“Knew what?I don’t understand.That man, Antonov, he was the one who?—”
“He owned Apex Lending.He owned our debt.”I finally looked at her, and whatever she saw in my eyes made her flinch backward.“Don’t you see?He didn’t save us from the debt collectors.He was the debt collector.He created the entire situation so he could offer to rescue me from it.”
Clara’s face went pale.“But why?Why would anyone go to that much trouble?”
I didn’t know.Didn’t care.The why didn’t matter right now.Only the what.
I had been played.Completely, thoroughly, devastatingly played.By a man I had trusted with my body.By a man I had told I loved.By a man who had looked at me the morning after taking my virginity and called me convenient.
Because you were convenient.A warm body with a debt to pay.Nothing more.
He hadn’t even been lying.Not really.I had been convenient.A pawn in whatever sick game he was playing.He’d created my desperation, cultivated it, watched me struggle and suffer, and then swooped in like a savior.Made me think I was choosing when every choice had already been made for me.Made me think I was selling myself to pay a debt, when really I was just crawling deeper into a trap he’d built with my name on it.
The grief I’d been carrying for my father shifted, changed, hardened into something else entirely.He was dead.I would mourn him properly, eventually, when I had time to feel anything but this burning fury.But right now, there was something more important.
Rage.
Pure, burning, clarifying rage.
“He thinks he broke me.”My voice was different now.Harder.Colder.A voice I didn’t recognize as my own.“He set this whole thing up, used me, threw me away, and he thinks that’s the end of the story.”
“Lena…” Clara reached for my hand again, but I pulled away.
“He’s wrong.”My chair scraped back against the floor as I rose.“I don’t know how yet.I don’t know what I’m going to do.But Raphael Antonov is going to regret the day he ever heard my name.”
Clara was staring at me like she’d never seen me before.Maybe she hadn’t.Maybe this version of me was new, forged in the fire of betrayal and loss.
“What about the marriage clause?”she asked quietly.“You need to be married within a year, or you lose the hotel.How are you going to find someone in time?And who would you even?—”
She stopped.We both knew who.
There was only one man with the resources and the connections and the sheer arrogance to think he could still claim me after everything he’d done.Only one man who might have a reason to want this marriage as badly as I needed it.
The same man who had orchestrated my downfall from the very beginning.
The irony was so bitter I could taste it, metallic and wrong on my tongue.My father’s final act of distrust, his insurance policy against his incapable daughter, had created a trap that led straight back to Raphael Antonov.If I wanted to keep the hotel, I would have to marry.And if I wanted to marry someone who could actually help me save it, who understood its value and had the means to support it…
I would have to marry the man who had destroyed me.
Unless I found another way.
I walked to the window and looked out at the hotel gardens.Spring was coming.I could see the first green shoots pushing through the brown earth, daffodils about to bloom.My hotel.My legacy.The only thing my father had ever given me that mattered.
I was not going to lose it.Not to Raphael’s games.Not to my father’s lack of faith.Not to anyone.
Raphael thought he’d won.He thought he’d used me up and thrown me away, and that was the end of the story.He thought I’d crawl off somewhere to lick my wounds and never bother him again.
But he’d made one mistake.He’d underestimated me.
Everyone always did.
I pressed my palm against the cold glass and made myself a promise.I didn’t know how yet.I didn’t know when.But I was going to make Raphael Antonov pay for every lie, every manipulation, every moment he’d made me believe I meant something to him.
And when I was done, he would be the one who was ruined.
The rage was a living thing inside me now, coiled and waiting, its heat burning through the ice of grief.It would keep me warm through the dark nights.It would keep me moving when everything else wanted to make me stop.
My father was dead.My heart was shattered.And I was trapped in a cage of someone else’s making.
