Riot novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Not a Bad Batch

Joss's POV

Rhys opened the drawer, and I stood on the cold floor in his shirt and watched his hands shake.

He lifted out the box.

The sticker on the lid was in looping handwriting I had seen on a cream card in my own coat pocket.

For Ry, from H.

"Hold one up to the window," he said. "Tell me what you see. I don't want to be the only one who sees it."

I took a foil packet from him.

The sun had cleared the lake, and it came through the glass wall flat and white.

I turned the packet a quarter turn.

One speck of light showed in the middle.

"That's a hole," I said.

"There's one in every packet. Twelve of twelve."

"A bad batch doesn't do twelve." My voice came out thin. "A bad batch doesn't make the same hole in the same place twelve times."

"No."

My knees went, and I sat down on the edge of his bed.

He crouched in front of me with the foil still in his hand.

"I stood in my lobby and told forty people you planned this," he said. "Somebody planned it. It wasn't you."

"No. It wasn't."

I wanted to hit him.

I wanted it so badly that my palm hurt.

I put my hand flat on my stomach instead, and the baby rolled under it.

"Who?" I said.

He told me what Art had said.

The housekeeper had worked for his mother for twenty years and for him for three.

The box came every month in a gift basket from Honor, and Honor had told her to put it in the drawer herself and not to trouble him with it.

Honor paid for the housekeeper's daughter's tuition.

I listened to all of it with my eyes on the sticker.

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