“When can I go back to school?” I ask.
His gaze lifts slowly from the glass. As soon as those dark eyes lock onto mine, the entire room seems to contract around us, the walls drawing closer, my pulse beating an unsteady rhythm in my ears that makes me dizzier than before.
“You won’t be returning any time soon. Not until I say.” The calm certainty in his voice infuriates me more than if he’d shouted it.
“You can’t just?—”
“I can.” He finally lifts the glass of wine to his lips and takes a slow, unhurried sip, like this conversation is nothing more than a mild inconvenience.
I shove back from the table so abruptly, the chair legs shriek against the polished floor, the sound ricocheting around the vast room. “This is insane. I have a life to get back to. I havemidterms. You can’t completely derail my life like this. You and Papa have no?—”
“Youhada life,” he corrects. “Your father traded it to me.”
The words crack through me harder than the blast that tore through my campus. For a second, I forget how to breathe. My fingers curl against the table’s edge, clinging to it because if I let it go, I know it would send me plummeting to the floor.
“He wouldn’t,” I whisper.
Sasha leans forward, his elbows resting casually on the linen tablecloth. His posture is deceptively relaxed, deceiving in the way a man would act as if discussing the weather, not ruining the very foundation of my life as I know it.
“He did. You’re here because he cashed in a favor. He brought you here and asked me to keep you safe. Do you think that was for free? Your being here forces him to behave himself until I say you can go. He doesn’t get a choice in how long you stay here. Neither do you,” he says, his tone matter-of-fact.
The room spins.
The concept of being stuck here in this gilded cage is so foreign that my mind refuses to make sense of it. It slams against every belief I’ve held, every memory of my father doing whatever he felt was best to protect me, every illusion I’ve clung to about who I am and where I stand in this world.
“You’re lying,” I whisper, but my voice sounds hollow. “He would never agree to a deal like that. This is temporary.”
Sasha doesn’t blink. He just watches me with that unnervingly steady gaze. “Are you that naive to believe your father isn’t capable of striking a deal like that? When you know he has done deals under the table for years? Surely, you aren’tthatblind,Printsessa.”
There’s a dark stillness in his eyes that says he has no reason to lie. That heneverlies about things like this.
Because why would he?
My stomach twists violently, my legs threatening to give out beneath me the longer I stand here and try to make sense of all of this. The chandelier above blurs into a smear of gold as my eyes begin to water. I grip the back of my chair to steady myself before I fall, but even the polished wood feels grotesque and wrong under my fingertips.
All the years of being protected, watched, hovered over… had it all been leading up to this end? For me to eventually be handed over to a man like Sasha Sokolov?
I try to speak again because maybe he’s wrong, maybe he misunderstood Papa’s intentions and the deal they agreed on when I was dropped off here. Maybe this is all some twisted power play to convince me I had been left behind in order to use me against Papa.
“What favor did he cash this in for?” I ask, the sound barely audible.
He sits back in his chair, setting his wine glass down with lithe, careful fingers. “A longstanding one. Your father has made many deals with me in the past and has racked up quite the laundry list. He wanted you out of the public eye and asked me to take you in. In return, I get to say when you go home.”
I choke on my next words. “So, that’s it? You justacceptedit? You’re a sick freak if you think I’m going to roll over and agree to this.”
“Careful,Printsessa.Not very wise to bite the hand responsible for feeding you at the moment,” he says softly.
The pet name is a warning, a reprimand disguised as something sweet. Yet somehow, that softness makes it feel even more threatening.
It reminds me of years ago when we first met. I had been sixteen, maybe seventeen, at the time. Too young to understand the danger I’d been surrounded with, too sheltered to recognize the tension humming beneath polished smiles and tailored suits.
Papa had dragged me along to one of his political dinners, the kind where the women wear diamonds heavy enough to bruise their bony chests and the men talk in half-truths over expensive liquor.
I remember being bored and sneaking away from the clusters of overly fake conversations, my heels clicking softly across marble floors while searching for somewhere that wasn’t filled with empty conversation.
That was when I’d seen him.
Sasha Sokolov had been standing over by the balcony doors, one hand in his pocket, the other wrapped loosely around a glass of something dark. He hadn’t been smiling. He hadn’t been speaking to anyone around him. He’d just been watching the room like a predator surveying unfamiliar terrain.
