Her 20-Year Silence Ended When Her Daughter Came Back for Revenge novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Screaming Water

Rhys's POV

A woman I had never met called my phone at eight that night.

"I'm a matron at the Cutler Street station," she said. "A girl in my cells says to tell you the lake house isn't safe. Tonight."

She hung up before I could ask her name.

I stood in the kitchen with the phone in my hand.

Gareth was at the table, going through the jeweler's page for the fifth time.

Nesta's mother sat by the stove with her hands around a mug.

"Lights out," I said. "Both of you upstairs, away from the windows."

Adela put down her mug.

She did not go at once.

She took the poker off its hook beside the back door and held it in her scarred hands.

"Adela," Gareth said.

She looked at him, and he said nothing more.

Then she climbed the stairs with the poker, and I heard the sash go up in the room over the lake.

I turned off the kitchen light and the porch light, and a minute later headlights swung across the ceiling.

Three men got out of a gray car at the end of the track.

I knew two of them. One was the driver, and one was his cousin with the thick neck, who had stood in my stepmother's linen passage a week ago and told his friend to check the cupboards.

The third carried a can.

"Gareth," I said. "The axe by the woodpile."

"I'll get it."

"Then stay at the front and make noise if anyone comes round."

"I'm forty-eight, not dead," Gareth said, and went out the front way in the dark.

The cousin came to the back door first.

He tried the handle, and it was locked, and he put his shoulder into the frame.

The wood split on the second hit.

I was behind the door with a cast-iron pan, and I swung it as the gap opened.

It caught him across the side of the head and he went down on the step.

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