning. He’s on site right now.”

Twenty years of birthday cards. A watch when I was ten. His hand on my grandmother’s coffin. Hart residence, this is Evie – and a voice on the other end

saying hello, sunshine, is your grandmother in?

“Lock the wing,” I said. “Nobody goes anywhere alone. Nadia, you stay with—”

“Nadia went down to the archive twenty minutes ago,” June said.

I have never moved so fast in my life.

I went down three flights and hit the ground-floor corridor at a sprint, and I heard it before I saw it a scuffle, a gasp, one heel skidding on tile.

–

He had her at the bottom of our own stairs.

Walter Kade, sixty-eight years old, silver-bearded, in a contractor’s fleece over a very expensive shirt, with one arm across Nadia’s throat and a syringe against the side of

her neck.

“There she is,” he said warmly. “Hello, sunshine.”

“Let her go.”

“She walked into me. Poor girl, I only came for you.” He smiled at me the way he’d smiled across twenty Christmas tables. “You’ve cut your hair. Adeline would have

hated it.”

“Walter.” My voice was flat. “How long?”

“Since you were nine.” He said it gently, like a kindness. “Do you know what Devereux pays for a clean record on a Hart girl, Evangeline? Do you know what it’s worth to people who have been waiting since 1974 for another one to be born?”

“You gave me a watch.”

“I did.” Something flickered behind his eyes, real and gone. “And they wanted you at nineteen. I argued for twenty-six. You could say I bought you seven years.”

Keep him talking. Get his weight forward.

“You’re going to need to say his name out loud,” I said. “For the room.”

He laughed. “Ambrose is at the east gate,” he said. “Fourteen men and a very good lawyer. He’d like a conversation. You’ll come, or I’ll put four hundred milligrams into this girl’s neck and you can spend nine minutes watching her die on your own stairs. It

isn’t complicated.”

“Commander,” Nadia whispered. “Don’t.”

And this is the part I need you to understand.

Fourteen months ago I would have gone. I would have walked out that door and

gotten into a car with the man who sold me at nine years old, because a woman who’s been trained to believe she’s worth nothing does the math and comes out with nothing.

But I hadn’t been nothing for ten weeks.

I’d been somebody’s Commander.

“Walter,” I said. “What’s behind you?”

He didn’t fall for it. Of course he didn’t.

But he did the thing every human being alive does when you ask that question – his attention went back. Half a heartbeat. One flick of the eyes toward the door at his

spine.

Which was the half-heartbeat Ezra needed, coming down those stairs in sock feet like the wrath of God, because I’d told my unit nobody walks alone and Ezra Vance had not let Nadia out of earshot since the day she cried in our kitchen.

He took the syringe arm at the elbow and broke it in two places.

I took Nadia.

And sixteen people came down those stairs.

We had him zip-tied on the floor in eleven seconds flat. Nadia sat on the bottom step with her hand on her throat, alive, swearing beautifully.

Walter Kade lay on the tile of my wing and started to laugh through the pain.

“You think this is a rescue,” he said. “Sweetheart. There’s a marriage settlement signed in 1974 that says the first Hart daughter born goes to that house, and there’s a death certificate with your name on it that says you don’t legally exist. You can’t testify.

You can’t sign. You can’t even report a crime.”

“That’s not law,” Roman said coldly, from the doorway.

“No,” Walter agreed. “But it’s leverage, and he’s already inside the outer gate.” He rolled his head toward me, still smiling. “And your brother just drove out to meet him. Twenty minutes ago. Because I sent him a text from your phone, darling, asking him to.