Bury the Ex, Wed the Heir novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Three Names

Silvan was standing at the east wing window when Linnet came back up the stairs.

He was dressed and shaved, and his hand was white on the curtain.

"You went out there alone," he said.

"I went out there with a phone and a plan."

"They had cameras. Anselm was twenty feet from you."

"And Madam hit him," Linnet said. "It's all over the news already."

He turned from the window, and his face was hard.

"I stood here and watched you walk into thirty lenses, and I could not follow," he said. "I have never hated this room so much."

Linnet shut the door behind her.

"You were at that window with your shirt open at dawn," she said. "That's why there's a photograph."

"I know."

"Why were you there?"

"I woke when you left," Silvan said. "The bed was cold, and I wanted to see you were safe in the yard."

His hand tightened on the curtain.

"I did not think about the glass. I only thought about you."

She had no answer for that.

So she said the other thing instead, the one that had sat in her chest for nine days.

"I bowed to your photograph," she said. "I stood in front of three hundred people and bowed to a dead man, and you were ten feet away, listening through a wall."

His jaw tightened.

"Madam told me to stay hidden."

"You could have coughed a little louder," Linnet said. "I spent six hours believing I'd married a grave."

"I know that too."

"Then say you're sorry."

"I'm sorry," Silvan said at once. "I should have found a way. I thought you were safer not knowing me."

"Safer."

"I thought you'd walked in for the mill, and you'd leave in two years, and I had no right to anything from you."

He looked at the floor.

"And you called me the corpse," he said. "In the dark, the first night, to my face."

"I didn't know it was you."

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