Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 151

Chapir

Chapter 151

KISAKEL

The hotel was the kind of place you ended up when you’d run out of everything except pride.

The room smelled of damp carpet and someone else’s cigarettes, no matter how many times! cracked the window that only opened four inches before it stuck.

The bedspread had a burn mark near the corner I’d flipped under so I wouldn’t have to look atar. One of the two lightbulbs had gone, and the front desk had told me, not unkmdly, that maintenance came on Thursdays. The shower dripped. The wall behind the headboard let through the muffled bass of someone else’s television, hour after hour, like a heartbeat I couldn’t turn off

It cost forty dollars a night, and after seventy–eight thousand dollars and a job I no longer had, forty dollars a night was a number I had to think about.

“Did you get it?” Jace asked after doing his best to know where I moved to and failing.

I had ignored the first three calls from him. By the fourth one, my head was already hurting too badly to keep listening to the sound of the ringing phone.

“I got it. It’s here. It’s fine.” I sat on the edge of the bed with my knees pressed together and stared at a brown stain on the ceiling that looked too much like water damage to be ignored.

“That’s interesting.” Something cooled in his voice, “Because I went by Elgin’s this afternoon. And Elgin told me you were never there. That there was no ring. That he hadn’t seen you in days.”

The room went very still around me.

“You went to Elgin’s.”

“I said I would.”

“After I told you — I told you I was handling it.” I was on my feet, the old panic threatening to spike, but underneath it, something hotter. “I told you I’d get the ring. I told you it was my mess. And you went behind me anyway, to check, like I was a child you couldn’t trust to run an errand.”

“Don’t turn this around. You lied about where it was-”

IF

“I had it sorted.” My voice climbed. “You couldn’t give me one single thing to handle on my own without going to confirm it for yourself. That’s all I am to you, isn’t it? Something you have to verify.”

“Arel-”

I dropped the call immediately, my breathing coming out hard.

1/4

my band and

The

ock came again, and my pulse jumped straight into my throat. For one terrible second: 1 thought it was Jace Or worse.

No one knew where I was.

I crossed the thin carpet and opened it on the chain first, and then all the way, because the face on the other side was the only one in the world I was glad to see.

“Nessa” Relief hit me so fast my knees almost weakened.

Her face softened the moment she saw me.

“Hey, sweetheart. Surprise!” She stood in the grim little hallway with a paper bag in one hand, a small overnight bag in the other hand, and concern written beautifully across her face.

I stepped back immediately. “Come in. Please.”

She looked utterly out of place against the water–stained walls. “You didn’t think I’d actually find this place, did you?”

“Are you kidding? I didn’t even think you would be able to make it.”

“Why not?” She hugged me. “We’re friends, aren’t we? Of course I had to come.”

I shut the door and locked it again while she looked around the room. To her credit, she didn’t make a face. She didn’t look disgusted. She didn’t ask why I was staying in a place with cracked tiles and a bed that sank in the middle.

She just set her bag down and turned back to me.

“Oh, Kiss,” she murmured. “You shouldn’t be alone in a place like this.”

“I didn’t know where else to go,” I admitted.

Her eyes warmed. “Then it’s a good thing I’m here.”

r

And just like that, the loneliness that had been sitting on my chest all day eased a fraction.

***

We sat on the edge of the bed because there was nowhere else, and I put my head in my hands and pressed my fingers into my temples, where a headache had been building since the courtyard.

2/4

11.75 am

Chop

losing bw m****

job pur’s house. Oceans Flaughe

Tsaid. Tve burned down my whole life in a single day without any humor if it. Even Elgin won’t cove

There ne on left

“There’s ine” Newsa’s hand found my back warmly. “And listen to me because I need it to un She waited until I looked at her. You did the right thing.”

I laughed weakly. “Which part?”

“All of it.” She held my gaze. “Everything you did today was rigin. Every single thing

“It doesn’t feel right. It feels like I set myself on fire” I sighed.

“Because no one’s ever let you choose yourself before, so of course it feels wrong” She said it so gently it ached. “Elgin? Kiss, a friend who makes you choose between him and the people you need isn’t a friend. He abandoned you the second you didn’t dance to his tune. You did the fight thing letting him go.”

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