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, 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."

Before I could process what that meant, I felt myself being lifted not by the arm this time, but thrown over a shoulder like a sack, face down, the guard's back beneath my stomach, my fists hitting against it over and over in a fury that was completely useless and that I could not stop.

"Put me down. Put me down...."

"We're sorry, Miss Kayla." His voice was genuinely apologetic. "These are our orders. We have no choice but to obey them."

I kept hitting his back the entire way to the car. It accomplished nothing. He walked with the steady, unhurried pace of a man who knew exactly where he was going and had already decided to feel bad about it later.

The car door opened. I was finally placed inside and he closed the door. The locks engaged with a sound.

And then we drove back to the Harrison estate while I sat in the back seat with my ruined dress and my bleeding feet.

The car finally came to a stop, we had finally arrived at the mansion I wanted to leave but get caught and brought back.

The guards brought me in through the main entrance of the house. Through the doorway, I could see them, all three of them. My father was standing near the fireplace. My mother was sitting upright on the sofa, her spine perfectly straight. And Mirah, perched beside her in her blush bridesmaid gown, her hands folded in her lap.

None of them had the look of people who had been worried about me.

My father glanced at the guards. "You can leave he said to them."

They bowed before leaving. The room contracted around the four of us.

I stood in the middle of them in my destroyed wedding dress, the torn skirt, the muddy hem, the bare bleeding feet, and the thin cut on my cheek from a branch I'd caught on the way through the trees. I looked at my father the way I had been looking at him my entire life.

Staring at him, after twenty-three years, hopelessly searching his face for the particular expression a parent is supposed to have when their child is standing in front of them like this.

But I see nothing.

The silence stretched between us, taut and purposeful.

Then I felt it.... the sharp, stunning crack of my mother's palm across my cheek.

The blow snapped my head sideways. The pain bloomed immediately, the kind that rings in your ears for several seconds afterwards. I turned back slowly, pressing my own hand to my face, and I looked at my mother.

Linda Chen was on her feet, she was furious in a way I had always seen her.

"How dare you." Her voice was low and sharp as a blade. "How dare you think of running away today of all days? Do you have any idea what you almost did to this family?" She raised her hand again.....

"Linda." My father's voice cut across the room. Not because she shouldn't hit me. But because he had things to say first.

My mother lowered her hand.

Not one person in the room asked if I was alright. Not one person looked at the mark blooming on my cheek and felt the need to say something about it.

This was simply how things were in the Chen mansion.

My father looked at me in that cold, considering the way he had frightened me since childhood.

"Do you have any idea," he said quietly, "what today means for this family?"

A broken sound rose in my chest that was almost a laugh. "I know exactly what today means."

"Then you understand why you cannot do this." He took one measured step toward me, his voice dropping into the reasonable register he used when a decision had already been made and he was simply walking you toward it.

"Kayla. The company is finished if this marriage doesn't happen. Everything I have built, this family's future, everything it all depends on you today."

"Then it shouldn't have depended on me." The words came out steadier than I expected. "You should have built it differently."

Something shifted in his face. In twenty-three years I had never said the true thing directly to either of them, never held the mirror up and made them look, and I watched them absorb it, my father, my mother and I watched it change absolutely nothing, and that was the part that broke something in me far deeper than the slap had.

"You have embarrassed this family enough for one day."

I had heard that sentence in a hundred different forms my entire life. You've embarrassed us. You've disappointed us. Why can't you simply......

"Embarrassed," I said. The word tasted strange in my mouth, like something that didn't belong there. "You want to talk to me about embarrassment. You are selling your own daughter to settle a business and you want to talk to me about embarrassment."

I looked at him directly, and I felt something in my chest that I had never quite felt before, not courage exactly, but the specific recklessness of someone who has already lost and therefore has nothing left to carefully protect. "I am standing up for myself for the first time in my life. That is not an embarrassment. That is the only reasonable thing I have ever done."

My father turned to my mother. Slowly. "Where," he said, in a tone of genuine bewilderment, "did she get this nerve today?"

My mother's eyes hadn't left my face. "I see you've found a running mouth to go with your running legs." Her voice was silk over gravel. "Let's see how far both take you when you're locked in a room and only brought out when it's time to walk down that aisle."

"Kayla."

Mirah's voice called out my name. Soft and careful, wrapped in that particular quality she had always known how to deploy, the little-sister voice, the one that had worked on me since she was four years old and had learned exactly how to use her size against my heart.

I turned and looked at her.

She was standing now, her expression arranged into something that resembled genuine distress, her eyes wide and imploring. She was beautiful when she looked like that. She had always been beautiful when she looked like that.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked. "For the last time, just this once can't you do this for me? I'm your little sister, Kayla. You always said you'd do anything for me." Her voice softened further. "Can't you do just this one thing?"

I looked at her for a long moment.

I thought about all the times I had believed that voice. All the years I had arranged myself smaller and quieter to make room for her. All the homework I had done in her name, the blame I had absorbed that belonged to her, the exam I had sat in her place during our college because she hadn't studied and couldn't afford to fail and had appeared at my door the night before with those same wide eyes and that same soft voice and the absolute certainty that I would say yes.

I had always said yes.

"Mirah." My voice came out tired in a way that went deeper than today. "The only time you remember I'm your sister is when you need something from me. When you need me to step in, step back, take the fall, carry the weight, then I am your sister. The rest of the time I am furniture." I looked at her steadily. "I have been a replacement for you my entire life. I am not going to be one for this."

Something moved across her face, quick and complicated, there and then gone.

Then she stepped back, and her expression settled into something smooth and unreadable, as she looked at our parents with a small, deliberate movement of her chin.

"I suppose Mom and Dad will have to decide what to do with her, then," she said quietly.

There it was.

The little sister who needed me, wrapped so efficiently back up into the daughter who didn't.

My father didn't hesitate.

"Guards."

They reappeared in the doorway with the speed of men who had been waiting just outside it.

"Take her to the basement. Lock the door. You bring her out in two hours when it is time for the wedding."

"No...."

They were already moving toward me. I pulled back, stumbled, and caught myself against the arm of a chair.

"Dad." My voice came out cracked and open in a way I hadn't intended. "Dad, you cannot.... I am your daughter. I am also your daughter. You cannot lock me in a basement like I am... like I am...."

He did not look at me. He was already turning away, straightening his cufflinks, the conversation concluded as far as he was concerned.

"Dad."

Nobody answered.

The guards were gentle about it, which was its own particular cruelty they took my arms without roughness, and they walked me down the corridor and down the stairs through the door at the bottom, and one of them said, quietly with what sounded like genuine regret, "I'm sorry, Miss Kayla," before the door closed.

The lock turned.

I heard their footsteps receding.

And then there was silence, the specific, total silence of a room underground, a silence with weight and texture, a silence that pressed against my eardrums and my chest at the back of my throat all at once.

I stood in the middle of it for a long moment.

Then my legs made a decision my pride had nothing to do with, and I sank onto the floor, I pulled my knees up to my chest, and I pressed my forehead against them, letting the tears fall.

Two hours. I'll be here for the next two hours all alone.

My father's voice moved through me like ice water.

Everything I have built. This family's business. It all depends on you today. Which I still can't believe.

You owe us this.

This is what you are for.

I pressed my face harder against my knees and I let myself cry in the dark basement, while the memories came the way they always came when I finally stopped running from them carrying me backwards to three days ago when everything had happened.