Sold to the devil’s son

Spent

“You knew about this,” Nikolai said, and it wasn’t a question.

His father finally turned to face him, unhurried, like a son storming into a room mid-signature was an inconvenience rather than a crisis. “I knew you’d react like this. Which is exactly why I didn’t tell you first.”

“So you told her father instead.” Nikolai’s jaw tightened. He hadn’t looked at me again since that first glance, and somehow that was worse than if he’d stared. “You went around me entirely.”

“I did what was necessary.”

“Necessary for who?” Nikolai’s voice rose for the first time, and the younger man by the window straightened like he was bracing for something. “Because it certainly wasn’t necessary for me. I have a life, Father. I have plans that don’t involve marrying a stranger because you decided it solves a business problem.”

“Watch your tone.”

“Or what?”

The room had gone very quiet. My father still hadn’t lifted the pen off the page, like he was frozen there, half-finished, unwilling to commit to the last stroke while two Voss men tore each other apart three feet away from him.

I found my voice before I decided to use it. “Can we stop talking about me like I’m not in the room?”

Nikolai looked at me then, really looked, and I made myself hold it even though something about his eyes made my pulse climb. Anger, mostly. But underneath it, something closer to exhaustion, like this fight was one in a long line of them he’d already lost before it started.

“No offense,” he said, “but this isn’t about you.”

“It’s my name on that folder.”

“And it’s my life they’re rearranging to fit your father’s balance sheet.” He turned back to his father before I could answer. “I’m not doing this. I have someone, Father. You know that. You’ve known for a year.”

The younger man by the window shifted his weight, arms uncrossed now, watching the exchange like he wasn’t sure whether he’d be needed to physically separate anyone before the afternoon was over. The woman with the tablet had gone completely still, her pen hovering above the screen, no longer pretending to record anything.

Something tightened in Aleksandr’s expression, quick and controlled. “This isn’t the place.”

“You made it the place the moment you put a folder in front of a woman I’ve never met and called it settled.”

“Camille is not a suitable match for this family, and you know it as well as I do.”

The name landed in the room like a dropped glass. I watched Nikolai’s shoulders go rigid, watched something flash behind his eyes that had nothing to do with me at all.

“Don’t,” he said, low and dangerous. “Don’t say her name like it’s an argument you’ve already won.”

“It is won,” Aleksandr said. “It was won the moment I decided this family needed an alliance more than you needed a girlfriend with no name and no future to offer us.”

“She has more integrity than every person standing in this room combined.”

“Integrity doesn’t secure a controlling interest in Calloway Shipping.”

The words hit the air and just hung there, and I felt my stomach drop for an entirely different reason now. Not because of secrets. Because of the plain, ugly math of it. His father wasn’t hiding anything complicated. He’d simply decided his son’s relationship was worth less than a business deal, and hadn’t bothered to pretend otherwise.

“So this was never about protecting anything,” I said, before I could stop myself. “You just wanted what my father has, and I was the easiest way to take it.”

Aleksandr’s eyes cut to me, cool and unbothered. “An elegant solution benefits everyone, Miss Calloway. Your father’s company survives. My son marries into a respectable name instead of an unremarkable one. And you gain a life most women would never say no to.”

“Most women weren’t asked,” I said. “You didn’t ask me anything.”

“Neither was I,” Nikolai said quietly, and for the first time since he’d walked in, he wasn’t looking at his father. He was looking at me, and there was something almost apologetic underneath the anger, like he hated that we were being lumped together as collateral in the same transaction. “For what it’s worth.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. He held my gaze a second longer than the moment required, and I felt it land somewhere I wasn’t ready for, before he looked away first.

“This conversation has run its course,” Aleksandr said, straightening his cuffs like the whole exchange had been a minor inconvenience rather than his son’s entire life being rearranged in front of him. “Marcus, finish the signature. Nikolai, my office, now.”

“I’m not finished,” Nikolai said.

“You are.” His father’s tone left no room for argument. “We will discuss this at home.”

Nikolai held his father’s gaze for three long seconds, and I found myself holding my breath along with the room. Then, instead of following him, he crossed toward me, and every muscle in my body went tense without my permission.

“You don’t want this,” he said quietly, close enough that no one else could hear it clearly. “Whatever you think this offer is, walk away from it while you still can.”

“That’s easy for you to say when you’re the one they’re fighting to protect.”

Something flickered across his face, gone before I could name it. “I’m not being protected. I’m being spent.” He straightened, some of the heat draining out of his voice, replaced by something colder and more tired. “Just like you.”

“Nikolai,” his father said again, sharper now.

He stepped back from me, jaw set, and turned toward the door without another word to either of our fathers. He paused there for a second, hand on the frame, like he wanted to say something else and thought better of it. Then he was gone, and the silence he left behind felt worse than anything he’d said out loud.

Aleksandr exhaled through his nose, composed again in an instant, as though his son’s fury had simply been weather passing through. “My apologies. He’ll come around. He always does.”

My father hadn’t moved from the desk. He was staring at his own unfinished signature like it belonged to someone else, like the ink had already decided something he couldn’t undo no matter how hard he wished it.

“Dad,” I said, quieter now. “Please. Look at me.”

He lifted his eyes, and what I found there wasn’t defiance. It was defeat, complete and total, the kind that comes from a decision already made long before I walked into the room.

“I have to,” he said. “Wren, I have to.”

“Why?” I crossed the room until I was standing right in front of the desk, close enough that he had nowhere else to look. “Give me one real reason. Not a business term, not a number. A reason.”

“Because if I don’t, we lose everything.” His voice cracked on the last word, and I realized with a jolt that my father, who had never once in my life looked afraid of anything, looked afraid right now. “The company, the house, thirty years of your grandfather’s work, gone within a year. This is the only offer on the table that keeps any of it standing.”

“That’s not a reason to sell me off like property.”

“It’s the only reason I have.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes anymore. “I know how it sounds. I know what I’m asking of you. I wish there were another way, Wren. There isn’t.”

He finished the signature.

The sound of the pen lifting off the page should have meant nothing. Instead it landed in my chest like something final, like a door closing on a version of my life I hadn’t even known I still had.

Behind me, the study door opened again.

I turned around, expecting Nikolai had changed his mind and come back.

It wasn’t him.