Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 126

Chapter 126

OCEANS

I’d barely cleared the threshold of my own office before the door slammed open behind me.

I didn’t turn around to know who it was. I knew the weight of that walk.

Harold had followed me the whole way from the boardroom, close enough that I’d felt him at my back like a second pulse.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

I turned slowly. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. He crossed the room, stopping inches from my face. “What. The fuck. Is wrong with you?”

I set my jaw and took a step back. “Lower your voice. There’s glass on three sides of this room.” I rounded my desk.

“I don’t care about the glass.” He came after me, planting himself at the edge of my desk. “I care that I just watched you stand in front of that board and dare them to vote you out. Over a girl. I watched you do it.”

“Then you saw a man refuse to fire someone who’s done nothing wrong,” I said coldly.

“No.” He said. “I saw a man set fire to his own house to keep one window warm.”

I dropped into my chair because standing felt too much like squaring up, and I wasn’t ready to square up with Harold.

“You don’t get to lecture me about that house,” I said lazily.

“I get to more than anyone alive.” He leaned both hands on the desk.

“You think Fred is the only threat here?” Harold asked. “You think those men won’t move against you if they believe you’ve lost control? They’ve tolerated your temper because it makes them rich. They won’t tolerate you risking the company over your PA.”

“Don’t call her that,” I warned.

“What should I call her?” he snapped. “The woman you love? Fine. The woman you love is becoming the knife everyone else can see sticking out of you.”

I was quiet.

“Do you remember what this company was before it became anything it has become today?” His voice dropped, and I didn’t like it.

I fucking hated when Harold spoke this way, because a loud Harold was just noise, but a quiet Harold? It meant he was about to put his thumb on something so tender that might shatter.

I braced myself for impact as he continued.

it was a drawing. On a piece of paper. In a hospital cafeteria. You and your father, the two of you arguing over a name for a company that didn’t have a single dollar behind it yet.

“Sop

“He didn’t live to see one floor of it built.” Harold kept going, because Harold had never once in his life stopped when I told

Chapter 120

Chim to He was gone before the ink dried on the first lease. And you stood at the side of that bed — I was there Ocrans

and you held that man’s hand and promised him the thing you two dreamed up would not die with him

The room tilted shghtly, as memories I’d buried under sixteen years of motion suddenly stood back up.

My father…

He raised me alone.

My mother died the day I was born. She traded her life for mine, and my father never once let me carry that guilt.

He carried it for me. For both of us.

He worked himself into the ground building a future for a child who’d cost him the only woman he loved, and he did it without resentment, without tiring, and with a strength and resilience I have spent my entire adult life trying and failing to imitate.

And on the last clear day he had, he made me promise.

I had kept that promise through every brutal, sleepless, ruthless year since. The company was the only place my father still lived.

“That’s not fair,” I said quietly.

“None of this is fair.” Harold straightened. “That’s exactly my point. You’re sitting on the one thing that holds his memory upright, and you just offered it to a room full of vultures because you couldn’t stand to sign one termination letter.”

“It’s not just one letter.” I looked up at him. “It’s her life. You know what it means when I let someone go. She’d never work again. And all for what? Because a man who’s been stealing from her since she was a child decided she was inconvenient?”

That stopped him for half a second. “What are you talking about, stealing-”

“Nothing I can prove yet.” I cut it off before it became a thread I couldn’t pull back. “But I know what I’m looking at, Harold. I’m still looking.”

He studied me. And I watched the moment he set the business down and picked up the thing he’d actually come in here to

because he suddenly looked more frightened than angry.

say,

“This is what I was afraid of,” he said.

“Don’t.” I closed my eyes for a second. I knew where this was heading.

“No. I’ve watched you for months. I’ve watched her crawl into every part of you

”

your focus, your judgment, you

patience.” He shook his head slowly. “She’s taken up more room in your head than anyone ever has. More than-

“Harold…” I was on my feet, just a few inches away from him.

#

more than even Vanessa ever managed to.”

The moment he mentioned her name, the temperature dropped out of everything in the room.

My ears rang. I held his gaze.

“I watched you after Vanessa. I watched you turn grief and guilt into an altar and knee in front of it for years. I thought no woman would ever get inside your head like that again.”

Chapter 126-*

My chest went egid…

“Don’t..”I warned again. My hands were trembling so hard I could barely keep them still.

but Kisarel has.” His voice dropped. “Worse, maybe. Because Vanessa haunted you from the dead. Kisarel is standing right in front of you, and you still can’t save her without destroying yourself.”

I stepped closer. “Do not bring Vanessa into this

“I will bring her into it because you have refused to admit the pattern.”

“There is no pattern.”

“There is. You are not capable of love, Oceans. You obsess. You obsess over women you can’t save, then you punish the world because you failed.”

My hands curled slowly at my sides.

“Harold,” I whispered, but the asshole didn’t listen. He didn’t sense the danger surrounding him.

“And your guilt over Vanessa is still running your life. You were a coward then, and you’re being reckless now to make it.”

up for

Something in the room snapped.

I hit him.

There was no thought between his last word and my fist.

One second he stood in front of me.

The next, his head snapped to the side, and he staggered back into the chair near my desk. The sound of bone against knuckle filled the office, but it was barely enough.

I’d never done this at least, not to anyone who wasn’t an actual threat.

My hands shook with my action. The split skin over my knuckles had reopened, and there was blood on my fingers again.

But I don’t care. I wanted more.

That was the only reasoning I had left. More.

Harold touched his blood-stained mouth with his thumb.

He looked at it, then back at me.

“Feel better?” he asked, and somehow his words added fuel to the fury already running through my veins.

I moved toward him.

I don’t know what I would have done.

That was the truth of it.

I had no clean answer for what my body intended when I closed the distance again with rage roaring so loudly inside my skull that the office, the glass, the world outside all blurred.

Chapter 126

Harold straightened. He was ready for the second hit when the door suddenly opened.

“Oceans!”

It was Kiss. And I hated what her voice was trying to do to the rage coursing through me.

“Leave, Kiss.” I wasn’t looking at her. I was looking at Harold, mapping out the next best spot where I’d prefer my fist to

connect.

I was already drawing back to hit him again, because the word ‘coward was still ringing in my skull and he was right and th was exactly why I needed him to stop…

My thoughts and actions came to an abrupt halt when I felt soft, fragile arms around my waist.

They locked across my middle with a desperate, stubborn strength, and a voice against my chest saying my name like it wa the only word she knew how to say.

“Oceans, Oceans, stop. Please.”

Fuck.

Didn’t I ask her to leave?

Suddenly, the strangest thing happened… It was new… I had noticed that it always happened whenever she touched me. And that was a feeling I would never be able to explain to a single soul on this earth.

The rage went out of me.

It was like her touch had reached into the center of all that heat and simply turned it off at the source.

My fist was still raised, and my breath was still ragged, but the violence had gone, replaced by the cold, clean quiet she always left in me… The same quiet I’d been chasing my whole life and only ever found in the least possible person to find it

I lowered my hand.

I felt her chin press against my chest. I looked down at her and saw the fear and the plea in her eyes.

“Please.” She whispered, and fuck knows I lost every fucking will of my own in that instant.

For one second, I let myself stand inside her warmth and breathe in her scent.

Then I spoke in a voice so flat I doubted anyone could hear me.

“Get out, Harold.”

He shook his head and looked at me with something worse than anger in his eyes… Disappointment.

Then his gaze dropped to Kiss.

He looked at her armas around me. He looked at her face, whatever was on it, pressed against my chest. And he stared at her with a coldness, I had never once seen him aim at another living person.

He didn’t say another word as he turned and walked out

My heart was still trying to break through my chest.

9:51 am pM

Chapter 126 –

Hooked at her again. Her face was pale, her eyes wide with fear and confusion and something that looked too much like worry for me to survive.

I wanted to explain..

I wanted to tell her about my father Vanessa. The promise. The board. Fred. The fact that every direction I turned, someone was waiting with a blade and her name carved into the handle.

Instead, I wrapped my arms around her for a moment, taking in all over her, until my heart rate slowed.

I turned and picked up my car keys off the desk.

“Come with me,” I said impatiently.

She looked at me

those eyes, still wide with the fright of what she’d just watched, searching my face for the version of me that made this make sense.

She didn’t find it. Because there wasn’t one. None of this would ever make sense, even to me.

But she didn’t argue either.

She just nodded and followed my lead.

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