The Husband They Bought To Die

Chapter Ten: Beneath Where You Sleep

By evening, the whole house had changed its tune.

The servants were polishing silver for a celebration dinner. Margaret had propped the Meridian invitation on the drawing room mantel where every visitor would see it, and toward Iris she was suddenly all sweetness, asking whether she had eaten, whether she needed a doctor, and whether the reporters had been too rough with her. Toward Gideon, she was colder than ever.

She found him in the upstairs hallway. "That closet is to be cleared tonight," she said without looking at him. "The Meridian Gala is less than a month away, and I will not have guests in this house wondering why a grown man sleeps with the mops. You'll move to the servants' quarters behind the kitchen."

"No, he won't."

Iris stood at the top of the stairs. Behind her, the rest of the family had drifted out of the drawing room to see what the noise was about, Celeste with a glass in her hand and Damien leaning on the banister.

"From tonight, my husband sleeps in my wing," Iris said. Her voice was calm, but it carried down the stairwell to every one of them. "And he eats at this table. If anyone has a problem with that, they can tell me now."

"Iris, be reasonable," Margaret began. "People will talk."

"Let them talk. They've talked for three years while he slept next to the mops."

Nobody else said a word. Celeste's mouth opened and closed without a sound. Damien's smile cracked straight down the middle. Margaret looked from her granddaughter to the man in the worn jacket, and for once she had nothing to say. The invitation on her mantel was addressed to Iris and her husband, and they all knew it.

* * *

It took Gideon less than half an hour to clear three years of his life from the closet. He carried out the canvas bag, the folded blanket, and a few books he had borrowed from the old man's library and never returned. Then he stood alone in the empty room, looking down at the narrow cot. On the wall beside it, low enough that no one had ever noticed, he had scratched a faint line for every night he spent in this house. There were a thousand and ninety-five of them.

He remembered Old Master Whitlock's last night. The old man had been gray and shrunken by then, every breath a labor, and he had sent the nurse away and called Gideon to his bedside. Gideon had leaned close, expecting final instructions about Iris. Instead, with the last of his strength, the old man had gripped his collar and whispered words that never made sense.

"When the three years end, look beneath where you sleep."

Gideon dragged the cot away from the wall and knelt. He ran his fingers along the floorboards until one shifted slightly under his touch, and he pried it up with the edge of his razor.

Beneath it, wrapped in oilcloth and furred with dust, lay a sealed envelope and a folded legal document. The envelope bore no name, only five words in the old man's handwriting: For the man who lived.

He broke the seal. The letter was written in the old man's shaky hand, and as Gideon read, the room seemed to tilt beneath him.

"Gideon, if you are reading this, then you lived, and I chose well. Forgive an old man his secrets. The curse was never real. Quell was paid to invent it, and the money came from someone inside my own family."

Gideon's hand tightened on the page. Someone in this house had paid a fraud to sentence him to death, and then passed him in the hallway every day for three years without blinking.

He unfolded the document. It was a deed, stamped and registered, to forty acres of waterfront land called Eastgate Harbor. Edmund Whitlock's signature sat at the bottom beside a notary's seal.

"My son Edmund left this to Iris before he died," the letter went on. "The province intends to build its new deep-water port on that land, and it will be worth billions. Under Edmund's trust, control of the harbor passes jointly to Iris and her husband on their third wedding anniversary. Whoever is married to her at that midnight becomes its co-owner."

Gideon read the line again, slowly, and everything fell into place with terrible clarity. The widow's star, the bought husband, the deadline at midnight, none of it had ever been about bad luck. It had been about land.

That was why they had needed him dead before midnight. That was why the Vales had a second husband waiting at the table with champagne in his hand. And that was why Lucius wanted him now, more than ever. To take Eastgate Harbor, his uncle needed one of two things from him, his signature or his death certificate.

The final lines stopped his breath.

"Edmund's crash was no accident. The man who arranged it later destroyed your father too: Lucius Morrow. And he had help from inside my house."

Behind him, a floorboard creaked.

Gideon turned. Iris stood in the doorway. He didn't know how long she had been there, but one look at her face told him she had read every word over his shoulder. All the color had left her cheeks, and one hand gripped the door frame as though the floor had moved beneath her.

"My father was murdered," she whispered.

She didn't cry. She looked past him at the open floorboard, and something in her eyes turned hard and cold, something he had never seen there before.

Downstairs, the dinner bell began to ring. Voices rose from the hall below, Margaret calling for wine, Damien laughing at something, and chairs scraping across the dining room floor as the whole family gathered to celebrate.

Gideon folded the letter and slid it inside his jacket, then crossed the room to stand beside her in the doorway. Somewhere at that table sat a traitor, and for the first time in three years, he had been invited to dinner.