?Arden?
FIVE MINUTES AFTER ENGAGEMENT
To the great escape, wife.
There was very little light in my childhood. What existed had to be made by hand, coaxed into being where none was meant to survive. It lived in stolen laughter and quiet alliances, and that phrase was part of it. Four words that greeted me at eighteen, in my first and only bedroom, carved into the headboard by some other kid from some other story of heartache. I traced over them nightly with all the hope I ever dared. I remember the grain of the wood beneath my fingers, the way the letters dipped where the knife had pressed harder, and the ritual of tracing them until sleep took me. They were a promise. A lifeline. But I also knew they were never fully mine. Those words, that hope, had been left by whoever owned that bedroom before I did. I believed them to be a hero, a person of great strength. Someone who no longer occupied that room because theyhadfound that great escape.
I hadn't imagined this.Him. Alexander Creed.
Hearing them spoken aloud, lifted so easily from a Buyer’s mouth, was a violation. Alexander said them with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, too. His expression was tight despite his clear attempt at trying to be charming. I’d spent enough time with men trying to be as unreadable as stone to know that the creature calling mewifewas far more ugly than he was presenting. I sat across from that beautiful, stern, terrifying man, and felt myself sealing shut piece by piece. For a handful of days after Leah died, I had let myself soften. I had forgotten how dangerous that was. With Rafe, I hadlaughed. With the others, I had felt almost unguarded. Freedom had brushed against me, brief and intoxicating.
And then it was gone, and I remembered what it took to survive.
A Creed’s wife, but not the one my body still reached for when I let my guard slip. I tried to pull myself inward, to remember what mattered, to fix my thoughts on survival and escape and the fire I owed my past, but Rafe’s face kept intruding. Putting on the ring—it would kill a sacred part of me. I knew it would. I could burn every devil I’d ever known and it still wouldn’t have made it bearable.
The fire behind Alexander had burned down to a low, sullen glow, smoke and brandy thickening the air as Monty, the woman who masqueraded as me, disappeared down the hall without a sound. The room felt staged now, emptied of witnesses, as if the world had narrowed itself to just the two of us. The ring rested in my palm, heavier than it had any right to be, its diamond catching the firelight in brief, sharp flashes that felt almost accusatory. I glared at it, then at him.
In that light Alexander looked like a villain pulled straight from the stories meant to warn hopeless romantics. I could picture him easily in the devil mask from the van. He was playing at nonchalance with the marriage offer and the drinks.I knew it the second he opened his mouth, and it was clear that he was slowly letting the charade fade away. I had always known evil by the way it announced itself, but Alexander unsettled me in a different way. There was no immediate revulsion. There was…pull, and it started with the tattoo inked in bold on his forearm:CREED. As he let all that charm he’d shown me fade away, I recognized that he carried himself like a gravestone weathered by decades of grief and reverence. One look in his stern gaze and it was as if he was promising that if I knelt and dug deep enough, I would find a history so dense and complicated that I’d be forced to honor it whether I wanted to or not.
But who he was didn’t matter when he had already told mewhathe was. This was a man who had purchased me, who had torn me from what little family I had left, who now stood between me and my freedom. Whatever poetry his surname and ink carried, whatever ghosts lingered behind the words he’d spoken, they were irrelevant. I refused to romanticize a cage. Alexander Creed was surely a monster, no different from the others who had shaped my past, and the ring in my hand was not a promise. It was a brand as sure as my DOLL tattoo.
I wish…I wish I’d known…Never mind.
“No,” I managed, my voice a strained, hoarse crack through the silence. That word had meant little at that point. Honestly, it’s surprising how long I used it for what little worth it held in my life, but I did. I tried to have choice, even just an illusion of it.
Alexander didn’t respond right away. He remained where he was, broad and unhurried beneath the clean lines of his suit. All of the charm, the nonchalance—it slid away until he was a hollow of the man who originally laid out his terms. As I expected. I was certain I was finally facing the real him. Firelight traced the angles of his jaw and collarbone, caught in the faint shadow of stubble and the gold chain resting at his throat. When his gaze finally lifted to mine, it was calm, almost thoughtful. “Very well.”
He picked up his phone from the table between us and brought it to his ear without breaking eye contact. I caught the low murmur of a voice on the other end and felt tension coil up my spine, panic pressing in sharp and sudden. “Are the trackers out?” he asked. There was a pause. Then his mouth curved with a grimace. “Kill the one you removed the tracker for. Leave the other two where Halden can find them.”
The world lurched. “What?” I pushed to my feet, the chair scraping back too loud in the stillness.
Alexander ended the call and typed a brief message before looking up at me again, his expression unchanged. “You have thirty seconds to reconsider.”
I knew this shape of violence. I had lived inside it for too long not to recognize the contours. Men like Viktor and Halden wrapped their cruelty in reason and inevitability, called it strategy so they wouldn’t have to name it for what it was. Alexander stood cut from the same cloth now, composed and distant while others did the killing at his command. The ring bit into my palm as my grip tightened, its edge sharp enough to ground me. My mind filled with the image of the van, of masked men and restraints. Of Rafe. Of Thorne and Kane, unconscious and helpless.
“You’re lying,” I whispered, even as the familiarity of the moment made me sick.
“No.” His voice remained infuriatingly steady. “You withdrew your consent. I’m responding accordingly.” He glanced at the screen of his phone. “Ten seconds.” He lifted his glass and took a slow sip, unbothered. “Tell me to send the message,” he said calmly, “and they live.”
“Send it,” I said, the words cutting their way out of me. There was no choice left to pretend at. Even in the presence of a man baring the mark of a Creed, I was still being pushed to the same edge I had lived on my entire life. Death had always hovered there, patient and familiar. Marriage was a small toll to pay to keep the people I loved breathing, and without anything to hold against Alexander, I didn’t have a lot of bargaining power. Besides, I had survived far worse than a diamond ring. I shoved it onto my finger, the metal cold and wrong, and lifted my hand toward him with clenched teeth. “I said: send it.”
His thumb moved across the screen. “Sit down, Mrs. Creed.”
I didn’t. I stayed where I was, spine straight, pulse steady. Nothing in this arrangement required obedience or grace. It didn’t demand softness or submission, and I refused to offer any. There was very little Alexander Creed could threaten that I hadn’t already endured, very little he could take that hadn’t beenstripped from me long ago. I met his gaze without flinching. I wasn’t afraid of him, and I wouldn’t be.
He studied me for a moment before standing, setting his glass down with careful precision. “You don’t trust me,” he said. “I wouldn’t either.” There was no charm in it, no attempt to dress the words up. If anything, he sounded grim, almost worn down by the admission, and the shift unsettled me. The longer we stood in the same room, the more his facade seemed to erode, revealing something harder and more exhausted beneath it.
But I didn’t lower my guard. Men like him learned how to mirror darkness as easily as they learned how to weaponize charm. Either could be a lure. If Alexander was truly a Creed, if he had grown up on Viktor’s estate only to rise into the rank of a Buyer, then manipulation wasn’t just a skill; it was muscle memory. I couldn’t imagine how he’d convinced someone as insatiably greedy as Viktor to take him off the market and elevate him instead.
“You likely have questions,” he said, “and I’ll answer them, but if you’re anything like me, you won’t accept words without proof.” His gaze flicked to the expensive watch at his wrist. “Your room is down the hall. You have twenty minutes to change and make yourself presentable.”
I lifted my chin. “I’ll wear your ridiculous ring,” I said evenly. “But I’ll also wear what I have on.”
Alexander’s gaze moved over me with an unhurried thoroughness that set my nerves on edge. His expression didn’t change, but his eyes did, darkening. No one had ever looked at me like that before. It wasn’t hunger exactly. It was as if he knew he could consume me whenever he chose and didn’t feel the need to rush. But he didn’t know me. He didn’t know my love, or the way it hardened into something immovable when it was threatened. That devotion would never belong to a man who forced my hand.
“I would prefer not to touch you,” he said finally.
For a second, I wasn’t sure I heard him right. I swallowed, disoriented by the contradiction. He had bought me, pinned me in a van, bound my future with a ring, and now he was issuing commands about my body and my presentation. Buyers didn’t abstain. They didn’t draw lines. I hated that my life had trained me to expect rape as inevitability, hated that it felt like the only certainty in that stifling parlor with the fire snapping behind him and his gaze holding me in place, but thatwasmy reality. It was…disturbing to hear him say otherwise. “And I would prefer to remain in clothes I’m comfortable in,” I said.
