Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 29

Chapter 29

Chapter 29

KISAREL

“Well, well, well…” She stepped in slowly and easily, her eyes pinned to the box on the floor. “What do we have here?”

I clutched the photograph tighter, knowing that one wrong move and everything I’d been protecting for years would be gone in a few seconds.

Her interest seemed pinned to the contents of the box without her even looking my way.

She crouched in front of me, and the first thing she picked up was the knitted socks.

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She held them up, turning them over in her fingers with the expression of someone handling something they found vaguely offensive. “What on earth-” She laughed. “Your parents died, and this is all you get from them. A pair of cheap, misshapen socks? That’s almost impressive.”

She dangled them from two fingers like they were something she’d found on the street. “No wonder you turned out like this. They didn’t even think you were worth leaving something real behind.”

She flung them sideways.

“Stop it!” I scrambled after them, snatching them off the floor and pulling them against my chest with the photograph. “Get out of my room, Moonie. Get out right now

But she was already reaching into the box again.

Her fingers closed around the watch.

“No-” I lunged for it, but she was faster, standing up in one fluid motion and stepping back, holding it up between us with the watch swinging lightly from her fingers.

“Ooh.” Her eyes lit up.

She turned the watch slowly, and the interest on her face shifted. “Wait.”

I was on my feet. “Give it back.”

She wasn’t listening. She was looking at the watch the way someone looks at something they recognize turning it over, examining the face, the band, the weight of it in her palm. Moonie had grown up surrounded by money. She knew what expensive looked like, felt like, and this watch was speaking a language she was fluent in.

“This is a Patek Philippe.” She said it quietly, almost to herself. Then louder, with the dawning

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pleasure of someone arriving at a very satisfying conclusion. “A Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime.” She looked up at me. “Do you have any idea what this costs? This watch costs more than this entire house, Kisarel.” She turned it over, and her smile widened. “Where did you steal this from?”

“It’s mine. Give it back.”

“Yours.” She repeated the word with enormous amusement. “This watch is yours. You.” She tilted her head. “You can barely afford decent clothes, but suddenly you own a watch people like us collect?” She stepped closer, lowering her voice. “Don’t insult my intelligence.”

She tapped the watch lightly. “Your father was a miser. The most pathetic, tight–fisted man I ever had the misfortune of knowing. He wouldn’t have bought himself a cup of coffee if he could avoid it. There is no universe in which Harry Kendell owned a Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime.” She closed her fingers around it. “So I’ll ask you again. Where did you steal it?”

“It’s none of your business where it came from.” I stepped toward her, my hand out. “Give it

back to me. Now.”

“None of my business?” She looked at the watch again, “Everything about you is my business. You live under my roof, eat my family’s food, breathe air you didn’t earn.” She lifted the watch slightly. “And now you’re hiding something valuable in my house?”

Her smile was settling into something cruel. “No. I think I’ll be keeping this.”

The words hit me the wrong way.

“You can’t-”

“I absolutely can.” She dropped it into her palm and closed her fingers around it. “Consider it compensation for all the years I’ve had to share a roof with you.”

I don’t know what moved through me in that moment. But it felt more like rage.

I kept that watch safe for six whole years. I couldn’t let it go, for reasons I had never been able to explain to myself. And now, seeing it in Moonie’s hand while she was already looking at it like it was hers made something in me refuse. Completely, irrationally, with a ferocity that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the fact that of everything in that box, of everything that had ever mattered to me, that watch was the one thing I had never been able to put down.

I grabbed for her wrist.

I almost had it, but her free hand connected with my chest. The force of it sent me backward so fast my body couldn’t catch up with itself.

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The bed frame caught the side of my head with a loud crack and a sensation that swallowed everything sight, hearing, the feeling of the floor under me all of it collapsed inward at once like a light being switched off at the source.

I was on the floor. I didn’t know when that had happened.

Moonie’s voice reached me from somewhere very far away, like sound traveling through water. It felt like I was at the bottom of something deep, and she was standing at the surface looking down.

I tried to move, but nothing responded.

She was calling for help. That was my first thought. Even after everything, some stupid, stubborn part of me heard the urgency in her voice and thought she’s getting help.

–

I strained to hear the words, and then they assembled themselves, one by one, into something that had nothing to do with help.

“Mum.” Her voice came out bright and satisfied, reaching me from the surface of whatever I was sinking through. “I’ve found the necklace.”

The necklace.

My mother’s necklace.

No.

The word formed somewhere inside me and never made it out.

And before I could reach for the necklace – the only thing my mother left for me

blank.

it all went

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Chapter 29

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