Chapter 283

[ 1,020 words ]

Katia’s POV

He looked at Sam.

Sam opened her mouth.

“It was a domestic disturbance call,” Reeves said. He pulled out his notebook. “Who wants to start p>

“I do,” Sam said.

“It was a misunderstanding,” I said at the same time.

Reeves looked between us.

Sam turned to look at me.

I met her eyes and held them. The message in my face was not subtle — I had known Sam for fourteen years, and she could read everything I was thinking, and right now what I was thinking was not here, not now, not like this.

She pressed her lips together.

Reeves walked closer, stopping a few feet from my chair. He looked at the split lip, the mark on my cheek that was already darkening into something that was going to be very visible for the next several days.

“Ms. Kensington,” he said. “You want to tell me what happened p>

I took the napkin from my face. I folded it carefully in my lap.

“My husband arrived unexpectedly,” I said. “We had an argument. It got out of hand. It was a misunderstanding p>

The word tasted wrong in my mouth.

Reeves looked at Jude against the wall.

Jude looked back at Reeves with the calm, composed expression of a man who had already decided how this was going to go. Despite the wire-mesh jaw, the swollen eye, and the blood in his hair from the fire extinguisher, he managed to project the air of a man who was in complete control of his own narrative.

“Detective,” Jude said, his voice slightly impaired but carrying that unhurried British weight even through the damage. “As my wife said. A misunderstanding between husband and wife. We are both very sorry for the inconvenience to your department p>

The word wife landed in the room.

Reeves looked at me.

I did not correct it.

I was aware of Jude’s eyes on the side of my face. I was aware of the way he had whispered it when Reeves first stepped through the door — leaning forward from where he sat against the wall, his voice low enough that only I could hear it.

Think about Aiden.

That was all he had said.

And those two words had shut every door in my chest simultaneously — every instinct toward fight, toward truth, toward standing up and telling Reeves exactly what had happened in this office. Two words that had reduced me to the woman sitting in this chair with a folded napkin in her lap and the wrong words in my mouth.

I was not afraid of Jude Wolfe.

I was afraid of what a man with his resources could do to a custody case involving a six-year-old who was currently living in the Windsor family mansion and carrying the surname of a woman whose marriage was publicly disputed.

So I sat in the chair.

And I used the wrong words.

“It was a misunderstanding,” I said again.

Reeves wrote something in his notebook. He did not look convinced. He was a detective — he had been a detective long enough to know the shape of a statement that was true and the shape of one that was covering something, and the look he gave me said he knew exactly which one he was hearing.

But he also knew that without a complainant, he had nothing to work with.

He closed the notebook.

“We will need statements from both parties before we leave,” he said. “And I would recommend p>

“Of course,” Jude said smoothly.

Reeves looked at Sam.

Sam was looking at me.

“Is there anything you want to add?” Reeves asked her.

“Yes,” Sam said. Her voice was steady. The voice she used when she had decided on something. “It was not a misunderstanding. Mr. Wolfe physically assaulted Ms. Kensington in her own office. I witnessed it. I have the marks on her face as evidence, and I have the security camera footage from this floor which will show p>

“Sam,” I said.

She stopped and looked at me.

“It was a misunderstanding,” I said quietly.

The silence between us was three seconds long and contained fourteen years of friendship and everything that came with it.

Sam’s jaw tightened.

She looked away from me and toward the window and said nothing else.

Reeves glanced between us one more time. Then he nodded at the uniformed officers and moved toward Jude to take his statement.

The moment Reeves’ back was to us, Sam crossed to my chair and crouched down in front of me, her voice dropping to barely a breath.

“Is he threatening you?” she said.

I looked at her.

“No,” I said.

Sam looked at my face. At the split lip and the darkening mark on my cheek and the careful, controlled blankness I was holding with everything I had.

She knew.

I could see it in her eyes — the moment she put it together, the thing Jude had whispered, the reason I had gone still, the name she knew better than any other name in my life because she had been there the night he was born in a hospital in Brooklyn with nobody else in the room.

She knew exactly what he had said to me.

She stood up.

She did not argue. She did not push. She walked to the window and stood with her back to the room and her arms folded across her chest and said nothing, and that silence was the loudest thing in the office.

I looked down at the napkin in my lap.

The blood on it was already drying at the edges.

I thought about Aiden at the Windsor estate, working on his model airplane in the garden, completely unaware that his mother was sitting in her office with a split lip and the wrong words in her mouth.

I thought about what a man like Jude Wolfe could do with a custody filing, a disputed marriage, and enough money to make the court system move however he needed it to move.

I folded the napkin again.

I waited for Reeves to finish.

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