He Didn’t Kidnap Me. Not Exactly novel Chapter 295

He Didn’t Kidnap Me. Not Exactly

Chapter 295

The panel lit red first, scanning, tracing thin lines across my hand exactly the way it had before. Then, slowly, the red bled away into green, the confirmation chime ringing out clean and certain.

The door unlocked. Once again.

“It reads your blood,” Aria said quietly. “The same blood it reads in my father’s palms… In mine.”

I ripped my hand away and stumbled back again, putting real distance between us this time.

Aria turned aside, shaking her head slowly, some deep, private sadness settling over her features.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, not looking at me at all now, just saying it into the empty air like the words

needed somewhere to go. “I’m sorry.”

I stood there, unable to sort through the mess currently occupying my chest. I couldn’t even name half of what I was feeling. But I recognized the fear underneath all of it clearly enough- the fear that any part of what Aria had just said might actually be true.

I didn’t want it. Not the smallest fragment of it.

Aria opened her mouth to say something else, but voices cut her off.

Distant, but real, drifting toward us from somewhere down the corridor; several people, talking, moving

closer to our axis.

Both of us went rigid at once.

“Let’s go,” Aria said, already moving.

I followed.

We burst out of the covered corridor into something different entirely- an open–sided walkway, exposed along one edge to whatever lay beyond it, columns spaced evenly along the length of it like ribs holding up

the roof above.

11:39 am

Chapter 295

The voices around us swelled the further we moved, though I still couldn’t see a single face attached to any

of them. Sound without source. Which, somehow, felt worse than actually seeing the people making it.

Then the walkway opened into a courtyard, and both of us skidded to an immediate halt.

Aria backed up so fast I collided directly into her.

The space in front of us was full. Dozens of figures, all draped in black–women in heavy veils and long, flowing gowns that swallowed every trace of their shape, men in dark overalls with their faces left bare, heads bowed in unison around a low stone altar at the center.

Thin trails of incense smoke curled upward from somewhere near the front, thick and sweet, clinging to the back of my throat the second it reached me. A low, murmured chant rolled through the crowd, dozens of voices layered into one steady, hypnotic rhythm.

It looked less like a criminal empire and more like something ancient. Something that had been happening in exactly this spot for far longer than either of us had been alive.

We retreated immediately, both of us pulling back into the shadow of the walkway.

That was when the voices from behind caught up to us.

I froze completely, my heart slamming so hard against my ribs it actually hurt, because the corridor we’d just come through now had people moving into it from the other direction, and the courtyard ahead was packed with a religious ceremony we could not possibly walk into unnoticed.

We were stuck. Genuinely, completely stuck, sandwiched between two directions that both ended badly.

Aria’s gaze darted sideways, fast, and she found a door tucked against the nearest wall, shoving us both through it before I’d even registered she’d moved,

We stumbled into a small room, and relief lasted exactly as long as it took me to notice the two people already occupying it.

A man, mid–dressing, shirtless, clearly preparing to join whatever was happening outside. A woman beside him, veiled, waiting, presumably his wife.

Both of them turned toward us instantly.

11:39 am PP

Chapter 295

Panic hit me so fast and so completely nearly forgot how to breathe. The man’s expression shifted from surprise to something aggressive within a single second, his whole posture sharpening, and I took an involuntary step backward certain we were about to be caught, exposed, dragged in front of Roman Volkov

within the next thirty seconds.

Aria moved first.

She grabbed something off a nearby shelf – I genuinely couldn’t tell what, something heavy and decorative and slammed it against the side of the man’s head before he’d finished closing the distance between them. He staggered, and the woman lunged at Aria from behind, grabbing for her shoulders.

Aria twisted and drove her forehead directly into the woman’s face.

The woman dropped instantly, collapsing in a heap.

Aria spun back to the man, grabbed another object off the same shelf, and brought it down against his skull hard enough that he crumpled to the floor beside his wife, both of them motionless.

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