My Ex-husband, who chose my sister, Now wants me Back

Kayla's POV. This dress is going to get me killed. The thought crossed my mind as I shoved through yet another wall of branches, the expensive white fabric snagging and tearing on everything it touched. And for the first time, I understood why brides always looked so fragile. It had nothing to do with emotion. It was the dress. So suffocating that I found it impossible to run in my wedding dress that my mother had zipped me into just two hours ago with her steady hands and eyes that held no apology whatsoever. But I kept running. My heels were long gone. I had kicked them off back at the garden wall when I was hauling myself over the fence, the first truly decisive thing I had done in twenty-three years of my life. The ground was cold and unforgiving beneath my bare feet. Every stone bit into my skin. Every root reached up like it had a personal grievance against me. The November air hit my arms and chest like a slap, and I welcomed it because cold meant outside, and outside meant away, and away was the only direction I had left in the world. "She went toward the east gate!” I spun around mid-stride. Through the tangle of tree branches, I could make out the shapes of men moving, my father's security guards. They were far behind me. But not far enough. I faced forward and ran even faster. I had been planning this for exactly forty-eight hours. Two days of watching the house like a hawk from my window, studying the guards, learning their rotation, finding the twelve-minute gap between the man who covered the garden path and the man who covered the east wall. Two days of performing the role of the obedient, resigned daughter my parents needed me to be. Nodding at the right moments. Keeping my eyes down. Letting them believe the fight had gone out of me completely. Which it hadn't. But I had learned very young that the most useful thing a girl nobody watches can do is let them keep not watching, right up until the moment she runs. Just ahead of me, through the thinning trees, I could see the road. The service road that ran along the back of the Harrison estate, pale and grey in the light, the one the caterers had used just that morning when they arrived to set up flowers, candles and champagne flutes for a wedding I was never going to attend. Three lines of trees between me and I would be gone. Completely gone. A sob climbed my throat and I swallowed it back down hard. I could not afford to cry and run at the same time. I needed my vision. I needed every single thing I had to get free from this family, this family that had looked at their own daughter and seen nothing but a convenient solution to an inconvenient problem. “Forty feet to the road.” My feet were bleeding. I could feel it, not sharply, the cold had done some merciful work numbing everything below my ankles but I could feel the wet warmth spreading against the dirt with every step, and I didn't care. I had decided two days ago, sitting on the edge of my bed staring at nothing, exactly what I cared about and what I didn't. Pain was nowhere on the list. What was on the list was never becoming a transaction. Never be handed over like a signed cheque, like a company asset, like something that belonged to people who had never once treated me as though I did. “Twenty more feet.” And then I felt an arm come out of nowhere. It wrapped around my waist like a steel beam, solid and immovable, and the ground disappeared from under my feet entirely as I was lifted clean off the earth. The scream that tore out of me was not the quiet, controlled kind I had spent years doing. It was raw and desperate. "Miss Kayla…" "Let go of me!" I fought. I fought with everything I had. I drove my fingernails into the arm locked around my waist, twisted my body, and kicked backwards with both legs as I made myself as violently difficult to hold as I possibly could. It made no difference whatsoever. The man holding me was twice my size and had clearly been paid to be unmoved, that was exactly what he was, holding me with the patient, methodical grip of someone who had done this kind of thing before and found it routine. Two more guards materialised from the trees to my left. I recognised their faces. My father's men. Faces I had walked past a hundred times in the corridors of my own home, faces that had given me polite, unseeing nods for years. They were seeing me very clearly now. "Miss Kayla, please calm down…." "I said let go of me." My voice cracked on the last word. I hated that crack more than anything else that had happened today. I pressed my lips together and kept struggling because the crack was the only thing I couldn't control, and I was not going to hand them anything else. Eventually, the man set me down, not gently, but not cruelly either, in the businesslike way of someone returning an object to a surface. His hands moved immediately to my arms, pinning them. I stood there breathing in ragged pulls, staring at the road that was now twelve feet away, at the gap in the hedgerow, at the empty dark stretch of freedom that might as well have been on the other side of the world. One of the guards already had his phone pressed to his ear. "Sir." "We found her." Found her. I stood very still inside those words. Like I was something that had been misplaced and had to be returned to its proper position before anyone noticed. The call ended. The guard looked at his colleagues. "Let's get her to the car."