Chapter 139: Couldn’t Finish
The quiet in the Quinn household that afternoon in Zeden wasn’t comforting. It was loud in the wrong way—loud with tension, loud with thoughts, loud with unspoken plans and tightly-wrapped secrets.
Regina paced her bedroom in growing impatience. Her heels clicked across the polished wooden floor as she moved back and forth, arms folded tightly across her chest. The curtains were drawn, but she could still hear the faint noise of the city outside—car horns, people laughing, children playing. All of it grated on her nerves.
She stopped at the edge of her window, her fingers twitching against the cool fabric. Her phone sat on her nightstand like a time bomb. She kept glancing at it, willing it to ring. Any moment now, she thought. Any moment.
She’d been able to quench the fire on the internet about their family by making sure Ivy signed the papers and though she was supposed to be feeling a little bit relieved and happy but those emotions were far from her right now as all she could think of was the important call she was waiting for.
Where was the call?
"It shouldn’t take this long," she muttered to herself, eyes narrowing. "He said he’d do it quickly. Clean and without traces so what was taking so long."
She smirked to herself. Regina Quinn had always been several steps ahead. She always knew where to look, how to dig, who to pay, and how much silence cost. Finding Ruby hadn’t been hard—not once she knew where to start.
"Just a few calls here, a few taps there," she whispered, admiring her own handiwork in her mind. "Florittle wasn’t too big to cover. And once I had that foolish Stefan followed and watched, everything thing else fell in place."
She let out a breathy laugh, more pride than amusement. "Honestly, I’m just too good."
After the airport had refused giving them the cctv footage from the day Ruby arrived there, she’d thought since Stefan had gone there to find Ruby too, that it was only right they followed him so that he’d do the digging himself and just lead them to her.
She turned to the mirror, smoothing the front of her blouse. In her mind, everything was already done. Ruby was gone, Stefan would have no choice but to return to Ivy, and her daughter’s disgrace would be erased.
But her phone still hadn’t rung from the call that’d confirm it all.