Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 167

Chapter 167

KISAREL.

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She took the phone away, and the reality of the room came choking me again. I sat there, holding onto the memory of his voice as it kept moving through me like blood that had forgotten its way and just remembered.

He was coming.

He was surely coming.

Oceans Stark doesn’t say things he didn’t mean.

I had to hold onto that faith, even though I had no reason to believe he could find a place I couldn’t even describe.

But he’d said it in that assuring voice of his, and I believed him. I had to.

I just had to find a way to stay alive until he found me.

I had spent the entire morning begging. I wasn’t going to spend the afternoon begging. If he was coming, then every minute mattered, and more minutes could be bought.

I watched Vanessa move around the space. She’d gone quiet since the call – the kind of quiet I could call ‘the working quiet!

She was working on something.

She checked her watch every now and then.

“You were kind to me,” I began.

She didn’t even look up. “Don’t even start.”

“I’m not starting anything, Nessa. I’m telling you what I know.” I kept my voice steady, which cost me everything I had left. “The hospital, the tea, the way you held my hand when the doctor said the word ‘pregnant. Nobody performs that well, Vanessa, not for a month. Somewhere in the middle of using me, you liked me. That part was real. You can’t tell me otherwise.”

She stopped moving for a moment.

She was standing over a crate near the far wall with her back to me, and I watched her shoulders slacken a little- a small tightening through the coat, there and gone.

“Being real doesn’t matter,” she said. “My mother was real. The account still has to balance.”

“Then balance it with him.” I leaned forward as far as the ropes allowed, and the chair creaked under me. “I was fourteen when your world burned. I wasn’t even in it. He’s offering you everything. His money, his company – I heard him say it, Vanessa. Just don’t take his life. Don’t take a life. Enough of the blood.”

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15:01 Fri, Aug 7

Trapped By My Ruthless Boss

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She turned around at last, and her face was calm again, which made me twice as uncomfortable as her anger did. “You want me to take the money he made from the blood of my family?” She laughed, looking at me incredulously. “Everything else he built after that night you saved him stands on your blood.” She crossed to the little table and began clearing it – the flask, the wrapped sandwich, the banana she had arranged so carefully hours ago – packing each item back into the bag with the tidiness of a woman who was closing up a picnic that had ended well. “I explained this already. You’re not being punished for who you are. You’re being punished for what you did.”

“For saving a life?” I asked.

“For saving that life.”

“Your mother kept a list of names,” I said, and her hands went still on the bag. “You told me she was waiting to hold her granddaughter before she chose. That’s who she was, Vanessa. A woman who set a place at her table for a boy who hadn’t earned it yet, and kept baby names in a drawer.” My voice cracked, and I let it. “I’m carrying a child. You held my hand when I found out. You checked the sedative dosage twice so you wouldn’t hurt it. So look at me and tell me your mother’s daughter burns a pregnant woman alive and calls it balancing

an account.”

The silence went on so long I could hear my own pulse.

“You think I haven’t done that math.” Her voice came out low and terribly even. “You think I haven’t sat with it every night since the doctor’s office. I told you, Kiss. Liking you has been the single most inconvenient thing that has happened to me in eleven years.” She zipped the bag shut. “But my sister was fourteen. She almost made it to the trees. She didn’t deserve the fate that befell her. Nobody deserves such a fate.”

“So stop it for yourself.” I was crying now, and I didn’t fight it. “You said living is the punishment. Then live, Vanessa. Walk out of here, let him spend the rest of his life knowing you’re out there, knowing what he owes and never being able to pay it. That’s worse than anything you can do with a fire. How would you walk away knowing you killed an innocent child?”

An expression moved through her face when I said that last part.

And that was when I finally understood what I was looking at, because she smiled at me, soft and almost grateful, almost as if I had arrived late at a conclusion she reached long ago.

“Who said I’m walking out?”

The room went cold around me.

“Vanessa-”

“I told him living is the punishment.” She picked up the metal can from behind the crate, and the sound of it – the slosh of liquid against tin – reached me, followed by the smell. “His punishment. Not mine. I’ve done my eleven years, Kiss. I’ve lived in the ash the whole time. I’m not staying for the afterward.” She unscrewed the cap without hurry. “He arrives, and he finds the fire, and this time there’s no doorway to run from and no math to do. This time he stands outside and watches, and then he lives. That’s the whole design. We burn together. It was never complicated.”

“Please.” The word tore out of me, sounding useless, as she began to pour. “Vanessa, please, the baby-

“I know.” And her voice was gentle. It stayed gentle the entire time, gentler than anyone had ever spoken to

15:01 Fri, Aug 7

Trapped By My Ruthless Boss

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me in that house I grew up in, while the sharp stink of petrol climbed the walls and soaked into the boards under my chair. “I’m sorry it’s you. I have been sorry since the coffee shop. You’re the only person in eleven years who made being dead feel like a waste.”

She walked the perimeter as she spoke, tilting the can with care, missing nothing – the boarded window, the door frame, the base of every wall. “If it helps, my mother would have loved you. She loved and collected people like you. Kind ones. Blind ones.”

She set the empty can down by the door and took the matchbook out of her coat pocket. I pulled against the ropes until my wrists burned, screaming incoherent words.

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