Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 168

Chapter 168

KISAREL.

:

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I stopped screaming when I understood that screaming was spending air I could not afford.

–

The fire had taken the walls faster than my mind could follow. Now it worked through the room with a patience that was somehow scarier than fury eating the boards over the window, walking along the ceiling beams, filling the upper half of the room with rolling black smoke that pressed lower every time I looked at it. The heat came off everything. My eyes streamed. Each breath I drew tasted like petrol and burning dust.

Vanessa sat across from me with her hands folded in her lap, watching the flames the way other people watched rain.

With a smile on her face.

She was done with me. I understood that now. Whatever she was waiting for, it wasn’t anything I had left to

say.

So I stopped trying to speak to her and got my brain to work instead.

I looked around for any possible escape route, and the possibility of even reaching for it with my hands tied to a chair.

Smoke rises…

At least I knew that from some half-remembered instruction from school a lifetime ago – ‘smoke rises, heat rises, air lives near the floor.”

I bent forward as far as the ropes allowed, dragging the chair’s weight with my body, and folding myself down toward my knees until my face was as low as I could carry it. The air there was foul but breathable. I pulled it in slowly through my mouth and made myself count the breaths.

One. Two. Three…

‘You are not allowed to panic,’ I told myself. ‘Panic is a luxury, and you are five weeks pregnant, and you cannot afford luxuries.’

The ropes were tied at my wrists behind the chair back, and I had been testing them for hours without result – but hours ago my hands had been dry. They weren’t dry now. Sweat ran down my arms in the heat, slicking my wrists under the cord, and when I turned my right hand and pulled with everything in my shoulder, the rope moved.

It moved a fraction of nothing, and it burned my skin like a brand. But the good thing was, it moved.

I pulled again. The fibers shifted against my wet skin. Pain flared up my arm, and I welcomed it, because pain meant the ropes were still moving and I was heading somewhere with this.

“Stay with me,” I whispered, but I wasn’t talking to myself. My voice came out cracked and small under the roar of the fire, and I aimed it downward, at the center of me, at the person the doctor said was the size of almost nothing at all that was living inside me. “Stay with me, baby. Daddy is coming. He’s coming, and we are

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Trapped By My Ruthless Boss

going to be here when he arrives, do you hear me? We are going to be here.”

The rope gave another fraction. Blood or sweat, something warm, ran into my palm.

Then the coughing started.

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It came up out of me without permission, building up one cough at a time, and then a chain of them I couldn’t stop, each one tearing at my throat and each one costing me air I had counted and saved.

By the time the fit passed, I was dizzy, and the room had tilted several degrees to the left and refused to come back.

The smoke had reached me, even down here. The clean layer near the floor was thinning, and the heat had grown claws and fangs – it wasn’t pressing against my skin anymore; it was inside my skin, inside each breath I took, cooking the air before it ever reached me.

I pulled at the rope again.

My arm obeyed, but a little slower.

Across from me, through the shifting orange light, Vanessa had begun to sway.

It started small at first – a slow tilt of her upper body, which she quickly corrected before tilting again her folded hands had come apart and gripped the sides of the chair.

Her face was running with sweat and streaked grey with smoke, and her breathing had turned audible, coming out in a shallow rasp I could hear even under the fire.

She was dying too. She had known she would die. She had chosen it, planned it, and poured the petrol around her own chair as generously as mine.

“Vanessa.” My voice barely existed anymore. “Vanessa, it’s not too late. The door-”

She turned her head toward me slowly, like it weighed something enormous.

–

and

There was no fear anywhere in her face. That was the thing I would have wept at if I’d had the water left for weeping. She looked at me through the smoke with her eyes half-closed and something almost peaceful settling over her.

Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear the words she was trying to form, and I would never know what they were.

Then a beam came down between us.

The crash swallowed the room – sparks in a great orange fountain with a wall of fresh heat rolling over me – and when I could see again, I couldn’t see her at all. Only fire where she had been sitting. Fire and smoke and the collapsing ribs of the ceiling.

“Vanessa!”

Nothing answered except the roar.

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Trapped By My Ruthless Boss

And that was when I felt it start to happen to me.

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The dizziness stopped being dizziness and became a tide. It came up from somewhere beneath thought. patient and dark and absolutely certain.

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