Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 169

Trapped By My Ruthless Boss

Chapter 169

OCEANS

“Sir.” Reeves’ voice came through the speakers, and something in it made my foot ease off the accelerator. “We have it. A groundskeeper called in smoke access on a private property two miles off the county road. Abandoned farmhouse, boarded windows, single structure. A woman matching the description bought supplies at a station four miles out this morning. She paid cash and looked directly into the camera”

Elgin lurched forward in his seat. “That’s it. That’s her. Oceans, drive-

“Wait,” I said, the wheels in my head already turning.

I stared at the road with my hands on the wheel and the engine idling beneath me, and the thing that had been scratching at the back of my skull for the past minute finally stood up and showed itself.

“She looked into the camera,” I said.

“Sir?”

“Eleven years, Reeves. Eleven years without leaving one fingerprint anywhere on this earth. She came even closer to us for a whole month, and we never found a thread. She erased herself from a hospital, from a funeral, from every database you ever tried to hack into.” My jaw was so tight the words came out flat. “And today she pays cash under a camera and lets a groundskeeper see things. Today, of all days.”

The car went very quiet.

Elgin turned to me slowly, and I watched him arrive where I already stood. “She wants you to find her.”

“She’s not hiding from us.” I could hear my own pulse. “She never was. The two hours weren’t a deadline. They were an invitation.” My hands flexed on the wheel. “She wants me to find that house, Elgin. Which means whatever is waiting inside it is the whole point. It’s the thing she built eleven years for.”

“Then it’s a trap-”

“Of course it’s a trap.” I put the car in gear. “She told me herself. ‘I’m going to watch. That’s the plan. She doesn’t want me dead, she wants me standing there as an audience to whatever show she was about to put up.”

“Oceans-”

“There’s a pregnant woman in that house with her.” I pulled onto the road and buried the accelerator. “Knowing it’s a trap changes nothing. It only tells me how fast I need to be.”

The engine screamed through the gears. Fields tore past the windows in long green smears, and Elgin gripped the door with both hands and said nothing more, because there was nothing more to say. Reeves stayed on the line, feeding me turns.

“Authorities are inbound, sir. Five minutes behind you, maybe less. Fire response is further out – the sector’s rural, nearest station is-”

“How far am I?”

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15:01 Fri, Aug 7

Trapped By My Ruthless Boss

“Four minutes.”

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Four minutes. Vanessa had promised two hours, and I had spent nearly all of them chasing a ghost, while she sat in that house with my whole world tied to a chair, a pole or whatever the fuck caught her fancy, waiting for the guest of honor to arrive.

I took the turn onto the county road hard enough that the back end stepped out, corrected, and kept going.

“Oceans.” Elgin’s voice sounded strange.

I followed his eyes through the windscreen.

The treeline stood dark green against the grey sky maybe a mile ahead, and above it, leaning with the wind, rose a column of black smoke.

Everything in my body stopped working for one full second.

I had seen smoke like that before. Heck, I had stood inside the making of it with my lungs full of it and a girl screaming behind me. For eleven years, I had seen the same smoke over and over again every time I closed

my eyes.

Some part of me had always known I would see it once more before the day ended. She had promised me that. But seeing it in real time stole the air from my lungs.

History was repeating itself, with me on the ugly side of the table.

“No,” Elgin whispered. “No, no, no—”

“Reeves.” My voice came out of some cold place beneath the panic. “Fire response. Now. Everything they have.”

“Already called, sir. Six minutes out.”

Fuck.

Six minutes. Fires don’t negotiate with six minutes.

I stopped feeling the car. The last half mile happened somewhere outside of me – the private track, the rutted dirt hammering the suspension, branches raking the sides – and then the trees opened, and the farmhouse stood in the clearing ahead, and it was burning… Not ‘beginning to burn. It was fucking ‘burning!

Fire stood in every boarded window and moved along the roofline like something that was alive, and the sound of it reached through the car’s sealed windows, a deep and steady roaring I remembered in my bones.

I was out of the car before it fully stopped.

The heat met me thirty feet from the porch, a solid wall of it, and Elgin was shouting somewhere behind me. Sirens were rising faint down the county road, and none of it mattered, because eleven years ago I stood exactly on this side of the table, in front of this exact scene, and did the cowardly thing any man could have ever done. I had done the wrong math years ago.

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