Chapter 51
Chapter 51:
Callum and Declan arrived in Thornfield on a Tuesday, and the city received them the way a body receives a foreign object: with rejection.
It began at the airport. The car service Callum had pre-arranged — a black sedan, the same model he used in Halcombe, booked through a luxury fleet he’d used a hundred times — was cancelled. No explanation. No alternative. Just a text notification: “Your reservation has been cancelled by the provider.” Callum tried two other services.
Both declined.
By the third refusal, the pattern was clear: this wasn’t logistics. This was infrastructure.
Thornfield’s high society operated like a membrane: permeable to those it recognized, impervious to those it didn’t.
And the Ashworth-Blackwell alliance had, in the space of a single phone call from Harold, redefined Callum and Declan from “visiting dignitaries” to “unwelcome.” Restaurant reservations evaporated. Hotel concierges developed sudden amnesia about available rooms.
Business contacts who had been eager to connect went silent. The two most powerful men in Halcombe were discovering what it felt like to be nobody in a city that wasn’t theirs.
Callum adapted. He always adapted — it was what made him Callum. He rented an apartment through a third-party intermediary.
Established a working base.
Called Lara from a new number.
The call connected. Rang twice. Then: the distinctive three-tone signal of a number being blocked. He tried again with a different number. Same result. The Ashworth phone system wasn’t just screening — it was learning.
Each new number was flagged, identified, and blocked before the second ring, with the automated efficiency of a system designed by someone who understood that persistence was Callum’s defining trait and had engineered defenses accordingly.
He tried Harold. Through Miriam, he’d obtained the family number — a private line that Harold used for business and family and very little else.
“Harold, this is Callum. I want to p>
Click. The line went dead mid-sentence. Not voicemail. Not a polite redirect.
A severance — clean, immediate, the telephonic equivalent of a door being slammed.
Lᴀtеst chαptєrs 𝑖n g𝓪lнovєls.со𝓂
Declan tried next. Same number. Same result. The same decisive click, delivered with the same administrative finality, as if Harold Ashworth had programmed the phone to recognize their voices and disconnect on the first syllable.
“We go to the house,” Declan said.
They drove to the Ashworth estate. The estate was everything Privet Lane was not: old, sprawling, surrounded by stone walls that predated electricity, with a gate that had been designed in an era when gates were meant to keep out armies rather than visitors.
Callum and Declan parked across the road and waited.
They waited through the morning. Through lunch, which they didn’t eat. Through the long, golden afternoon that Thornfield wore like a garment — different from Halcombe’s gray elegance, warmer, more ancient, with a light that turned the sandstone buildings the color of bread crust and made everything look like it had been there forever.
They waited because waiting was all they had left. The calls were blocked. The society was closed. The gates were shut. Miriam’s message had been sent, and Lara had agreed to let them attend the wedding, but “the wedding” was ten days away, and ten days in Thornfield, surrounded by a city that had been instructed to ignore them, felt like ten years in a waiting room with no magazines.
At four in the afternoon, a black Rolls-Royce turned onto the estate road.
Callum saw the silhouette first. Through the tinted rear window — partially lowered, because the afternoon was warm — Lara’s profile appeared like a photograph being developed: the line of her jaw, the curve of her neck, the dark hair that caught the Thornfield light and held it.
Declan didn’t think. Thinking was not, and had never been, his response to the sight of Lara. He floored the accelerator and swung his car across the Rolls-Royce’s path with the precision of a man who had spent fifteen years threading machines through gaps that didn’t exist.
The Rolls-Royce stopped.
Declan’s car stopped. Two vehicles, nose to nose, in the middle of a residential road in Thornfield, producing the kind of scene that would be discussed at dinner parties for weeks.
“Lala, get out.” Callum was at the window before the Rolls-Royce’s engine had finished settling. His knuckles rapped the glass — gently, but with urgency. “We need to talk. Please p>
Inside the car, Lara’s first reaction was not to look at Callum. It was to look at Edmund.
She found his face — the amber eyes, the composed mouth — and searched it for jealousy, for anger, for the territorial fury she’d seen in other men when their space was invaded. What she found instead was something she was learning to recognize as distinctly Edmund: stillness. The kind of stillness that contained motion, the way a river contains current. He was not passive. He was choosing.