Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 163

Chapter 163

KISAREL.

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I didn’t realize I’d said it out loud until her face confirmed it.

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“He ran.” She nodded slowly, almost gently, as if grateful I’d carried the weight of the word for her. “Strangers pulled me out of the rubble an hour later. Half my back was gone. I spent four months in a hospital under a name nobody would ever have dreamt of checking. I couldn’t speak for the first six weeks, and do you know what I did with every single day of it?” Her eyes were streaming now, but somehow, her voice still remained calm. “I waited. I lay on my burns, and I waited for him to find me. He had money coming, he had that mind, he had loved me – and I knew that he was tearing the state apart looking.”

She wiped her face with the flat of her hand in one rough motion, like she was furious at it. “He never came. He held the funeral in three weeks. They buried four caskets. He bought me a stone, Kiss. Black granite. He decided I was dead because my body was never found and it was ruled that I had been burnt to ashes by the fire – he believed their ruling and let me die easily. Just like that.” She sighed a long, harsh sigh.

“I attended my own funeral fully disguised, because those men were out there and could never know I survived. I watched him not look for me. That’s where I made the promise on my mother’s grave. That someday he would stand exactly where I was standing – watching everything he loved burn because of a choice he made – and that he would have to live afterward. The way I have lived.”

The whole place went very quiet. It was almost as if she was giving me enough time to digest her sad story.

I did.

I actually did. And I felt so sorry for her.

But beyond the sympathy, I was dying to know what my role was in all this. Because I still didn’t see myself anywhere near all that’s happened to her.

“I’m sorry.” The words came out of me as a whisper, and I meant every bit of it – tied to her chair, terrified for my child, I meant it. “What happened to you – Vanessa, I am so sorry. But I don’t understand what it has to do with me. I’ve never touched your life. Whoever this man is, I don’t know him – I’ve never-”

She looked at me for a moment I’d consider too long.

Then she smiled – the saddest smile I have ever seen on a human face – and reached out and took the lapel of the jacket between her thumb and two fingers. The stranger’s jacket.

“Six years ago,” she continued softly, “I was finally ready. Five years of staying dead, scraping money no one would trace, finding men no one could ever trace or follow. On a certain street, on a night I would have considered a blessed one… Ten seconds to finally getting the justice my family deserved.” Her thumb moved over the fabric, back and forth, with extra calmness. “And a girl stepped out of the dark and put herself in front of my ten seconds. A girl who didn’t even know him.” Her voice went almost wondering.

My heart began an unhealthy race. It felt like it was trying to rip out of my chest.

No.

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10:31 Sat, Jul 25

Chapter 163

No.

God, please.

She had certainly come for revenge.

That whole night was a blur.

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The assassin’s face was obscured, so I didn’t get a clear view of who it was. And neither did I know or see the face of the man whom I had pushed out of the way.

I had no idea that the one good thing I was trying to do was going to end up entangling me in a messy web

like this one.

I swallowed hard.

“No.” The word left me without my permission. The room had begun to tilt. “No. Look. I can explain. I didn’t know… I never. Oh, God.”

I panicked so hard my stomach rumbled.

“You bled on that pavement for a total stranger, Kisarel Harry. And you kept his jacket like a fucking relic. And you never once knew whose life you bought with your own blood.”

“I… I swear I didn’t…”

“The man you saved that night,” she said, and leaned in close enough that I could see myself drowning in her eyes, and her voice was gentle, and the gentleness was the cruelest thing that has ever been done to me. “Did you ever wonder who he was? Ever tried to find out who the fuck he was?”

She let out a wry smile. “No. You never did.” Then she held my gaze. “But I’ll be glad to tell you for free who he

was.”

Something in me told me I wasn’t ready for this reveal. I felt it deep in my bones that this reveal was going to tear my world apart.

Why? Why did it feel that way?

“No. Please. Don’t.” I said, shaking my head as my vision blurred with more tears.

“The stranger who never came looking for you. The man I have spent eleven years arranging to ruin.”

“Don’t. Please-”

“His name is Oceans Stark.”

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