He Didn’t Kidnap Me. Not Exactly novel Chapter 314

He Didn’t Kidnap Me. Not Exactly

Chapter 314

was heavier than it had any right to be. Genuinely, offensively heavy, and I found myself wondering, in the middle of an active warzone, exactly what kind of arm day these men were doing to lug these things around casually. I’d have biceps for days on this routine. Mildly tempting, under vastly different

circumstances.

“Can you use that?” my mother asked.

Which was, somehow, not the question I expected from the woman I’d spent my entire life watching manage a chronic illness and burnt/toast, not firearms

‘How hard can it be?” I said, with a shrug and a smile that even 1 recognized as deeply unconvincing.

Voices echoed down the hallway.

Two men appeared, limping, clearly injured, and clearly not injured enough to stop coming toward us. One dragged a leg thay looked completely destroyed, and somehow that didn’t slow him down even slightly, determination carved into his face like the damage was just a minor scheduling delay.

“Shoot them, my mother said.

I raised the gun. My hand shook so badly the barrel wobbled in three different directions at once.

The men closed in.

One reached for a weapon on the ground, and I understood, with total clarity, that this was the exact moment I failed to do the one thing that might save us

both.

A hand snatched the gun from mine.

A shot rang out, and the reaching man dropped.

I turned, stunned, to find my mother already aiming at the second one

I panicked.

My mother did not.

–

and then the gun clicked, empty, out of bullets.

1-

She flung the gun instead, an actual full–body throw, like her arm had been quietly training for the Olympics my entire childhood without telling me, and it snapped into the man’s leg hard enough to drop him instantly. She crossed the distance without a flicker of hesitation and kicked, once, directly into his throat, and he went down and simply didn’t move again.

She exhaled, calm, like she’d just finished a light jog.

I stared at her.

WHAT?!

I did not get long to process the fact that my mother might have been a secret assassin this entire time, because three more men peeled ant of what I’d genuinely believed was solid wall.

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Chapter 314

Turns out it was a gap. A whole hidden little side passage I hadn’t clocked at all, which felt like exactly the kind of detail this building would keep fiore e

out of hatred.

On of them carried a sledgehammer, which felt deeply unnecessary and also extremely effective as a way to make me want to be anywhere else on the planet. The other two looked like they were patting themselves down for weapons, which was somehow worse, because a man built like a vending machine doesn’t actually need a weapon to ruin your entire evening.

Whatever my mother had just pulled off with the throwing–a–gun–like–an–Olympic–javelin thing, I did not think it was going to scale to three of these guys at once. We both stumbled backward, and my brain offered absolutely nothing useful, which had become something of a running theme tonight.

Then a fourth man appeared.

My stomach dropped even further, because at this point in the evening, new men appearing from nowhere had a strict track record of meaning bad new

The three of them spun on him instead.

It took me a full second to catch up to what I was looking at, because the fourth man wasn’t a fourth threat.

It was DeLuca.

And then it was DeLuca doing things to those three men that I genuinely did not have the vocabulary for.

He caught the first swing clean, twisted the man’s own arm against him, and drove a knee straight up into his face hard enough that the guy simply stopped being vertical. The second one threw a punch that DeLuca ducked so smoothly it looked choreographed, and then DeLuca’s fist found his throat, folding him instantly into a wheezing heap. He grabbed that same man and used the momentum to redirect the third guy’s punch straight into his own friend’s face – before finishing the last one off with a single, decisive an actual person, used as a shield, which felt like it should be illegal in several countries, and yet

hit

three of them down. Maybe four seconds, tops.

I would like it noted, for the record, that DeLuca was not wearing a shirt at this point in the evening, and my brain, mid–warzone, mid–terror, still found several idle seconds to file that information under extremely relevant, come back to this later.

Silence dropped over the hallway.

DeLuca turned toward us.

For one full second 1 just stood there, staring, my brain doing the same slow–motion thing it always did whenever he showed up looking exactly like the answer to a problem I hadn’t finished panicking about yet.

Then relief crashed through me so hard I forgot I had legs for a second, and I was already moving, closing the distance and throwing myself directly into his

arms.

He caught me like he’d been expecting it. Which, honestly, at this point, he probably had.

I held on tight, my whole body finally allowed to stop bracing for the next disaster, at least for these few seconds, and when I pulled back to look at his face, he was smiling Gently Like none of the last ten minutes had happened to either of us.

Mina Be he said.

<

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He Didn’t Kidnap Me. Not Exactly

Chapter 315

Tusy’s POV)

“Yes.”

I said it into his shoulder, wholehearted, no hesitation anywhere in it, and hugged him tighter, like proximity alone could make up for every hour I’d spent tonight not knowing if he was even alive.

“I missed you too, my Daisy.”

I felt it before I fully processed the words – the vibration of his voice against my ear, low and warm, and then the actual sentence caught up to my brain a half–second later and did something catastrophic to my heart rate. In the middle of an active warzone. With gunfire still echoing somewhere behind us. ty body had genuinely selected this exact moment to blush.

I felt safe anyway. Stupidly, thoroughly safe, standing there in his arms while the entire building around us tried to fall apart.

“I think we can hug later, Daisy,” my mother said. “We should be moving now.”

Right. Fair. Extremely fair, actually, given the circumstances.

‘You can hug your handsome hunk later, she added, which snapped something else into focus entirely – I hadn’t actually introduced them yet.

Right. I gestured between them. “Mother, this is Deluca.”

“Okay,” she said, studying him. “Your friend?”

Fopened my mouth. “Um. He’s my-”

I stalled out completely, and DeLuca stepped in smoothly, closing the gap I’d left hanging.

“Boyfriend,” he said, extending a hand to her. Nice to meet you, ma’am.”

I stood there frozen, and I genuinely couldn’t tell you why, because this wasn’t new information. I already knew this. He already knew this. But hearing it said out loud, to my actual mother, in his actual voice, hit some entirely different part of my brain than just quietly knowing it ever had. DeLuca is my boyfriend. I knew that. I’d known it for a while now. And somehow I was standing here relearning it from scratch anyway.

I surfaced from that spiral just in time to catch the tail end of whatever conversation had apparently been happening without me.

-yes, she’s one hell of a character, DeLuca was saying, “but that’s what makes her special.”

I stared at him. They’d had an entire exchange while I was busy having an emotional crisis over one word.

He caught my expression and gave me the smallest smile, resting a hand briefly on my shoulder.

“Now is not the time for questions.

Correct Dreply correct, actually, unce I had approximately four questions already lined up and ready to go.

We need to nuve, he sand, and started walking, one band finding mine while I reached back for my mother’s with the other. We moved as a group, harried

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Chapter 315

but steady, gunfire still cracking somewhere in the distance behind us.

brain, predictably, refused to stay quiet. It kept circling back- the way he’d finished my sentence without hesitation, the way my mother had gone from fragile to lethal in about four seconds flat back in that hallway. Both things sat there, demanding attention I didn’t have room to give them right now.

Later. Both of those were for later.

“What’s the plan?” I asked instead, as we rounded a corner. ‘How do we get past Volkov’s men? There are so many of them.”

“The plan is to get you both somewhere safe, DeLuca said. “Far from here. Then I come back and finish this with Volkov. As for his numbers – they’re

already falling.

“How?” I pressed. “How is that even possible?”

“Two rival empires finally colliding in a war this size doesn’t stay quiet,” he said, steady, unhurried, like he was reciting something he’d already planned three moves past this conversation. “The whole city feels something like this happen. Which means outside police, forces that answer to no one currently working for Volkov, are already moving in. More of them arrive every minute. His corrupted officers can’t cover for him against numbers that size.”

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