He Didn’t Kidnap Me. Not Exactly novel Chapter 311

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15:02 Fri, Sep 4 ) M

He Didn’t Kidnap Me. Not Exactly

Chapter 311

Daisy’s POV)

Volkov had left with Aria.

Now, I felt disrupted.

The whole courtyard had turned into one giant, breathing threat, but somehow, in the middle of all of it, my eyes still found DeLuca’s.

He looked tense. Obviously. Anyone with a pulse would look tense standing in the middle of this. But underneath it, there was something steadier, something that looked less like I don’t know what to do and more like give me one more second to figure out how to fix this. I’d seen that exact expression on him before, usually right before something impossible happened.

I held onto that. It was the only stable thing in the entire courtyard.

Then a voice sliced through my focus.

‘On your knees. Drop the weapon.”

Volkov’s police. The ones who’d turned their guns on their own colleagues without so much as a flicker of hesitation, currently barking that exact order at their own chief, who was standing there looking like his entire understanding of reality had just been rearranged without his permission.

He didn’t drop it. He just stood there, weapon still raised, confusion and fury tangled together across his face.

“I said drop it!” the officer barked again, sharper this time, stepping closer.

Nico’s men had mostly folded already, weapons lowering one by one under the combined pressure of Volkov’s remaining guards and the officers who’d just switched sides. But the chief’s little pocket of resistance was still live, still unresolved, and every second he refused felt like a lit fuse nobody had figured

out how to cut,

I didn’t want it to escalate. One shot, from anyone, and this entire courtyard was going to turn into/something none of us walked away from.

I turned back to DeLuca, some instinct telling me he’d have a plan, some signal, some-

Hands closed around my arms.

I didn’t even get to finish the thought before I was wrenched backward, and DeLuca lunged toward me on reflex, only to freeze mid–step as three guns swung up to track him instead.

He stopped.

I understood why immediately, even through the panic – there was nobody left standing behind him. Fritzo was still restrained. Nico wasn’t on his side. The palice weren’t either, not really, not anymore. For one brutal, exposed second, DeLuca Deluca had absolutely nothing at his back, and every plan he’d built tonight meant nothing against that simple fact.

It didn’t look permanent That helplessness in his eyes wasn’t the kind that stayed. But it was real, right now, in this exact second, and I hated every part of wat:fung it happen to him.

Let go of me: I twisted tard against the grip on my arms, and the man carrying my unconscious mother kept pace hesite us with so much as a gray of

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15:02 Fri, Sep

Chapter 311

effort, like she weighed nothing at all.

Then the gates opened.

Not the main gate Volkov had vanished through a smaller one, set into the base of a tall stone wall on the far side of the courtyard – and out of it came

a slow, deliberate procession.

Dozens of them. Women first, draped head to toe in heavy black robes and veils, moving in unison with a kind of practiced, unhurried reverence. Men followed behind, faces bare but expressions carefully composed into the same solemn stillness, incense trailing thin gray smoke behind the whole group as

they walked.

–

For one strange, suspended moment, the entire courtyard seemed to hold its breath around them not out of fear, but something closer to ritual, like even

chaos knew to make room for whatever this was.

It looked sacred..

It looked, for exactly as long as it took the front row to lift their heads and register the police uniforms scattered across the courtyard, like something hol

had wandered into the wrong scene.

Then it wasn’t sacred at all.

Hands vanished into robes. Weapons emerged. The serene, unbothered composure on every face cracked apart in an instant, replaced by something far more familiar; the same violent, practiced readiness I’d already seen from every other person Volkov commanded tonight.

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