Paid to Leave, Pregnant With the Vampire Kings Heirs novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Eleven O'Clock

Ambrose calls at his usual hour and Linnea lies to his face through the phone; he says he lands at dawn.

I let it ring three times.

June stood beside me with her arms crossed and mouthed: Don't.

I picked up anyway.

"Linnea."

His voice came down the line low and rough, and the bond in my chest answered it before I could stop it.

For a second I couldn't speak.

"It's eleven," Ambrose said. "I'm calling like I always do."

"How did you get this number?"

"Your grandmother's deed. It's on file at the county. I've had it for two years." He stopped. "I called your cell forty times. A man at Tempest House told me it was found on the seat of a car at a gas station."

"I threw it away."

"Why?"

"Because I didn't want to be found."

The line was quiet.

June pressed both hands over her mouth.

"I need to tell you something," he said, "and I need you to hear it all before you answer. I didn't sign those papers."

I looked at the table.

"The seal was on them," I said.

"The seal is a wax stamp, Linnea. Anyone with my ring and a candle can make it. I was in the middle of a treaty meeting with the Northern Court when Ottoline's lawyer called my aide to say it was done. I wrote to you from the hallway."

"I saw."

"You saw it after."

I closed my eyes.

"Yes."

"Then it isn't signed," he said. "Tell me it isn't signed."

"It's signed."

The bond tightened so hard in my ribs that I had to hold the counter.

I knew exactly what he felt, because I was feeling it too.

"By whom?" he asked.

"By me."

Nothing came down the line for a long moment.

June shook her head at me, slowly, and I looked away from her.

"I wanted out," I said.

I kept my voice flat, the way I used to talk to patients who were asking if they'd live.

"I wanted out of that house, Ambrose. I wanted out of the dinners and the aunts and the tea. Your family told me every night for a year that I was a bad bet, and they were right. I'm not what you needed. Fifty million dollars is a lot of money, and I took it."

"Say that again."

"I took it."

"No. Say it again so I can feel it."

I understood what he meant a second too late.

He was reading me through the bond.

A lie shows up in the bond as a cold spot, and he found mine.

"You're frightened," he said quietly. "You're so frightened that I can feel it from here, and it isn't of me."

"Don't do that."

"Linnea, what happened in that house?"

"Nothing happened. I got paid."

"You picked up every night for nine months and told me you were fine."

"I was fine."

"Every night I said ignore them, and you said you would." He laughed once, a hard, ugly sound I had never heard from him. "And the one morning I couldn't reach you, you signed in four minutes."

"How do you know it was four?"

"The lawyer logged the time with Ottoline's office. Four minutes, Linnea. You didn't call me. You didn't wait."

I had no answer to that.

I had a real one, the only one, three flickers on a screen, and I could not give it to him.

If I said it on this line, anyone listening would hear it too.

I did not know who was listening.

"I'm tired," I said. "Please don't call here again."

"I won't call."

My heart dropped.

"I'm landing at first light," he said.

"Ambrose."

"I'm not asking, and I'm not angry. I'll be at that door at dawn. Look me in the eye and say you wanted this, and I'll walk away and sign whatever you put in front of me."

"You don't have to come."

"I'm your husband until the new moon," he said. "I'll be there."

The line went dead.

I stood holding the receiver until June took it out of my hand and hung it on the wall.

"Well," she said, "he's not a coward. I'll give him that."

"Don't."

"And you're a worse liar than you think."

"I know."

"He knows too," June said. "That's the part that's going to hurt tomorrow."

She made me eat toast.

She made me lie down on my grandmother's quilt in the front room with a hot water bottle.

I did not sleep.

Around four in the morning, the bond began to pull at my chest, gently, and it did not stop.

I felt him getting closer by the hour.

At six, as the window turned grey, I heard tires on the gravel.

A car door shut.

Boots came up the porch steps, steady and unhurried.

June looked at me from the kitchen doorway.

Then a knuckle struck the door, twice.

"Open the door, Linnea," Ambrose said.

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