He steps closer, and I feel the air shift around him. “I am Konstantin Rusnak,” he says.
The name hits me like a punch. Rusnak. Everyone in organized crime, every criminology seminar I’ve ever attended, knows that name. And what it means. Power. Control. Death whispered behind velvet words.
He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. Every word cuts.
“Your father,” he begins, “uncovered intelligence that belonged to criminal factions—including mine. He didn’t turn it in. He hid it…in ways only you could unknowingly carry. Now…multiple factions are hunting you for those fragments.”
I shake my head, words trembling out of me. “You’re insane! My father…he was a good man. He wouldn’t—he wouldn’t do anything like that!”
His face doesn’t change. Not a flicker. Not a twitch. Cold. Precise.
“You are a target,” he says, almost casually, and the words are like ice water down my spine. “And as your father’s last surviving link, you are also the payment for the danger he created.”
I gasp, my legs wobbling beneath me. My body shakes. “I…I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I stammer. “You have to let me go!”
He doesn’t even blink.
“You will remain here,” he says. “Permanently. Under my authority.”
The wordpermanentlyhits harder than the kidnapping. Harder than the guards. Harder than the gates I know are locked behind me.
“This house will protect you,” he continues, voice maddeningly calm. “But it will also control you. Your movements. Your access. Your contact with the outside world.”
My chest tightens. “You can’t do this,” I snap, panic sharpening my tone. “You can’t just keep me like—like some prisoner.”
“I can,” he says simply.
I scoff, brittle and disbelieving. “For what? I can’t give you anything. I don’t have money. I don’t know what my father supposedly took from you. I’m useless to you.”
For the first time, his mouth curves.
It’s not a smile.
It’s a knowing smirk.
“You’re wrong,” he says. “You’re the only thing that matters.”
My heart slams against my ribs. “What does that even mean?”
He takes one step closer.
Then another.
“You will marry me, Raelyn.”
The world tilts.
“What?” I whisper.
“Your father created this debt,” he continues, unhurried, relentless. “You will pay it.”
I stumble backward, horror crawling up my spine. “No. No, that’s insane. You’re insane.”
I keep backing away until there’s nowhere left to go, until the cold wall presses into my spine and I realize—fully, terrifyingly—that there is no exit. No negotiation. No rescue coming.
He watches me the entire time.
Not like a strategist calculating risk.