Hero by Michael Grant

Author:Michael Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 23

Problems at Home

SAM TEMPLE HAD never been the sort of person to spy on others. He was certainly not the sort of person who would spy on his wife. What he had with Astrid was a relationship that had already endured more stress than a hundred normal marriages. They weren’t just solid as a couple; they were chiseled out of granite.

And yet . . .

Sam was also not overly neat or particularly obsessed with keeping a clean kitchen, so he was not the sort of person to reorganize the dishwasher. But the thing was, he had a coffee cup he’d left out on the balcony for, oh, maybe a week, and it had grown a ring of something green and scummy. He wanted to get it cleaned before Astrid noticed it because Astrid was overly neat and quite obsessed with keeping a clean kitchen.

But the dishwasher was almost completely full. In order to wedge his cup in there he had to move a few things around and . . . and then he saw the glass. It had clearly been used for orange juice. But clinging to the bottom and sides of the glass, along with the innocent pulp, were grains of something gray and gritty.

Sam pulled the orange-juice glass out and looked at it from every angle. Then he ran his finger around the inside and worked the grit between his thumb and forefinger.

“Oh, Astrid,” Sam whispered. “No, no, no, sweetheart.”

Astrid was at a spin class or Pilates or whatever, he could never recall. The world was falling apart, but the exercise classes must never stop; this was LA, after all. He glanced at the clock on the microwave, which displayed the proper time because: Astrid. He had a solid half hour, minimum.

It took just five minutes to locate the FedEx envelope, still containing a baggie partly filled with powdered rock.

Sam sat on the edge of their bed and hung his head, overwhelmed by a tidal wave of memory, and with those memories came dread. Dread of a repeat. Dread of more and more and more. He felt sick inside. He wanted to cry.

He wanted a drink.

But this wasn’t about him, or his feelings; it was about Astrid. There was no point in asking why she had done it, and no point in asking where the powder had come from. Two women who loved him in different ways were doing their best to protect him. He couldn’t get angry over the deception; they’d done it because they were worried about him.

They think I’ll crack. They think I’ll drink.

And Sam knew that Astrid did not trust him to be able to stop Drake. Which was fair enough because he knew he couldn’t stop Drake. He’d had many battles with Whip Hand, back when Sam could still fire a killing beam of light capable of cutting through stone. He’d killed Drake, or so Sam had once thought. And when they got word that Drake was still alive, Sam had done .

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