Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 170

Chapter 170

OCEANS.

The door gave on the second hit.

Solid heat came out of the opening, as a wall of it struck me full in the face and forced me back a step before I put my arm up and pushed through it.

Then I was inside, and the world stopped being a world.

There was no room anymore. There was fire climbing every wall, smoke rolling thick across the ceiling and pressing downward, and only a thin layer of breathable air left near the floor.

The roar of the fire wasn’t a fucking joke… Timber cracking, glass giving way somewhere at the far end of the room, and the deep steady breathing of the flames drawing the house into their lungs one board at a time.

“KISS!”

The smoke ate my voice whole.

I went low and moved, placing one arm across my mouth, with my eyes streaming against the burn of the fire, and everything in me was screaming her name faster than my mouth had the ability to.

Shapes swam through the orange murk. The skeleton of the ceiling above me sagged in long glowing lines that promised nothing good about the minutes this building had left.

Then I saw the chair.

She was folded forward over her own knees with her hair hanging down and her arms wrenched behind her.

Fuck.

Fuck. No.

She was not moving. She was not moving at all.

Something happened inside my chest that I will not be able to describe for as long as I live.

I had no thought left in me. Thoughts ended at the door.

I crossed the burning room without permission from my brain, if we could venture into this, without a single process. I was on my knees in front of her with my hands on her face, lifting it.

Her eyes were closed, and her skin was grey with smoke and hot under my palms.

Fuck. I could not tell if she was still breathing or not, and I also understood in the same instant that I could not afford to find out.

I couldn’t.

Trapped By My Ruthless Boss

I was scared.

I’d never been this scared in my entire life.

I was tempted to place my fingers against her temple to be sure she still had a pulse, but I fucking couldn’t bring myself to do that.

If I stopped to find out, and the answer I got was wrong, I would stop entirely, and the fire would take all three

of us.

There was one version of me that got her out of this house, and it was the version that did not check.

“I’m here.” My voice came out wrecked and shredded raw by the smoke, but I spoke anyway, saying it directly into her ear as I reached behind her and found the ropes. “I’m here, baby. I’ve got you. Stay with me.”

The cord was slick and swollen with heat. I tore at the knots, and they fought me. My nails split against the fibers, the rope shredding my fingers, but I neither knew nor cared, until the last knot gave and her arms came free. She poured forward into me like water, so fucking boneless, weightless, and silent.

Silent…

She wasn’t moving.

Oh, God.

“No.” I put my arms under her. “No, you don’t. You hold on. Do you hear me, Kisarel? You hold on to me-

I stood with her against my chest, and that was when I saw Vanessa.

The fallen beam lay across the center of the room in a line of flame, and she was beyond it, near the far wall where the fire hadn’t fully reached yet – crumpled on the boards beside her overturned chair, one arm flung out, her blonde hair spread through the ash.

For one heartbeat, the memories of eleven years flooded me all at once.

I was twenty-four again, the house was burning, and she was on the floor looking at me across her mother’s ruined home, and I had two seconds and a decision, which I made, that had cost every good thing that came

after.

And now, history was repeating itself again. Only, this time, she had built it herself, set herself inside it, and waited for me to walk in and choose.

Except there was no choice to be made.

Kiss was in my arms. Our child was in my arms. That was all the choice there was to be made. And that was all that mattered.

The ceiling was screaming above all of us, but my legs were already moving toward the door.

I turned and looked at her unconscious self once again.

“I’m sorry.” I said to her over the fire, even though I never knew what my apology was meant for – that night, or this one, or all the years between. “I’m sorry, Vanessa.”

The ceiling groaned, pulling me back to reality, and I ran.

The door was a rectangle of grey daylight in a wall of orange, and I went for it with her face pressed into my neck, and my body curled around her. The heat chewed through my jacket at the shoulder, along my forearm with a bright climbing pain I registered from a distance and refused to let stop me.

I went through the door as part of the roof came down.

The blast that followed shoved me off the porch.

I turned in the air, taking the ground with my shoulder and my back, keeping her above me, off the earth.

We were finally outside. I could see the sky. Grey, open, cold, impossible sky.

I dragged in air that cut my lungs like ice water after the furnace, as sounds rushed in from every direction around me sirens, engines, men shouting, and one voice above all of it, screaming.

“Arel! Mr. Stark!”

Elgin broke through the police line like the line was made of paper. Two officers grabbed for him, but he was long gone out of their reach.

He fell to his knees beside us in the dirt with his hands hovering over her, touching her hair and her cheek, pulling back, terrified of her stillness.

“Is she-” His whole face was ruined. “Mr. Stark… Oceans… Is she breathing? Please. Please, tell me she’s-” His voice was breaking.

“I don’t know.” Saying it out loud nearly finished me.

I positioned myself on my knees, laying her down on the grass with a care that felt obscene against the violence of everything around us. Her head tipped back, her lips parted and grey, while my hands were shaking too hard to be useful for anything.

“I don’t know, I couldn’t- Medic!” I called out at a volume I didn’t know I owned, even though they were already running toward us. “I need a medic, now!”

They swung into action immediately, opening her collar, fingers pressed to her throat.

Those few seconds were the hardest in my entire life.

My heart was drumming.

One of the paramedics caught sight of my arm and reached for it. “Sir, that burn needs-”

“Give her all your attention.” I was already pacing. “This can wait.”

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