Sold to the devil’s son

The chase

The address Nikolai sent led me to a parking garage three blocks from my father’s office, empty except for a black car idling in the far corner with its headlights off.

I almost turned around twice on the walk there. Almost texted back and said no, this was insane, I didn’t owe a stranger anything, especially not one whose family had rearranged my life without asking me a single question. But some part of me needed to hear whatever he was about to say, needed it more than I needed to feel safe, and so I kept walking until I reached the car and the passenger door swung open before I’d even raised my hand to knock.

“Get in,” Nikolai said. “Fast.”

“That’s not exactly reassuring.”

“Wren.” His voice had an edge to it I hadn’t heard before, something closer to real fear than irritation. “Now.”

I got in. He pulled out of the garage before my door was even fully shut, tires screeching against concrete, and merged into traffic with a sharpness that threw me back against the seat.

“What is going on?”

“My father’s driver called mine twenty minutes ago.” He checked the mirror, jaw tight, both hands white-knuckled on the wheel. “The Reyes family knows about the agreement already. Someone leaked it before the ink was even dry.”

The name meant nothing to me. “Who are the Reyes?”

“The reason my father wanted this alliance in the first place.” He took a hard left, cutting off a delivery truck, and I grabbed the door handle without meaning to. “They’ve been trying to take Calloway Shipping out from under your father for two years. If they find out the deal is done before they can stop it, they lose their last window to move.”

“So they’ll do what, exactly?”

He didn’t answer right away, and that silence told me more than any answer would have.

I twisted around to look through the back windshield, half expecting to see nothing, half already bracing for what I did see. A dark sedan two cars back, weaving through traffic with none of the caution the other drivers were showing.

“Nikolai.” My voice came out thinner than I wanted. “There’s a car following us.”

A pair of headlights swung into the lane behind us, too close, too fast, matching our speed almost immediately. Nikolai’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror and something in his face went hard and focused, all the sharpness of a man who’d clearly done this before.

“Seatbelt,” he said. “Now.”

I fumbled it into place with shaking hands as he cut across two lanes without signaling, horns blaring behind us. The headlights followed, closing the gap.

“Nikolai—”

“I see them.”

He took the next corner too fast, tires shrieking, and for one horrible second I thought we’d hit the parked line of cars along the curb. We didn’t. He straightened out, foot hard on the gas, weaving through a red light as cross traffic swerved to avoid us, and my heart slammed against my ribs so hard I could feel it in my throat.

The car behind us ran the light too. Close enough now that I could see two shapes in the front seats, close enough that when we hit a straight stretch of road, the sedan surged forward and clipped our back bumper hard enough to jolt the whole car sideways.

“Nikolai!”

“I know.” His hands worked the wheel fast, correcting the skid before it became something worse, tires fighting for grip against the asphalt. “Hold on.”

“Who’s driving that car?” I gripped the door handle so tightly my knuckles went white. “Are they trying to hurt us, or just scare us?”

“With the Reyes family, there’s rarely a difference.”

He hit the brakes hard enough that my body strained against the seatbelt, then wrenched the wheel right into a gap between two delivery trucks that looked too narrow to fit through. Metal screamed against metal as we scraped past, sparks flashing bright in the side mirror, and then we were through, careening down a narrow side street, one I wouldn’t have even noticed was there, half-hidden between two buildings. Nikolai killed the headlights entirely and rolled us into a loading dock recessed just enough to hide the car from the main road.

We sat in the dark, engine off, both of us breathing hard. Seconds later the sedan roared past the mouth of the alley without slowing, engine roaring away into the distance, and for a moment the only sound in the car was my own ragged breathing and the tick of the engine cooling.

“They lost us,” Nikolai said, quiet now, exhaling like he’d been holding his breath the entire chase.

“Lost us.” My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. “That was actually happening. That wasn’t some overreaction, that was—”

“That was exactly what I was trying to warn you about in your father’s study.” He turned to look at me fully for the first time since I’d gotten in the car, and whatever careful distance he’d kept between us before was gone now, replaced by something rawer. “This isn’t a business arrangement, Wren. It’s a war with better tailoring. And you just became a target in it whether you wanted to be or not.”

I stared at him, my pulse still hammering, the adrenaline leaving me hollow and shaking in its wake.

“Why did you come get me? You could have just let your father handle it. Let me handle it.”

“Because you didn’t sign up for this.” His jaw tightened. “None of it. And I’m the reason you’re in it now.”

I wanted to argue with that, wanted to tell him I could take care of myself, that I wasn’t some fragile thing that needed rescuing. But my hands were still shaking in my lap, and the memory of that sedan clipping our bumper was still too fresh to pretend otherwise.

“What happens now?” I asked. “We can’t just sit in a dark alley all night.”

“We wait until it’s safe to move, and then I get you somewhere they can’t reach.”

“And after that?”

“After that, you tell me if you still want to walk away from this marriage.” His eyes met mine in the dim light, steady despite everything that had just happened. “Because if you do, I’ll help you find a way out. Whatever it costs me.”

Headlights swept across the mouth of the side street, slowing.

Nikolai’s hand shot out and gripped my arm. “Get down.”