ROSALIE
My legs couldn’t keep up with the pace my mind wanted them to run. My breath hitched, each inhale a sharp, shallow gasp for air that sounded like a wheeze.
Bursting into my father’s office, I slammed the door shut behind me with a bang that echoed off the polished mahogany walls.
“There’s no way,” I choked out, my voice a ragged mess. “There is absolutely no chance in hell I’m doing this.”
He remained seated behind his large wooden desk. “He knows too much, Rose.” His voice, usually strong enough to command his men, was strained with a quiet defeat. “I’m afraid I don’t have any upper hand.”
“But you always have the upper hand,” I yelled. “I can’t marry him—he’s insane!”
“Insane or not,” Dad started, holding onto a pause, “he holds all the cards. Information. Secrets about our family that, if exposed, could crumble everything we’ve built.”
“What kind of information?”
He hesitated, the lines on his face deepening even more. “We’ve spent years avoiding that family, but now Max knows,there is nothing more we can do. The families are too strong to go against.”
The world I knew—a world carefully constructed by my father, the one who’d kept me protected for years—seemed to teeter on the brink of collapse.
Silence fell over us, broken only by the ticks and tocks of the grandfather clock in the corner of the room.
The idea of marrying a madman was unthinkable, yet my options seemed to be dwindling with each passing second.
“He’s already set the terms,” Dad continued. “If we refuse, he’ll unleash the information. The Feds, the politicians—they’ll all come down on us. It will be the end of everything.”
As I stood there, my mind still reeling from the weight of my father’s words, he rose from his desk, the chair creaking under the strain. He came around the desk and stood directly in front of me.
The room seemed to close in on me, the walls a suffocating reminder of the cage I was being forced into. My mind raced, searching for a way out, but every path led to the same end.
“I have to marry him?” I asked, my voice almost lost. The very words tasted bitter on my tongue, a sentence to a fate worse than death.
“For the sake of our family.” He nodded. “I already agreed to his terms.”
“I can’t believe this,” I whispered, my voice trembling. “Did you even try to fight him? How could you?”
“Rose, you have to understand, he has eyes everywhere now. Running wouldn’t solve anything if death didn’t.”
My father had signed my life away to the man who would eat me alive.
The stakes were no longer just my sanity. They were my life and the future of everything I knew.
CHAPTER 26
ROSALIE
“Careful!” I shrieked, my voice echoing dramatically through the empty apartment.
The man, built like a refrigerator on wheels, grunted but didn’t slow down. He wrestled with a comically oversized cardboard box. Its brown surface was tattooed with the words “Nana’s fancy dishes” in red marker.
“That box has my Nana’s dishes in it! You break that, and she’ll haunt you from the grave.”
“Max said you Clarkes are good at that.” His laugh echoed through the empty hall.
Disbelief rendered me speechless. Dimitri, they called him. I’d call him a careless klutz. He was one of Max’s goons. My arms were full of my bags, which made it hard for me to help him carry the dishes, but also conveniently prevented me from catching him when he inevitably tripped over his feet.
I watched, wide-eyed, as Dimitri and the other men carried out my things in boxes. The second they got here, they’d started packing everything up like overcaffeinated ants.
Everything was happening so fast I couldn’t begin to wrap my mind around it all. Max wasn’t wasting a second. I’d stood inthe hall the entire time with my overnight bag in hand, watching them pass through box after box.
