The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 148

Chapter 134: The Bait

Bella POV

The hardest part was not the plan itself, the hardest part was telling Tom

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Not the truth – we’d agreed on that, Diana and I, after minutes of logistics at the kitchen table while Caleb handled Lena’s team.

Tom was four, he did not need the real version, he needed the version he could carry without being afraid.

“Mummy’s going to stay somewhere else for a little while, I told him, sitting on the edge of his bed. “Just a few days. You’re going to be with Daddy and Diana.”

Tom looked at me with his serious grey eyes. “Because of the bad person?”

“We’re sorting out the bad person,” I said. “This is part of sorting it.”

He chewed on this. “Are you going to be safe?”

I

“Very safe,” I said. “Lots of people keeping an eye on me.”

“Like Leon with the biscuits?”

“Similar to Leon,” I said, and didn’t let my voice change. “And you’ll be able to see me on a call every night. And when it’s done, I’ll be home.”

He looked at me for another long moment with that unsettling perceptiveness he’d had since before he could properly talk, and then he wrapped both arms around my neck and pressed his face into my shoulder. I held him tight and pressed my mouth to the top of his head and breathed him in.

Then I kissed his hair and said, “Look after Daddy.”

Tom pulled back and fixed me with a look of profound seriousness. “He’ll be sad.”

“Tell him about volcanoes,” I said. “It helps.”

I left at three in the afternoon, carrying a bag, dressed in the kind of outfit that read as practical departure rather than anything staged with dark trousers and a coat.

Lena’s team had confirmed that Cole’s surveillance of the building was still active, two operatives at different points. They would see me leave because that was the purpose. Caleb walked me to the private elevator.

He was holding it together, which I appreciated and which cost him something visible. His jaw was set and his hands were in his jacket pockets and he looked at me in the elevator lobby with the expression of a man who had agreed to a plan and was discovering that agreeing to a plan and watching it begin were two separate experiences.

“The team is good,” I said.

“I know.”

“My channel to Lena is open. Tom’s feed goes to my phone the moment I’m in the secure location.”

13

< Chapter 134 The Bait

+know, Bella.”

t looked at him. “Say what you need to say.”

He was quiet for a moment, and then: “I don’t like this.”

“I know you don’t.”

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“I understand why it’s the right call. I agreed because it’s the right call.” He looked at me directly. “And I still don’t like it.”

“That’s allowed,” I said, and stepped close and put my hand flat against his chest, feeling his heartbeat. “I will be fine. And when this is over, I will come home and we will have a very boring week where nothing happens and Tom tells us about dinosaurs.”

Something moved across his face. “Promise me.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, which was the most honest answer I could give him, and which he accepted because he knew me well enough to know I didn’t make promises I couldn’t guarantee.

He covered my hand with his, pressed it once, and let it go.

The elevator doors opened and I stepped in.

I watched his face as the doors closed. He was looking at me until the last possible second – and then I was alone in the elevator and I let myself feel it: the fear, the adrenaline, the cold and clarifying certainty of being the linchpin in a plan that had to work perfectly.

I’d felt this before. But with different stakes, in different rooms, with different enemies – but this particular feeling of standing at the edge of something with everything on the line and nowhere to go but forward.

I was still here, I’d always been still here.

The secure apartment was two miles from the penthouse – one of Lena’s team’s maintained locations.

I set my bag down and opened my laptop and pulled up Tom’s security feed immediately. He was in the living room with Diana, both of them sitting on the floor with his dinosaur cards spread between them, and Diana was apparently being quizzed by him.

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