Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 161

Chapter 161

Chapter 161

KISAREL.

I woke up cold.

The hotel was never cold. The hotel was stuffy and damp and smelled of old cigarettes, and I had fallen asleep hatin My body reached for that hated stuffiness now the way you reach for a railing that isn’t there.

The second wrong thing was the light. It came through gaps – thin blades of grey slipping between boards nailed ov window, moving with the branches outside. The hotel had curtains the color of weak tea. This was not the hotel.

I tried to sit up, and that was when I found the third wrong thing, because my arms didn’t come with me.

My wrists were tied behind the chair I was sitting in.

For a long moment I did nothing at all. I sat very still in the grey-striped light, my heart beginning to slam.

I schooled myself to calm down and think.

I made myself move through it piece by piece, because panic was a luxury and I was five weeks pregnant and I could afford luxuries.

And then, gradually, it all came flooding… The memories of how I ended up here.

The car. I remembered the car. Nessa’s arm around me in the hotel corridor, her voice low and warm – ‘you can’t stay look at you, I’m taking you somewhere better’ – and I remembered being so tired and so grateful that I’d cried into her shoulder in the lift.

I remembered her calling someone and saying “you can go in.” But I didn’t pay any attention to that because her person life wasn’t my business to nose in. So, I never asked her who was going into where.

I remembered the motorway lights sliding over the windscreen. I remembered her handing me the thermos, the tea sw and gingery, for my stomach, and asking me to drink it all.

I remembered drinking all of it, because she had made it for me, and because she was the only person left who made anything for me.

And then I remembered nothing.

We left so hurriedly that I left my phone behind.

The tea. The understanding arrived slowly and painfully, and I sat with it in that cold room and felt something in my che begin to break, though it had nothing to do with fear yet.

The tea.

She had made me the tea.

No. There would be an explanation. There was always – my mind scrambled for it even as the ropes held my wrists, generous explanation after generous explanation, each one dying faster than the last.

We were attacked on the road, and she hid me here for safety…

–

Someone was after me – the anonymous texts, the poisoning, the car outside the café – and Nessa had known, and this was protection, clumsy terrifying protection, and any ininute she would come through that door and untie me and explain

Except…

Except a protector doesn’t tie your hands behind a chair. Except the knots at my wrists were patient, unhurried knots, tied by someone with all the time in the world.

Except the room – and I made myself to really look at the room now…

It was an old farmhouse room, or something like one-bare boards. A single bulb hanging dead from the ceiling. The window was boarded carefully without a single hurry, properly screwed down at the corners. This wasn’t a place that had just been lying around. This was a deliberate place.

In the corner stood a camp bed with folded blankets, a crate of bottled water, tinned food stacked in rows, a bucket, a first- aid box. Supplies. Weeks of supplies.

Nobody boards a window in advance of an emergency Nobody stocks a deserted house with tinned food for a rescue.

This room had been waiting for me.

Successfully unlocked!

The cold that went through me then had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature, and my hands – my tied, useless hands strained on pure instinct toward my stomach and couldn’t reach it, and that was the moment the fear stopped

–

Chapter 161

being a thing I was managing and became a thing that had me by the throat.

The baby.

Whatever had been in that tea had gone into me, and into-

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“Please,” I said out loud, to hoone, to God, to the taste of ginger still ghosting at the back of my mouth. “Please, please, please.”

And that was when I noticed the fourth wrong thing. The one rny mind had been stepping around since I woke, the way you step around a hole in the dark.

I was wearing the jacket.

His jacket.

The stranger’s jacket – from six years ago that I had allowed myself to keep from the worst and bravest night of my life. had been in my bag at the hotel, folded under my clothes where it’s always been.

Someone had taken it out and settled it onto my shoulders while I was unconscious, and buttoned the top button, the w you dress a child.

Oh, God. What kind of sick joke was this?

The door suddenly opened.

“Oh, good. You’re awake.”

I knew that voice. It was Nessa.

My heart gave a loud thud.

She came in with a folding table under one arm and a paper bag in her hand. The relief that went through me was so viol and so stupid that tears came before my words even did.

–

Because she looked exactly like herself, the soft coat, the warm eyes, the little frown of concern – she looked like every version of her that had ever knocked on my door with food, and for two full seconds every generous explanation came roaring back from the dead.

“Nessa.” My voice cracked. “Nessa, thank God – listen, something’s happened, someone tied me – you have to help me, my hands-”

“I know, sweetheart.” She set the table down and unfolded its legs with a little metallic snap. “I did that. I’m sorry about th ropes. Truly. I made them as loose as I safely could.”

The room went very quiet.

“You” The word came apart in my mouth. “What?” I whispered, my brows narrowed.

“You would have tried to walk out of here the moment you woke, and it’s miles of nothing in every direction, and you’re pregnant, and you’d had a sedative.” She was unpacking the bag as she spoke – a flask, a wrapped sandwich, a banana arranging them on the little table with the same care she’d arranged food in my hotel room, and the ordinariness, of it was the most terrifying thing I had ever watched. “Mild, before you spiral. Perfectly safe at this stage, I checked the dosage twice. I wouldn’t hurt the baby, Kiss. That’s not-” She paused, some private consideration crossing her face. “The baby’s not the point.”

“Nessa.” I was shaking now, all of me, and I made my voice work anyway, because someone in this room had to still be the person I thought they were. “Whatever this is – whatever’s happened, whatever trouble you’re in – it’s okay. It’s okay. Just untie me, and we’ll fix it. It’s me. It’s me. You’ve been the only one – all these weeks, you’ve been the only person who-

“Who stayed. I know.” She pulled a second chair from against the wall, set it close in front of me, and lowered herself into it

She looked at me with those warm brown eyes. “You told me everything, do you remember? The affair. The firing. The engagement. The hotel.” Hei voice stayed gentle. “All those weeks, and you never once asked me a single question about myself. Where I came from. Who my people were. What I wanted.” She tilted her head. “You were so hungry for someone to be kind to you, Kiss, that you never once checked whether the kindness had a bottom.”

Each word went in like a needle finding a nerve, because they were true, and she said them without cruelty or malice in her

voice.

“Why?” My words came out choked. “Nessa. I loved you. You were my – why?”

She reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “Because of a man,” she said softly. “It’s always a man, in the end. Isn’t it?” She sat back. “And because six years ago, on a street you should never have been standing on, you meddled in something that was none of your business – and saved the life of the one person on this earth who deserved to die.”

I stared at her in shock and confusion.

Chapter 161

Six years ago? A street?

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There was only one street – the darkness, the gunshot, the stranger’s arms, the wet heat spreading through my dress – but it belonged to me, it was nine, I had never spoken it aloud to a living soul except Gerald and Elgin, and Gerald was dead

She could not know about it. There was no way in the world this woman could know about the shooting.

“I don’t-” My skin went cold inside the jacket, and I didn’t know why. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this-” “I know you don’t.” She smoothed her coat over her knees, a perfect definition of a woman with all the time she had ever needed. “We have days, sweetheart. And I’m going to explain all of it – every text, every visit, every accident that wasn’t one You’ve earned the whole story. You’re the only person in eleven years I’ve been sorry about.” She stood, and picked up the flask, unscrewed the cap, and the steam that rose from it smelled of ginger. “But we should start with names, since you never really asked.”

She poured the tea into the cap, set it on the little table in front of me, and smiled at me with the face of my only friend.

“Nessa was never my name.”

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