The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 116

Chapter 104: First Date Redux

Bella POV

The word Diana followed me to bed.

I lay in the dark for a long time, listening to the city outside and the quiet of Tom asleep down the hall, turning that single name over in my mind.

Caleb had taken the call in the hallway, his voice dropping so low I couldn’t make out anything after that first word. When he came back to the kitchen, his face was closed in a way I hadn’t seen in weeks – not cold, exactly, but careful in the way of a man managing something he hasn’t figured out how to say yet.

“Is Everything okay?” I’d asked.

“Fine,” he said. “Old business. I’ll explain soon.”

I’d let it go, because I’d learned not to push Caleb when his jaw was set like that – not out of the old fear, but because I’d watched him enough now to know the difference between him shutting down and him gathering himself. So I said goodnight, and he said goodnight, and I went to bed with Diana sitting quietly in the back of my mind.

I woke up to Tom’s feet on my face at six-thirty and forgot about it entirely.

The text came at noon, while I was at my desk reviewing the latest Hart Industries restructuring reports.

Dinner tonight. Just us. I’ll send a car at seven – wear something you don’t mind walking in.

I stared at it for a full ten seconds. Maya, who was sitting across from me going through Tom’s snack options for the week with the focus of a military strategist, looked up. “Your face just did something,” she said.

“Caleb wants to take me to dinner.”

“And your face is doing that thing where you’re trying not to smile.”

“My face is not doing anything.”

“Bella.” Maya set down the snack chart. “Your face is doing the thing.”

I put my phone face-down on the desk. “It’s just dinner.”

“It’s a date,” she said. “Say the word. Date. Four letters. Very manageable.”

I looked back at my reports. “I’ll see you when you bring Tom back at eight.”

She left laughing, which I chose to find undignified.

The car took me to a part of the city I hadn’t been to in years – a quiet side street off the main drag, lined with old buildings that hadn’t been renovated into anything sleek or profitable yet. I recognized it before I recognized it, and then I stepped out of the car and saw the hand-lettered sign in the window, and something in my chest went very still.

1.3

Chapter 104 Prst Date Redux

Archer & Sons Booksellers. Est. 1987.

+25 Points

t’d found it by accident a few weeks after arriving at Caleb house for the first time – twenty-three years old, engaged, soon to be married and desperately lonely, looking for somewhere to be that wasn’t the penthouse where my fiancee worked until midnight, and chose not to acknowledge my existence. I was only left with the driver who drove me wherever I wanted to go.

I’d spent most Saturdays here before everything fell apart, tucked into the back corner with a cup of tea from the café next door, reading things that had nothing to do with my life.

Caleb was waiting outside, hands in his pockets, no tie. He looked almost nervous, which was so foreign on his face that I slowed down to look at it properly.

“You remembered,” I said.

“Although James betrayed me I had no choice but to ask him to help me find it. It’s not on the main maps anymore.” He held the door open.

“You went to James,” I said.

Something shifted in his expression. “He was the only one who knew about it.”

“After what he did.”

Caleb was quiet for a moment. “He told me why, eventually. Victoria had his mother.” He said “She’d been holding that over him for months. Do what I say or she gets hurt. He was terrified and he didn’t know how to tell me.”

I looked at him. “And you believed him.”

“I was furious at him,” Caleb said. “For weeks. But yes. Eventually.” He glanced away briefly. “He said I’d done a lot for him over the years and he didn’t want to be another problem I had to carry. That he thought he could handle it himself.” A short pause. “He was wrong, but I understood it.”

“Is that why he resigned?”

“I think so.” Something crossed Caleb’s face that wasn’t quite anger and wasn’t quite grief. “He felt guilty, I think. He couldn’t look at me.”

“But you asked him to come back.”

“I told him to come back,” he said. “He’s a good man who was put in an impossible position by someone who specializes in impossible positions.” He paused. “Letting him walk away because Victoria used him would have been letting her take one more thing.”

I thought about that – a man so accustomed to being helped that the people around him stopped bringing him their problems. Tried to protect him from their own emergencies.

“That’s not a small thing,” I said quietly. “Having someone threaten your mother to get to you.”

“No,” Caleb agreed. “It isn’t.”

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