Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 210

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Chapter 210

Chapter 210

Monica was back in the basement.

She knew she was dreaming. Some part of her knew it the way you knew things in dreams, dimly, the knowledge sitting just out of reach while the dream pulled you under anyway. The concrete floor was cold beneath her. The ropes were back on her wrists. The darkness pressed down from all sides.

Then she saw her father.

He was standing in the center of the room the way he had stood when he came down those stairs. Shirt untucked. Hair uncombed. The face she had memorized at the table in the morgue, younger somehow and tired and trying. He was looking at her and he was saying something she could not hear.

She tried to move toward him. Her legs would not work.

Margaret stepped between them.

She was smiling. Not the controlled, practiced smile Monica had watched her use in that basement when she thought she had the upper hand. A different smile. Wide and wrong, the smile of someone who had stopped caring what they looked like. She had the gun in her hand and she was pointing it at Monica’s father and laughing, and the laugh bounced off the concrete walls and multiplied until the whole basement was full of it.

Monica screamed at her to stop.

No sound came out.

She watched the gun go off. Watched her father fall. She screamed again and nothing came out and she tried to run to him and her legs were still not working and she was not getting any closer no matter how hard she moved.

Then Margaret turned.

She turned and she looked at Monica and she raised the gun and she walked toward her, still smiling, still laughing, and Monica could not move and could not make a sound and could not do anything except watch her come.

Margaret’s hand closed around her throat.

Monica felt the cold of it. Felt herself being pushed down, the floor rising to meet her back, felt pressure closing over her face and water suddenly filling her mouth, water filling her lungs, and she could not breathe, could not get air, could not find the surface, and Margaret was above her laughing and the gun was pointing down at her and the water was everywhere and she could not-

Monica’s own scream woke her.

She sat bolt upright in the bed, gasping, her hands flying to her throat before she was fully conscious, pressing against the skin there to check it was clear. Her heart was crashing so hard she could feel it in her teeth. Sweat had soaked through the back of her pajamas. The room was dark and she did not immediately know where she was.

Then her eyes found the lamp on the nightstand. The familiar shape of the wardrobe. The curtains that let in the faint orange light from the garden lamps outside.

Her room. Riverside Manor. She was home.

She was still breathing hard, her hands still at her throat, when the door burst open.

Lucia came through first, already moving toward the bed, already reaching for Monica before she had fully crossed the room. Alexander was right behind her, his hand going immediately to the light switch, flooding the room with warm light, his eyes scanning every corner of the space the way they did now when something startled them in the night.

Lucia sat on the bed and pulled Monica in and Monica let herself be pulled.

“I’ve got you.” Lucia’s arms around her we

sent. “I’ve got you. You’re in your room. You’

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Chapter 210

re safe. I’ve got you.”

Monica pressed her face into her mother’s shoulder and breathed. In. Out. The smell of Lucia’s hair, familiar and specific and nothing like anything in that basement. Her heartbeat starting to slow.

“A dream,” Monica said against her shoulder. Her voice came out scraped raw.

“Tell me,” Lucia said.

Monica pulled back slightly, staying within the circle of her mother’s arms but needing to see her face while she said it. Lucia’s eyes were red from being woken, her hair loose, but she was fully present in the way she always was when one of her children needed her, all of her attention and none of her sleep mattering. “Dad was there,” Monica said. “He was in the basement and he was trying to say something to me but I could t hear him.” Her voice was still unsteady. “And then Margaret was there. She had the gun and she was laughin and she shot him and I couldn’t move and I couldn’t make any sound.” She stopped. “And then she came for me and she was drowning me and I couldn’t get up and she wouldn’t stop and I couldn’t breathe.”

Lucia’s arms tightened.

“It felt real,” Monica said. “The water felt real. My throat still feels wrong.”

“It’s not wrong,” Lucia said. “You’re breathing. You’re here. Your throat is fine.”

Alexander had come to sit on the other side of the bed. He put his hand on Monica’s back, warm and steady, and said nothing because he understood that sometimes presence was the only language that worked. Monica leaned slightly into him without thinking about it. He kept his hand where it was.

They stayed like that for a while, the three of them on the bed, the lamp warm, the room solid and real aroun them.

Eventually Monica’s breathing came all the way back to normal.

“Will it keep happening?” she asked. Her voice was quieter now. Not panicked. Just tired and honest.

“I don’t know,” Lucia said. “Probably yes, for a while. What happened to you was real and it was terrible and your mind is going to need time to process it.”

“I don’t want to go back to sleep,” Monica said. “I don’t want to go back there.”

“You don’t have to.” Lucia moved so Monica could lean fully against her. “We’ll stay here as long as you need. Monica closed her eyes. Not to sleep. Just to feel her mother’s heartbeat under her cheek and her father’s hand on her back and the warm, ordinary realness of her bedroom.

She stayed awake for a long time.

Later, when Monica had finally drifted off between them and the room was quiet, Lucia and Alexander moved carefully off the bed and stood in the hallway with the door open a crack so they could still see her.

Lucia leaned against the wall. The hallway light was very low, just enough to see each other’s faces.

“All of them,” she said. Her voice was barely above a whisper. “Not just Monica. All of them need help processing this. Ria, Lucas, Lena. Everything from before the kidnapping and everything after.”

“I know,” Alexander said.

“I want to set up therapy sessions. Proper ones, with someone who works specifically with trauma. Someone they can go to every week, not just when the bad nights happen.”

“We’ll arrange it tomorrow.” He looked toward Monica’s room. “All four of them. As long as it takes.” Lucia looked at the door. At the small shape visible in the warm light beyond it, her daughter finally asleep. “She held together for six days,” Lucia said quietly. “Six days in that basement and she still stood up to Margaret and she still told her father she forgave him when it mattered most.” Her throat moved. “She is thirteen years old.”

Alexander put his arm around her. Lucia leaned into him and they stood in the hallway in the low light and looked at their daughter sleeping.

Chapter 208

Chapter 208

The building on Carver Street looked abandoned from the outside.

Broken windows. Rust bleeding down the metal walls. Weeds pushing through cracked concrete in the loading area. If Lucia had driven past it on any other night she would not have looked twice.

Lucia crouched behind a police vehicle with Alexander, her hand inside his, gripping so hard that her own fingers had gone numb. She had stopped feeling it twenty minutes ago. Twenty officers spread across the perimeter. FBI agents moving between cars in the dark. Radios crackling in low voices.

“We’ve confirmed movement in the basement level,” someone said into a radio somewhere to her left. “Two adult figures. Possibly more.”

Alexander’s grip tightened around her hand.

She had been looking at the building’s lower windows the whole time, watching the dim light that leaked from somewhere below ground. Somewhere in that darkness her daughters had been sitting for six days. Six days of concrete floors and rope and cold and whatever Margaret had decided to do with that black bag. “Move in,” came the command.

The officers spread outward from the vehicles, moving toward the building from all sides. Lucia watched them reach the entrance, watched them disappear through the doors, heard the shout of commands from somewhere inside.

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