Her Vengeful Rebirth novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Petition

I held the phone out to Jericho in the grey light before dawn.

He read the text and said a word I will not repeat.

"They followed your car," he said.

"Or they put a tracker on it."

"I'll check."

"Later." I pulled the blanket up to my chin.

"She wants us to know she's watching. It's the same game as the dye, Jericho."

"She has no idea how much we're already holding."

He looked at me with something between awe and alarm.

"You're very calm for a woman who just got a text like that."

"I've been dead once," I said. "It sets the standard."

At eight he was standing at the stove in jeans and no shirt, scrambling eggs in a pan the size of a manhole cover.

I sat on the counter in his sweatshirt with my bare feet swinging, eating toast off his plate.

"You have a thing about eggs," I said.

"I have a thing about breakfast. When you grow up with a mother who works nights, you learn to cook or you starve."

"What did she do?"

"She cleaned offices in Lowell. At four a.m. she'd come home and make me eggs."

He flipped them with one flick of his wrist.

"Fried, always. With the edges crisp."

"Mine too."

"I know," he said. "You told me. At eleven-thirty. In the freezer."

My throat closed, and I put the toast down.

He turned off the burner, crossed the kitchen and kissed me, slowly, with his thumb under my jaw.

Down on the mill floor, a buzzer sounded.

We both looked toward the door.

"That'll be the lawyer," I said.

My father's lawyer was a silver-haired man in a camel coat who held a leather portfolio against his chest.

He stood in the doorway of the mill and could not decide where to put his eyes.

I had come down in Jericho's sweatshirt, and Jericho stood behind me in his jeans and bare feet, filling the stairwell.

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