Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 162

Chapter 101

KISAREL

Twoke up rold

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The hotel was never cold. The hotel was stuffy and damp and smelled of off carettes and I had fallen we insti

My body reached for that bated stuffiness now the way you reach for a railing that set there

The second wrong thing was the light. It came through gaps – thin blades of grey shipping beer lead window, moving with the branches outside. The hotel had curtains the color of weak tea. This was ter the ho

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

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 not 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 here,

and I remembered being so tired and so grateful that Fd cried into her look at you, I’m taking you somewhere better 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 personal 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 sweet 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 chest 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 cafe-and Nessa had known, and this was protection, clumsy terrifying protection, and any minute she would come through that door and untie me and explain

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Except

Except a protector doesn’t the your hands behind a chair Except the hors at my webs by someone with all the time in the world.

Except the room-and I made myself to really look at the room now.

pistični, uppfried knots tied

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 die corners. Thas sent a place that 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 staked in a buck, a 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.

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

“Please,” I said out loud, to no one, 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 my 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. It 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 way

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 violent 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.

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“Nessa My voice cracked. “Nessa, thank God-listen, something’s happened, someone for me hands-

I know, sweetheart. She set the table down and unfolded its legs with a lile metade soap 1 did I’m sorry about th ropes. Truly, I made them as foose 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 your pregnant, and you’d had a sedative.” She was unpacking the bag as she spoke-a flask, a wrapped sandwich aban arranging them on the little table with the same care she’d arranged food in my hotel room, and the andrines of the most terrifying thing I had ever watched. “Mild, before you spiral. Perfectly safe at this stage, I cheeyed the dosage I wouldn’t hurt the baby, Kiss. That’s not- She paused, some private consideration crossing her face. The lady’s not di 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-‘s okay. It’s okay Jur 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 She looked at me with those warm brown eyes. “You told me everything, do you remember? The affair. The firing. The engagement. The hotel” Her 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.”

1 stared at her in shock and confusion.

Six years ago? A street?

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 mine. 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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