The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 152

Chapter 138: Aftermath

Bella POV

Claim

Tom didn’t know what had happened. He knew Mummy had come home in the middle of the night and that when I picked him up out of bed he was half-asleep and warm, I held him for probably too long while he drowsily patted my hair and said, “You’re back already,”

I said, “I told you I would be,”

He was back in his own bed by four in the morning and asleep within minutes, and Caleb and I sat on the floor of his room in the dark with our backs against his bed frame, not talking, listening to him breathe.

After a while Caleb’s hand found mine and we stayed there until the light started to change.

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The nightmares started three nights later. Tom wasn’t a dramatic child. But he woke twice in the same night reaching for something in a way that made my chest tighten, and when I sat with him and asked what he’d been dreaming he said, carefully, “There were people who wanted to take me,” and looked at me with those grey eyes waiting to see how I would respond.

I didn’t look away from it. “That’s a scary dream,” I said.

“Was it real?” he asked.

I thought about how to answer. “Some people tried to do something that we stopped,” I said. “We were faster than them. You were safe the whole time, and you still are.”

He chewed on this with seriousness. “Because you and Daddy fixed it?”

“And Diana,” I said. “And Lena. And a lot of people who are very good at their jobs.”

“And Leon?”

“And Leon.”

He seemed to find this satisfactory as he curled back into his pillow and said, “Can you stay?” and I pulled the small chair from the corner and sat beside him and stayed until he was fully asleep again, which took about minutes.

I sat in the dark after he drifted off and felt the specific, bone-deep exhaustion of the last week. We were home, we were safe.

The days after were quieter than I expected them to be, and I said that to Maya when she came for dinner that Thursday, and she looked at me and said, “You expected to keep running, and you don’t have to anymore.”

“You’ve been in motion since you were twenty-three,” she said. “Moving, building, protecting, planning. The threat is gone and your nervous system doesn’t quite know what to do with that.” She pointed her fork at me. “Let it be quiet, Bella, you have earned it.”

She wasn’t wrong, I had spent the first three days after Cole’s arrest building contingency plans for the mor e like me warning, which was legitimate and ongoing and needed to be addressed, but which Lena, Caleb and Ethan’s legal team were already handling with competent, coordinated attention. I was not the only

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<Chapter 135 Aftermath

person carrying this anymore. That was something I was learning.

Clam

Caleb was in the kitchen making Tom’s pasta and listening to Tom explain something about sea creatures at full volume, and 1 sat at the table with Maya and watched them through the archway.

“He’s good,” Maya said, following my gaze.

“He is,” I said.

“I didn’t think I’d be saying that without qualifiers.”

“Neither did I.”

She smiled and refilled her wine and didn’t make it into more than it was. Diana came for dinner that Sunday.

She didn’t announce it, instead she texted me at two in the afternoon saying I’ll bring wine and nothing else, which I was beginning to understand was her version of asking.

I texted back a time and a salad request and she arrived exactly on schedule with a bottle I suspected was very expensive and a children’s book about pterodactyls for Tom, which she put on the table without comment while Tom stared at it with awe.

“There are flying ones in here,” she told him.

“I know,” Tom said, already opening it. “I love flying ones.

Diana sat down and accepted the glass Caleb poured for her and looked at the table.

I set food in front of her and sat across from Caleb and we had dinner the four of us, and Maya, who had stayed because Tom asked and because she’d decided Diana was, in her words, sharp in interesting ways – and the conversation moved through pterodactyls and Diana’s opinions on Silverton’s restaurant options and Caleb’s dry account of Forde’s legal team’s increasingly desperate strategy, and at some point Tom climbed into Diana’s lap to show her a page and she let him, her arm loosely around him, her chin near the top of his head, and Caleb caught my eye across the table.

I raised my eyebrow. He gave me a very small, very warm smile and looked back at his food.

Later, after Tom was in bed and Maya had gone and Diana was putting her coat on in the hallway, she said, without preamble and without looking at either of us: “I want to be useful going forward. Not just for the crisis, If that’s if you want that.”

–

I looked at her. “Diana.”

She looked back as she straightened her spine.

“Stay for coffee,” I said.

She stayed for hours and the security remained – Lena was honest that Cole’s warning wasn’t nothing, that the longer-term mapping of Victor Black’s old network was ongoing, that they were watching names they hadn’t fully resolved yet.

I was standing at the kitchen window with my coffee, thinking about nothing in particular, when Caleb came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me from behind, his chin on my shoulder, and said

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Chapter 138-Aftermath

nothing for a moment, just held on.

“Okay?” he said, eventually.

“Better than okay,” said. “Just quiet.”

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