My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 09

My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 09 – The Question Nobody Asked

I put the phone face down and finished my coffee.

“Commander?” Nadia said.

“Family,” I said. “Load up.”

Because here’s what fourteen months of silence does: when they finally speak, some

animal part of you still doesn’t believe a word.

We hit the Delacroix gate at nine the next morning. I got out, walked up to two men twice my size, and said, “Tell Mr. Delacroix to be at the south field in one hour.” Then I

walked away before either of them could open his mouth.

Same at the Renard estate. Same sixty seconds. Same walk-away.

When we drove into that field there were eleven Delacroix men on one side and

fourteen Renards on the other and the air smelled like a struck match.

–

I put my unit in a line down the middle – sixteen people, charcoal and silver, absolutely silent – and I stood in the center with two files under my arm and let both

heads of family walk out to me.

Old Henri Renard, seventy-one, looked like a man who hadn’t slept in two years. Victor Delacroix was forty and very pleased with himself.

“This is Sable’s answer?” Victor said, looking me up and down. “They sent a girl.”

“They sent a Commander,” I said. “One hour. Then you can go back to bankrupting each other, if that’s what you want.”

Then I asked the question that two years of litigation, nine attorneys, and four hundred million dollars had never bothered with.

“Why do you want this land?”

Victor talked about access rights and water and a lot of noise about his father’s

honor. He talked for four minutes and never once looked at the northeast corner of the field, which is where he looked every time he stopped talking.

I turned to Renard.

“Sir. Why do you want it?”

The old man’s mouth worked. And then, in front of twenty-five armed men and his own sons, he broke.

“My daughter is buried up there,” he said.

You could hear the wind.

“Céline. She was twenty-two. There’s a chapel in the northeast corner, unmarked now, fallen in. She died in 1998 and we buried her there because it was neutral ground, because both families used it for a hundred years, and because-” his voice went “–because Victor’s father was driving the car.”

Victor Delacroix went the color of paper.

Two years. Three mediations. Two teams from the best forensic house on the continent. And not one person had asked why.

I took a breath.

“Then here’s the settlement,” I said. “The land is not sold and not surrendered. It’s placed in a charitable trust, jointly funded, jointly maintained, in perpetuity. Neither of you owns it. Neither of you loses it. Both of you tend it. And Céline Renard gets a headstone with her name and her dates on it, paid for by the Delacroix estate, before the first frost.”

Renard was weeping openly.

Victor stood there for a long moment. Then he crossed the line between them and put out his hand.

I watched two old enemies shake over the grave of a girl who’d been dead twenty-six years, and I thought about how much damage silence does, and I had to look at the sky for a second.

Which is when I saw the sun flash off glass on the ridge.

“DOWN-”

I hit Renard in the chest with my shoulder and both of us went into the grass as the shot cracked across the field and took a bite out of the stone wall behind where his head had been.

Chaos. Twenty-five men drawing at once.

“HOLD!” I was already running. “Nadia, Ezra they can see them!”

with me! Everyone else, hands where

We took him four minutes later in a stand of pines, because he ran toward his car instead of away from it, and I remembered the tire tracks we’d passed on the way in

Twenty-eight, maybe. Clean rifle. No insignia, Ezra put him on the ground.

I crouched over him and pulled his phone out of his jacket, and the screen was still open, and I read the last message he’d sent before I’d even asked his name.

confirm target present. hart girl running point. she’s inside sable.

The man looked up at me and started to laugh.

“You’re supposed to be in the ground,” he said. “You know that, right? You were

supposed to be in the ground in February.”

“Who sent you?”

“Sweetheart,” he said, “you have no idea how many of us there are.”

Then he bit down on something behind his back teeth, and eleven seconds later he was dead in the pine needles with his eyes open.