He Didn’t Kidnap Me. Not Exactly novel Chapter 299

Chapter 299

{Daisy’s POV}

I moved before I finished deciding to.

Cellmates jeered as I shoved past their bars, voices overlapping in a chorus I barely registered.

“Ooh, somebody’s popular tonight.”

“New girl’s looking spicy already.”

I didn’t stop for any of it.

I hit the ground on my knees in front of the right cell, fingers wrapping around the hand still resting

through the bars, and I finally let myself say the word properly.

“Mom.”

She didn’t move.

Something in my chest cracked wide open at that, panic and dread pouring straight through the gap.

“Mom!” I shook her arm, gentle, then less gentle. “Mom, please-”

“Aw, look at that,” someone called from a few cells down. “Family reunion happening right here, folks.”

Laughter rippled through the corridor, ugly and careless.

I ignored it completely, because my mother’s eyes had opened, slow and unfocused, and relief crashed through me hard enough to hurt. She was conscious. She was alive.

Those two facts alone kept me upright.

But the rest of her told a different story. Her movements were slow, weak in a way that had nothing to do with sleep, and her skin had gone pale and papery in the dim light. Her dress hung wrong on her, wrinkled and torn at one shoulder, and the exhaustion carved into her face made something in me ache all over

again.

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Chapter 299

PPP

-Daisy, she whispered, barely audible.

“I’m here, mum.” I pressed my forehead briefly against the bars. “I’m going to get you out. I promise.”

I threw my gaze around the corridor, searching, and my eyes landed on the lock itself–heavy, mechanical,

and verh requiring a key I did not have.

I b

the corridor to an abandoned food tray sitting near an empty cell, grabbed the bent metal on it, and rushed back, jamming it into the lock and twisting hard.

lean in half.

hter erupted around me.

red that too, already moving again, scanning for anything else remotely useful. A length of rebar

d loose from a cracked support beam nearby, and I yanked it free, hurrying back toward the cell. meone reached for me as I passed- a hand shooting out through the bars, grabbing at nothing but air as twisted sideways out of range. I kept going, undeterred.

The rebar didn’t fit. Toc thick, too clumsy, refusing to slide into whatever delicate mechanism lived inside

that lock.

I needed something smaller.

The corridor stretched long between two doors, cells lining both sides the entire way, the one I’d come through at one end and another, older–looking door at the far end. I ran toward it, eyes catching on a strip of tarnished metal trim peeling away from its frame, thin enough that it might actually work.

I had to hurry. The men I’d left behind outside were surely already looking for another way in, another authenticated hand to press against a sensor somewhere.

I reached for the metal strip.

Then I

m the door directly in front of me.

I couldn’t go back the way I’d come- that hallway was full of exactly the people

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Chapter 299-

just escaped I couldn’t hide. There was nothing here but bars, bodies, and me, standing directly in front

“of a door that was, at this exact moment, unlocking itself.

Dread pinned me in place.

door swung open.

dy dropped first, crumpling to the floor just inside the frame, and my heart nearly stopped before the nd figure stepped over him and into the light.

Archer.

We stared at each other.

Neither of us moved for a long, suspended second, the silence stretching taut between us.

“Daisy,” Archer said, rushing to me now.

I backed away instantly.

Every question I hadn’t gotten an answer to came rushing back at once

why he was here, why he was dressed exactly like the men hunting me, why he’d vanished during the chase only to reappear now, stepping over an unconscious body like it meant nothing.

“Don’t come close,” I said.

“I’m not trying to hurt you, Daisy.” He held both hands up, slow. “I’m confused about why you’re here. And you look just as confused.”

The words came out sharp, edged with something close to anger. “What’s

ell.

salready moving. “Let’s get her out.”

ged himself into this without asking, and something about that scraped at me even through the

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Chapter 299

pamic.

He reached the cell first, tried the door, found it exactly as locked as I already knew it was, and spun back

toward the door he’d just come through, muttering something about keys, about having seen a man

carrying some earlier.

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