I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 07

I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 07

“He’s building a forgery case against you,” I said.

We were in the back of the car crossing Fifty-Ninth, and I was talking with my hands like my

mother.

“Think about it. He doesn’t just want you out-he wants you discredited. A forged access signature at your own bank, in your own name, emptying a box registered to your wife. Add a poisoned wife who dies of heart failure-” I stopped, because saying it out loud made my throat close. “Roman, he’s not framing you for

fraud. He’s framing you for me.”

Roman’s hand closed around mine on the seat. Not tentative. Not the careful arm’s-length hover of the last

six years. He took my hand like a man grabbing a rope.

“That will not happen,” he said.

“You can’t promise-”

“Ava.” He turned. Gray eyes, absolutely steady. “I have spent six years unable to touch you, unable to court you, unable to say one honest word to you, obeying a piece of paper because I thought it was your wish. I have been docile.” His mouth curved, and it was not a nice smile. “I’m done being docile. Let him come.”

Reader, I nearly climbed into his lap in moving traffic.

Instead I said, “Good. Because I need you to introduce me to your mistress.”

Her name was Sloane Marsh, and she met us in a sports bar in Queens wearing a Mets cap, eating wings, and looking nothing like the slinky silhouette from the tabloid photos.

“So you’re the wife.” She wiped her fingers on a napkin and shook my hand with a grip like a bear trap. ‘Congratulations on the mind-blowing affair we’ve been having. I’ve read all about it. Apparently I’m.

insatiable.”

I looked at Roman.

“Sloane is former Diplomatic Security Service,” he said. “I hired her in February, after the first lab flag.”

“I do close protection and I do source-tracing,” Sloane said. “Here’s how it works, Mrs. Vale. Your husband and I have met eleven times. Every single one was in a public place, at odd hours, badly lit-because I picked those locations. Because the second Julian’s people started following me, I wanted them to get gorgeous, useless photographs.”

“You baited the affair.”

“I baited the affair.” She grinned. “A man who thinks he’s winning stops looking at his flank. Also the photos are excellent. My mother famed one.”

“The payments,” Roman said quietly. “Show her.”

Sloane spun her laptop around. A tangle of shell companies-Cayman, Delaware, Cayman again-resolving

down into one final wire to one tabloid photo desk, signed off by an LLC whose sole member was a trust.

The Vale Family Legacy Trust.

Julian’s signature.

I stared at six years of my humiliation laid out as a line item. Every brunch where my friends went quiet when I sat down. Every time my mother called with that careful voice. Every night I googled how to know if your husband is cheating and then hated myself.

A hundred and forty thousand dollars. That’s what it cost to make me feel worthless.

“Ava?” Roman’s voice, close.

“I’m fine,” I lied.

“You’re crying.”

“I’m efficiently crying.” I scrubbed my face. “Sloane. How much do we have?”

“Enough to ruin him civilly. Not enough to arrest him.” She took a pull of her beer. “Forged clause is fraud n the inducement, sure. Tabloid payments are defamation-adjacent. But attempted murder? All i’ve got is a hair-follicle test that vanished this morning and an assistant who says he implied things.”

“So we need him to say it out loud,” I said. “In a room full of people. Into a microphone.”

Sloane looked at me with new interest. “And how do we make a man like that lose control in public?”

I thought about Julian crouching over my dying body, calm as a man reading a menu, because he’d already

won.

“We don’t,” I said. “We make him think he’s winning, and then we take it from him in front of everyone he’s ever wanted to impress.” I turned to my husband. “The gala. The shareholder vote’s that night, isn’t it?

Anniversary gala, board vote, moon and stars.”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s the night.” Twenty-five days. The night I die. “Roman, he’s going to try to kill me at that party.”

Roman didn’t blink.

“I know,” he said. “I’m counting on it.”