DEVIL'S OBSESSION

His Price

Amara sat very still, waiting, while Damian Cross took his time deciding how to ruin her evening.

He wasn't in a hurry. That was the thing she noticed most about him in those first few minutes the absolute absence of urgency in a man who held her mother's life in his hands and knew it. He reached for a glass of something amber on his desk, took a slow sip, and set it back down with a soft, deliberate click before he spoke again.

"Eighteen thousand," he said, as if tasting the number. "That's not a difficult sum for me. I could transfer it to your account before you leave this room and never think about it again."

"Then do that," Amara said, hating how small her voice sounded.

"I could." He tilted his head slightly, studying her the way a collector studies something he's considering acquiring. "But I don't lend money for free, Miss

"Bello. Amara Bello."

"Amara." Her name in his mouth sounded different than it ever had before deliberate, like he was testing the shape of it. "I don't lend money for free. Everyone who walks through that door owes me something in return. Interest, usually. Sometimes a favor. Sometimes information." He paused. "But not you."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I've decided what I want, and it isn't interest payments." He stood then, unhurried, rounding the desk to lean back against the front edge of it, close enough that she had to tilt her head up to keep looking at him. "One night. That's my price. You spend one night with me, and the eighteen thousand is transferred to your mother's hospital account by morning. No debt. No interest. No further obligation."

The room seemed to tilt slightly around her. Amara had braced herself for something ugly, but some small, foolish part of her hadn't actually believed it would be this.

"You're joking," she said, though she could already see he wasn't.

"I don't joke about money," Damian said. "Or about what I want."

"There has to be something else. A payment plan. Work I could do"

"There isn't." His voice was mild, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. "I'm not offering you a negotiation, Amara. I'm offering you a choice. You can walk out of here right now, and nothing happens to you I don't chase people who say no to me, I simply stop being useful to them. Or you can accept, and your mother has her surgery paid for by tomorrow morning."

Amara's mind raced through every alternative she'd already exhausted over the past three sleepless nights the bank, the second job that didn't exist yet, the family who had nothing left to give. There was nothing there. There had never been anything there. That was the whole reason she was sitting in this office in the first place.

"Why me?" she asked instead, buying herself a few more seconds to think. "You must have plenty of women who'd say yes to you without needing to be bribed for it."

Something flickered across his face not quite a smile, but close to one. "I do," he admitted. "But wanting someone and simply having them available aren't the same thing. You walked in here refusing to beg, refusing to charm me, telling me the truth because you didn't think you had time to waste on anything else. I find that considerably more interesting than a room full of women trying to flatter their way into my bed."

"So this is a game to you."

"Everything is a game to me," Damian said simply. "That doesn't make my offer any less real. Or any less generous, considering what eighteen thousand dollars is worth to most of the people who sit in that chair."

Amara looked away from him, down at her hands twisted together in her lap, and thought of her mother's face against the hospital pillows smaller every time she visited, tubes taped to skin that used to be soft and warm instead of thin and cool. She thought of the surgeon's voice explaining, gently but plainly, that they were running out of time to wait for the money to appear on its own.

There was no version of this where she said no and still saved her mother's life.

"If I agree," she said slowly, forcing the words out before she could talk herself out of them, "how do I know you'll actually pay for the surgery? That this isn't just" She couldn't finish the sentence.

"A trick to get you into my bed for nothing?" Damian finished for her, unbothered. "I don't need tricks for that, Amara. And I don't break deals. Ask anyone who's ever done business with me my word is worth considerably more than most people's signatures." He reached into the drawer of his desk without looking away from her, retrieved a slim phone, and set it on the desk between them. "I'll transfer the money the moment you agree. Before anything happens between us, if that would make this easier for you to live with. You'll have the funds in your mother's account tonight."

That, more than anything else he'd said, was what finally undid the last of her resistance not the money itself, but the fact that he was willing to hand it over first, with nothing binding her to actually go through with the rest except her own word. He was gambling that she'd honor a deal she hadn't technically signed anything for, the same way she was gambling that a man who ran half the underworld of this city would actually keep his.

"Okay," she said quietly, before she could change her mind. "One night. That's all."

"That's all," Damian agreed, though something in the way he said it made her wonder if he entirely believed his own words.

He picked up the phone, tapped through several screens with the ease of a man who moved this kind of money often enough that it barely registered as significant, and turned the screen toward her so she could see the confirmation. Eighteen thousand dollars, transferred directly to the hospital account she'd given the front desk on her last visit.

"It's done," he said. "Your mother has her surgery."

Amara stared at the screen until the numbers blurred, relief and dread rising in her chest in equal, dizzying measure. It was real. It was actually, finally real and she'd just agreed to pay for it with the one thing she'd never expected to have to sell.

"When," she managed, "do you want”

"Tonight," Damian said, setting the phone aside and studying her with an expression she couldn't quite read something that looked almost like anticipation, though he tried to keep it carefully banked beneath the same cool, unhurried composure he'd worn since she walked in. "I don't like to wait for things I want, Amara. And I've decided I want you tonight."

She swallowed hard, nodded once, and told herself this was simply the price of her mother staying alive a debt paid in the only currency she'd had left. She had no way of knowing yet that for Damian Cross, this wasn't t

he end of the transaction at all.

It was only the beginning.