My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 13

My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 13 – The East Gate

I have replayed the next nine minutes more times than I can count.

Here’s what I remember.

I remember Roman going through the door ahead of me, then turning at the top of the steps and saying four words: “Commander. Give the order.”

I remember my own voice coming out steady as stone.

“Marisol, seal this wing and sit on Kade – nobody talks to him, nobody moves him. Priya, wake the founder directly, no intermediaries, and get me a live copy of every file Kade has touched in eleven months. June, call the state police and use the words active hostage. Ezra, Nadia – medical, and that’s an order, Ezra, don’t you dare argue. The rest of you are with me. Roman, your unit comes down the north drive and we come in from the south.”

Sixteen people moved at once and nobody asked me a single question.

That’s what ten weeks buys you.

The east gate of Sable House is a stone arch two hundred years old with a gravel apron outside it, and under the floodlights in the rain there were three black cars, fourteen men, and my nineteen-year-old brother standing in the middle of them in a hoodie.

Ambrose Devereux was fifty-five. Beautiful suit. The kind of face that gets called distinguished in obituaries.

And standing beside him, pale and shaking and wearing a coat I bought him for Christmas three years ago, was my husband.

“There she is,” Devereux said. “God. She looks like Iris.”

“Evie, go,” Callum said hoarsely. “Get back behind the wall you don’t know what he

“Shut up, Callum.”

I stopped ten feet from Devereux, and my brother took three steps toward me, and one of the men put a hand on Theo’s shoulder, and I looked at that hand for exactly

one second.

“You’re standing on private ground,” I said, “with fourteen armed men, holding a minor’s medical guardian against his will. Do you understand what you’ve done tonight?”

“I’ve come to collect on something a hundred and fifty years old,” Devereux said. “Your family entered into an arrangement in 1974. There are documents-”

“There’s a girl,” I said. “Named Iris Hart. Who your great-grandfather sedated for five years and buried at twenty-seven with no coroner’s report. She’s not an arrangement. She’s a murder nobody ever billed you for.”

“Evangeline.” He held out one hand, palm up, patient. “Come and talk. Just talk. Your brother goes home tonight, untouched, and you and I-”

“Commander,” Roman said in my earpiece. “North element in place. Fourteen targets. Say the word.”

I looked at Ambrose Devereux’s outstretched hand.

Then I said it, loud enough to carry across that whole gravel apron:

“My name is Commander Evangeline Hart of Sable House, and every one of you is under citizen’s arrest for kidnapping, conspiracy, and the attempted murder of a woman you have already buried once.”

It took forty seconds.

They had fourteen men. We had two units, nine state troopers coming up the hill with their lights off, and me standing in the rain with a photographic memory, calling their positions from the tire tracks and the door slams I’d heard on the way in.

“Left car, driver’s side, he’s reaching Priya.”

“Two behind the pillar. June, low.”

“Devereux’s moving on my brother – THEO, DOWN-”

I hit my little brother in the back at a dead run and put us both into the gravel, and Roman Voss came out of the dark and took Ambrose Devereux off his feet so hard the man’s shoes came off.

Forty seconds. Nobody dead. Two of theirs hurt. One graze on Marisol’s arm she has never once stopped bragging about.

I got up.

My husband was still standing exactly where he’d been, hands out, doing the only thing he’d ever been good at.

“Evie, I was going to stop it,” Callum said. “I swear to God, I was going to stop it before October-”

elfth

“You ordered my headstone on November twelfth,” I said. “Eight weeks before my car left the road. Order number 4471, Calder and Sons, and I will still remember that number when I’m eighty.”

He opened his mouth.

“Don’t,” I said. “I’m the only person alive who never forgets anything. You married the wrong woman.”

Devereux was face-down in the gravel with Roman’s knee between his shoulder

blades, and he was still talking, because men like that always are.

“You can’t hold me,” he said, laughing into the stones. “You have no idea what you’ve stepped into, girl. There are nine families. Nine. We’ve been trading these records since 1974, and I’m the only one you can see.”

Headlights swept the hill. The founder’s car, and every partner behind it.

And Roman Voss looked up at me across the wreckage of the worst night of my life, soaked through, bleeding from the eyebrow, and said the single most inappropriate thing anyone has ever said to me:

“You’re absolutely terrifying, and if you weren’t my superior officer I’d have kissed you at that gate.”