The Billionaire’s Missing Bride

Chapter2

She didn’t sleep that night, and by the time the first gray light came through her bedroom windows, she had

made a decision that felt less like a choice than like the only door left standing in a burning house.

She found Julien again the next afternoon, in the walk-in pantry off the main kitchen where the shelves of preserved

lemons and dried herbs gave them cover from the rest of the staff, and laid out what little she’d managed to piece together in a sleepless night of pacing.

“I can’t stay,” she said. “If I stay, this happens. He’ll make it happen no matter what I say — you saw how he was last night. He wasn’t asking. He was informing me.”

“So we leave,” Julien said, and the ease with which he said it — as though it were the most obvious plan in the world,

rather than the single most terrifying sentence Namara had ever heard spoken aloud — steadied something in her chest that had been shaking since dinner.

“You’d do that? Leave everything here — your father, your job, the only life you’ve ever—”

“My father’s had this job for six years and he’d have another one by the end of the month if he needed it,” Julien said. “There’s nothing here that matters to me the way you do. I’ve known that for a while, Namara. I just didn’t think I’d have to prove it this fast.”

It should have felt reckless — it was reckless, objectively, two people in their twenties deciding to disappear from one of the wealthiest families on the continent with nothing but whatever cash they could gather and whatever nerve held out long

enough to get them past the gates. But it also felt, in that pantry, surrounded by the smell of thyme and rosemary and

the particular hush of a room built for keeping things fresh, like the only sane decision either of them had made in years.

They had six weeks before the engagement dinner would make everything official, and they spent every one of them

in careful, quiet preparation, learning to plan the way people plan who’ve never had to plan anything for themselves before.

Namara withdrew cash in amounts small enough not to trigger the accounts her father’s people monitored — a little here, a little there, over weeks, until she’d built a reserve she kept hidden in a lining she’d sewn herself into an old coat, badly, with hands that had never held a needle for anything but decoration. She learned, from an afternoon spent nervously scrolling forums on a device she wiped clean after every use, which countries required the least paperwork for a tourist visa, which cities had rental markets loose enough that cash could still open a door.

Julien, for his part, seemed to know things she didn’t — practical things, the kind of knowledge that came from

growing up without a safety net instead of drowning in one. He knew how to travel light. He knew which bus routes

out of the city didn’t run past the estate’s usual security checkpoints. He knew, with a calm that both reassured and unsettled

her, exactly how little money two people actually needed to survive, if they were willing to survive carefully.

“You’ve done this before,” she said once, only half joking, watching him fold a week’s worth of clothes into a single

worn duffel bag with an efficiency that looked almost professional.

“I’ve never had anything worth running with before,” Julien said. “That’s different from never

having run.”

She didn’t ask what he meant by that. She would think about it later — much later, in a different country, in a different life — and wonder if some part of her had heard the warning underneath it and chosen, deliberately, not to listen.

But in those six weeks, wonder was the last thing on her mind. There was only the plan, and the growing, giddy certainty

that for the first time in her life, she was choosing something for herself instead of having it chosen for her. Even the fear felt different from the fear she’d carried her whole life in that house — sharper, yes, but hers. Entirely hers.

The night before the engagement dinner, her father hosted a smaller gathering — a select group of board members and their families, a kind of preview of the announcement to come, though Damian Calloway himself was traveling and would not arrive until the formal dinner two days later. Namara wore the dress her father’s stylist had chosen for her, smiled at the appropriate intervals, and excused herself early, citing a headache that wasn’t entirely a lie.

She met Julien in the kitchen one last time that night, after the house had gone quiet, both of them speaking in whispers though there was no one left awake to overhear.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Before the sun’s up. The car service Etienne uses for early deliveries

— it comes through the service gate at four fifteen. If we’re in the back of that van when it

leaves—”

“We’ll be past the gate before anyone’s even awake to notice you’re missing,” Julien

finished. “I know. I’ve checked it three times this week.”

“And if it goes wrong?”

Julien reached over and took her hand, flour-dusted as always, steady in a way that made

the fear in her chest ease its grip, just slightly.

“Then it goes wrong together,” he said. “That’s better than anything that happens to you if

you stay.”

She believed him completely. She would remember, later, how completely she had believed him, and how little that certainty had ended up being worth.