Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 160

Chapter 160

Chapter 160

OCEANS.

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I stopped with my keys inmy fist and my mind already three streets away, because the question made no sense in any language I spoke.

“That’s not anyone’s photo for you to recognize.” I slowly crossed back toward him. “Put it down, Elgin.”

“Answer the question.” He insisted, holding the photo firmer.

“Her name is Vanessa.” Saying it out loud in this office, twice in one day, after eleven years of never saying it at all- something in my chest ground against itself. “She was someone I-she’s gone. She died eleven years ago. I buried her, Elgin. I paid for the stone. Whatever you think you’re looking at, you’re wrong.”

Elgin didn’t put the photo down.

He laughed instead.

It was the worst sound I’d heard in a day built entirely out of the worst sounds of my life — one high, cracked note with nothing behind it but horror, like his mind had just refused a delivery.

“Died.” He turned the photograph to the light, with an unsteady hand. “Monsieur Stark. I had dinner with this woman a few weeks ago. She poured my wine with these hands.” He tapped the picture. “She is younger here. The hair is different. But I have sat across a table from this face more than once. I have listened to her tell me – so tenderly, so sweetly – how worried she was about our Kisarel’s health.”

His eyes came up to mine, and there was something in them I’d never seen on Elgin before. Fear.

“This is Nessa. This is the woman who suddenly walked out of nowhere into Kisarel’s life and has not left her side since then.”

His words all took too long to arrive. My brain was processing them with the speed of a snail.

“No.” The word came out fucking flat and automatic, and some distant part of me registered that I’d been saying that word all day and it hadn’t stopped one single thing from being true. “No. She’s dead. Do you understand me? I stood at the grave. |–”

“Did you see a body?”

The question went into me and found the gap in my armor.

It’s been eleven fucking years, and I had never once let anyone ask me that question, because the answer lived in the sealed-off part of me alongside everything else from that time.

The fire had left nothing anyone would show a grieving man who was too much of a coward to save the woman he claimed to have loved.

There had been a casket. There had been a stone. There had been my guilt, which needed a grave to kneel at. There had never been a body I saw with my own eyes. Fuck, I attended her funeral from afar. Couldn’t even bear the thought of seeing her buried. So, how the fuck would I have seen a body?

“Oceans.” Elgin’s voice had dropped to almost nothing. “Who is she? Who is this woman to you?”

r

I paused as the words struggled to come out. I never could have believed that I would be telling this very story to a fresh listener after all these years.

“Someone I used to love.” My own voice came from somewhere far away. “Someone who died because-” I stopped. Even now. Even now the vault held. “Someone who died. Eleven years ago. In a fire, with her whole family, while 1-”

And then it arrived.

Fuck.

Nessa… She was the one I had heard so much about from both Kiss and Elgin. And each time they spoke about her, she always sounded like the perfect little gift from heaven.

The timing…

She was always around to the point of replacing Elgin in Kisarel’s life. Something no one would have ever believed. Kisarel trusted her – trusted her completely, the way you trust the only person who never left you in the middle of an ocean. She didn’t need to force anything. And right now, she was the one person on this earth Kisarel would follow anywhere, no questions, no struggle.

“Oceans.” Elgin had gone grey. He set the photograph down on the desk like it might go off. Last night, on the phone,

Chapter 160

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Kisare! told me who discovered you had been in my grandfather’s house. It was Nessa. Nessa found out.” His throat werked. “And Nessa told her not to call or warn me. ‘Elgin is emotional, Elgin will do something rash’ – she muzzled the une person who might have-” He stopped, took a deep breath and started again, arriving somewhere as he spoke.” Oceans. How did a woman with no past know to look at my grandfather at all? How did she know he mattered?”

And the floor finished going.

Because there was only one way… Gerald mattered to exactly one search on this earth – mine. A stranger couldn’t stun onto him. You’d have to know about the shooting. The savior. The six years. You’d have to be watching me closely eno to follow Reeves to an old man’s door and Gerald was dead within a day of us reaching him.

The one living soul who could identify my savior, dead in his chair, and the woman who somehow knew, standing besid Kisarel, posing as her best friend.

She hadn’t come back and avoided me. She’d come back and studied me. Everything I hunted, she reached first.

“She’s alive.” I heard myself say, and saying it made it real, and making it real turned the floor to water. “Eleven years I’ve been grieving her, and she’s alive, and she didn’t come back to me, Elgin. She came back and walked past me – past all security, all my watchfulness, all my fucking certainty – and she attached herself to the one person-“My voice seized. She’s not Kisarel’s friend. She was never Kisarel’s friend. She took her time building a cage around Kiss, and I was too b mourning her in one direction to see her standing in the other.”

“This only means one thing,” Elgin said, starting toward the door. “Arel is in grave danger.”

***

I broke every law written between my building and that hotel. Elgin gripped the doorknob the whole way and, for the firs time since I’d met him, said nothing at all.

We jumped out of the car swiftly, like we were on a rescue mission – and we fucking were.

More than a thousand thoughts ran through my head: thoughts about what could possibly go wrong… ‘Ts Kisare! fine? I she okay? Is she safe? Had Nessa gotten to her before we did?’

We made our way to her floor without saying a word to each other.

The tension and unspoken fear were mutual.

By the time we got to the door of room 14, it stood ajar.

That was the first thing that made my heart skip a painful beat.

An inch of darkness between the door and the frame, and everything in me went quiet.

“Kisarel.” I pushed it open. “Kiss.”

For a second, neither of us moved, because both of us were doing the same thing – trying to make it mean something other than what it meant.

The room was wrong-empty. The bed dragged loose on one side. The dresser drawer open with a sleeve caught in it half half out, like a hand stopped mid-packing.

One bag gone; the other open-mouthed on the floor with her things still in it.

“She’s checked out.” Elgin’s voice came out too fast, too high. “She’s moved. She said the room was terrible; she must hav found – she’s moved, that’s all, she took one bag ahead, and she’s coming back for-”

“Elgin.”

“-the rest, people do that, they take one bag and-”

“Elgin.”

He followed my eyes down.

On top of the open bag, face-down where it had been dropped or thrown, was her phone.

Fuck.

No.

Fuck.

She would never leave the phone. You’d have to move her faster than she could think.

I picked it up, and my hand didn’t feel like my hand. The screen was cracked. Behind the crack, the missed calls stacked one on top of another — Elgin’s name, four times. Jace. A number with no name. The little glowing ledger of everyone who had reached for her after she could no longer answer.

“She would never leave that.” Elgin’s voice had dropped to almost nothing. “Oceans….

Chapter 160

Elgin got to the door before I did. He went down the stairs, and I was one step behind him.

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The clerk downstairs looked up from his phone with boredom I put my hand flat on his desk hard enough to change his

mind.

“The woman in 14. When did she leave? Who with?”

“Hey, man, I can’t just-”

“Who was she with!” I growled, slamming my palm on the desk.

He looked at my face and rearranged his priorities. “Her friend. Alright? The one who’s been coming around all week –

classy lady, dresses nice. Couple hours ago. Had her arm around her, walked her out to the car.” He shrugged, uneasy now. Girl looked sick, or upset, crying maybe. Friend said she was taking her somewhere better.”

“Somewhere better,” Elgin repeated behind me.

Fuck.

Vanessa had her.

*

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