Chapter 3a: The Debt Is Paid
1095 Words
Ava’s POV
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The rest of the ride to wherever they were taking me was utterly quiet.
Not the peaceful kind of quiet either — the heavy, suffocating kind that pressed against your ears and made every small sound feel louder than it should. The low hum of the engine. The occasional shift of leather when one of his men moved. My own breathing, steady only because I forced it to be.
No one spoke. Not even him.
I kept my eyes forward, even though every instinct in me screamed to look — at him, at the men, at the doors, at the windows, at anything that might tell me where this was going. But I knew better. I had already seen too much tonight.
A man had died. Just like that.
And now I was here.
Alive.
That alone didn’t make sense.
We slowed, the car gliding to a near-silent stop before a building that didn’t try to impress — and somehow did anyway. No signage. No doorman out front putting on a show. Just clean lines, dark glass, and the kind of stillness that suggested money and power without needing to say it out loud.
Serious security. The kind you didn’t question.
One of the men stepped out first. Then another. My door opened before I could reach for the handle, like I wasn’t expected to do anything for myself here.
Or trusted to.
I stepped out carefully, heels dangling from my fingers, the pavement cool beneath my bare feet. My legs still felt unsteady — adrenaline, shock… or the weight of not knowing why I was still breathing.
HE stepped out last.
I didn’t look at him directly, but I felt it — the shift in the air, the way everything seemed to center around him without effort.
We moved inside quickly. No hesitation. No wasted motion.
The elevator wasn’t something you just stepped into. A key. A code. A pause long enough to make it clear that not everyone got access. And for a brief second, a sharp, irrational thought cut through me —
If this needs a last name, I definitely don’t belong here.
The doors slid open directly into the space, and my breath caught despite everything.
Floor-to-ceiling glass stretched across three sides, Manhattan spilling out below like something curated, something unreal. Lights blinking, glowing, alive — a city that didn’t care what had just happened to me.
The furniture was sparse. Dark. Expensive in a quiet, deliberate way. Nothing flashy. Nothing unnecessary.
It looked like a man lived here.
Singular.
No softness anywhere — no throw blankets, no photographs, no evidence of the small compromises that came with sharing space. Everything in its place. Everything chosen.
Controlled.
I stood in the middle of it in my work costume — costume was the right word, the sequined thing that covered the minimum required — with my heels still in my hand, and I tried to look like I wasn’t calculating exits again.
He poured two glasses of something amber and set one on the kitchen island without looking at me.
I didn't touch it.
He drank from his own glass slowly, studying me the way he'd studied me in the car — that particular quality of attention that felt like being read. Like he was already three pages ahead and was just waiting for me to catch up.
"Your debt to Tony," he said. "Principal plus interest as of tonight is eleven thousand, four hundred dollars." He set down his glass. "Your tuition arrears at NYU are nine thousand, two hundred. Your rent is two months behind — that's another thirty-six hundred."
My throat tightened. I hadn't told him any of that.
"You've been thorough," I said as if I wasn't scared about how he'd pulled such an information within an hour. Because this was the first time he'd be meeting me, yet he already had an info on my whole life.
"I've been efficient." He reached into his jacket and withdrew his phone, showed me a screen — a banking confirmation and numbers I recognized. "I wired the full amount twenty minutes ago. That's Tony's balance, your university account and lastly your landlord."
The floor shifted under me as I resisted the urge to gape.
"W-why?"
Goosebumps covered my skin when he shot me his dark look, but it wasn't so dark...fuck, am I really admiring this dangerous man right now? I'm playing a dangerous game.
"Because a woman who owes money has options." His voice was even. "She can run. She can go to people who might help her, like the police, for instance. She becomes unpredictable." He set the phone down. "But a woman who owes 'me' is a different matter."
I understood then, in the full cold light of it. What did he want with me? Why was he doing all this?
"You paid my debt," I said slowly, "so now, I owe you."
"Now you owe me." He held my gaze, then looked away. "Every cent. And I have one very specific idea about how you're going to pay it back."
The silence in the apartment was extraordinary — forty floors above the city, above all of its noise, just glass and expensive quiet and this man looking at me like I was something he'd already decided to keep.
I thought about my mother. About the phone call this morning — Lydia's voice knife-edged and familiar, asking why I hadn't called Victor back, defending the indefensible the way she always had. I thought about my father's face and what he would do if he were alive and knew about my predicament. About Riley who would soon text me at ten p.m. asking if I was okay because I hadn't reached out to her all day. About Jax, who would drive forty-five minutes in traffic to bring me soup when I was sick and thought I hadn't noticed the way he looked at me.
I thought about all the ways I'd worked to stay standing. Only for my debt to be paid in one night and also bind me to a man I barely knew in that same night.
"I'm not—" I started, but his glare made me stutter before I resorted to staring dumbly.
"You will, cara mia. And oh, you'll enjoy every bit of it." He told me cooly and walked to a chair, sitting calmly as if he hadn't just bought my whole debt and tied me to him.
For whatever reason, I had no idea!
- Writer
