AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The smile on Wolf’s face was nothing but pure delight. “Congratulations, sweetheart! Welcome to the family, Sean!”
“Thanks!” Sean said.
Amalie blew him a kiss, and then he was gone.
But their call had garnered attention from other diners, and when their call ended, people around them began lifting their glasses in congratulations, too.
“Just like in the movies,” Amalie said, as she slipped back to her seat.
Sean smiled. “The ones with happy-ever-afters.”
They made love that night in slow motion. Drawing out each moment for as long as they could bear until the walls fell down around them, they slipped into dreams that were not theirs, and woke up to a brand-new day.
It was the first week of March when Fiona Rangely learned her sentence. The good news was that she was getting that single jail cell after all. The bad news was that the single cells were reserved for death-row inmates only. She wanted to cry about it, but crying over spilled milk and dead husbands changed nothing about her fate.
The civil suits against her were still pending. The cogs of justice turned slower for some things than for others, but that didn’t matter either. She wasn’t fighting anything but the uncertainty of time, and how much was left with her name on it.
That night she dreamed of the estate in Miami. Dee was running a bath for her and adding the lilac-scented bath salts she always loved. Hank was waiting for her in the cabana. Then she was running down the stairs to meet him when Wolf appeared out of nowhere and opened the front door. Police swarmed into the house, dragged her out onto the lawn and cuffed her hand and foot, set the house afire, then drove away, leaving her helpless and too close to the flames.
She woke up shaking.
The analogies were clear. Karma had finally caughtup with her. She didn’t want to be here anymore, but she was going out on her own terms. One last master plan, and someone else would take the blame.
It happened in the showers. Stripped and naked as the day she’d been born, Fiona started cursing the other female inmates who were in the showers, calling them names. Insulting their ethnicities, their looks, calling out their ignorance by the way they spoke, and then shoved one woman out of the way and got under the showerhead with a washrag, snatched a bar of soap from someone else, and started washing herself.
The guards went in after her to take her out, and when they did, she spit in their faces. Within seconds, every naked woman was on her, punching, kicking, pulling hair, gouging their fingers in her eyes, drawing blood.
Lots of blood. Running into a red and winding circle down in the drains.
Fiona wasn’t fighting for her life; she was fighting for it to end. She heard guards sounding an alarm and never knew who threw the first punch, but it didn’t matter. She kept fighting and kicking, laughing and screaming until they threw her against the wall.
Her head cracked.
Her eyes rolled back in her head.
She was dead before she hit the floor.
She had incited the riot, her last “fuck you” to the world.
Wolf was in a meeting when his new personal assistant, Mark Heinz, slipped into the room, handed him a folded note, and slipped out again. He unfolded the note, saw the words, and stood.
“Excuse me, gentlemen. I need to take a call,” he said, and walked out of the conference room, back to his office, and picked up the receiver. “This is Wolf Outen.”
“Mr. Outen, I’m Ken Reeves, the warden at the Tallahassee Correctional Center where your wife is—”
Wolf took a quick breath. “No need to tiptoe around the message. She tried to kill me. Say what you have to say.”
The warden cleared his throat. “Er…um…she was in an altercation with some other women in the showers this morning, and I’m afraid she died during the fight. You will be notified when her body is released to—”
The rage in Wolf’s voice was hovering on detonate. “You can’t seriously believe I’m going to take the responsibility to bury that woman? I was already in the act of filing for divorce. Obviously, this saves me a dime. Burn her. Bury her. Choose your poison. By the law that put her there, she belonged to you. You lost her. You bury her.”
He replaced the receiver, sitting within the silence until the rage had passed, then went back to his meeting.
“My apologies, gentlemen. A little housekeeping to deal with. Now, where were we?”
That evening when he went home, Wolf sat down with a glass of wine and a stack of mail and began sorting through it, discarding junk mail and separating bills from personal letters. Then he picked up an envelope from a lab in Kentucky, set everything aside, and tore into it.
As he suspected, it was the DNA results he’d been waiting for. There were no surprises. He was Amalie Lincoln’s father. The Bullocks might argue she was Wolf’s daughter but not their granddaughter, but they didn’t know about his vasectomy after Shandy’s death, and to eliminate themselves from guilt, they would have to submit DNA tests to prove otherwise. They couldn’t lie their way out of that. He took the papers to his office, unlocked the safe, and put them into Amalie’s file.
