BLOOD DEBT BRIDE

Ice Has a Price

The man stepping out of the car moved with the unhurried confidence of someone who had never once worried about being unwelcome.

Elena's mind raced through every file she had memorized before this mission, matching the shape of his face to something buried deep in NIS records. Then it clicked. Rossovich. Viktor Rossovich, head of a rival syndicate that controlled the eastern ports, a man her briefings had labeled a temporary ally to the Kastellans and nothing more. An uneasy peace, the file had called it. Nothing about an unannounced late-night visit to the family estate.

Kael's hand found her wrist, firm and fast. "Inside," he said quietly. "Now."

"You said stay close to you."

"That was before I knew who it was." His jaw was tight, his eyes locked on the man walking toward the front steps. "Viktor doesn't visit without a reason, and he never visits at night unless the reason is bad."

Elena let him pull her toward a side entrance instead of the main doors, moving fast through a narrow hallway that clearly wasn't meant for guests. Through a gap in the curtains of a side room, she caught a glimpse of the foyer, Augustin already descending the staircase to meet Viktor, flanked by two men she recognized from the wedding, their posture shifting instantly from relaxed to alert.

"What's happening?" she whispered.

Kael didn't answer. He guided her into a small study off the main hall and shut the door partway, just enough to see through the gap without being seen. Elena understood immediately. He wasn't protecting her from danger. He was positioning her somewhere she could watch, and somewhere she could be watched leaving, if it came to that.

Through the gap, she heard Viktor's voice first, accented and calm. "Augustin. Forgive the hour. This couldn't wait for a phone call."

"It rarely can, with you," Augustin said, his tone giving away nothing.

"Someone hit one of my shipments last week. Off the coast, near the boundary lines we agreed on years ago." Viktor's voice hardened slightly. "My men tell me the crew wore Kastellan colors."

The room went very still. Elena felt Kael tense beside her, his breathing slow and controlled in a way that told her this was worse than it sounded.

"That's a serious accusation," Augustin said.

"It's a serious loss," Viktor replied. "Four containers. Men I trusted to guard them, dead before they hit the water."

Augustin's expression didn't change, but something in the room shifted, a current of tension Elena could feel even from behind the door. "I don't send men to touch what isn't mine, Viktor. If someone used my colors, they did so without my knowledge, and I promise you, they'll regret it far more than you will."

"See that they do," Viktor said. "Because if I find out otherwise, this peace ends the way it should have ended fifteen years ago."

The words hung heavy in the air. Elena filed the number away instantly. Fifteen years. Close enough to the timeline of her father's death that her pulse spiked without permission.

A commotion broke the tension before Augustin could respond, footsteps pounding fast down the hallway toward the foyer. One of the household staff, younger than the others, burst into view, breathless and pale.

"Sir," he said, addressing Elias, who had appeared from somewhere Elena hadn't noticed. "We found him. The one who's been feeding information to Rossovich's people."

Elena's stomach dropped as two men dragged a third between them into the foyer, his hands bound, a bruise already blooming dark across his cheekbone. He was young, barely older than she was, wearing the same dark uniform as the rest of the household staff. His eyes were wide with a terror that made her chest ache despite every instinct telling her to stay detached.

"Please," the young man said, voice cracking. "I didn't, I swear I didn't…"

Augustin's expression barely shifted. "Elias."

Elias stepped forward without hesitation, his movements calm, almost bored, the way a man moves through a task he's done a hundred times before. He said nothing to the boy. He didn't need to. Elena watched Kael's hand tighten against the doorframe beside her, his knuckles white.

"Don't watch this," Kael said quietly, without looking at her.

But she couldn't look away in time. What happened next was fast, brutal, and utterly silent except for one short, choked sound that Elena knew she would hear again in her sleep for weeks. Viktor didn't flinch. Augustin didn't flinch. The staff who witnessed it simply lowered their eyes and continued their work moments later, as if nothing at all had happened in the middle of their home.

Elena's hands were shaking by the time Kael finally pulled the study door fully shut, blocking the scene from view. She pressed her back against the wall, forcing air into lungs that suddenly felt too small for her chest.

"That's what this family is," Kael said, his voice flat, carefully empty. "I told you that marriage vow meant something real. This is what it protects you from becoming a target of. And what it makes you complicit in, whether you want to be or not."

"He was just a boy," Elena managed.

"He sold information that could have gotten every person in this house killed," Kael said. "There are no innocent mistakes in this family. Only ones that get punished quickly, and ones that get punished slowly."

Elena stared at him, searching for some trace of the man from 30 minutes before, the one who had spoken about his mother with something close to grief, the one who had asked what happened to her with something that sounded almost like tenderness. That man was gone completely, replaced by someone carved entirely from stone.

"You're suddenly different" she said quietly.

"I'm the same as I always am," Kael said. “What I said 30 minutes ago was a mistake."

The words landed harder than she expected. "A mistake."

"I said things I shouldn't have said to someone I've known for two days." His eyes were cold now, deliberately so, a wall rebuilt brick by brick in front of her. "This house doesn't reward softness, Isolde. I let my guard down once. I won't do it again."

Elena felt something twist in her chest that she refused to name, some tangled mixture of frustration and something dangerously close to hurt. She reminded herself sharply that none of this mattered, that Kael Kastellan's trust or lack of it was simply another variable in a mission, nothing more.

"Understood," she said, matching his tone, letting ice settle over her own voice.

Kael studied her a moment longer, something unreadable flickering behind his eyes before he turned toward the door. "Viktor believes someone used our colors to hit his shipment. My grandfather says he didn't authorize it."

"Do you believe him?"

Kael paused, his hand on the door. "I believe my grandfather tells the truth exactly as often as it benefits him to."

He opened the door and walked out without waiting for her, leaving Elena alone in the study with the echo of a sound she couldn't unhear and a memory of the number fifteen sitting heavy in her chest.

Fifteen years, Viktor had said. Close enough to matter. Close enough that when she finally made her way back to her room that night, she pulled out the small notebook hidden inside the lining of her suitcase, the one with pages of notes only she could decode, and wrote the number down beside a date she had never forgotten.

The date her father died.

She didn't know yet if the two were connected. But something about the way Augustin's face had barely moved when Viktor mentioned it told her they might be.

A knock at her door pulled her out of her thoughts. She closed the notebook fast, sliding it beneath her pillow before opening the door.

Elias stood in the hallway, his expression as unreadable as ever, his hands clean now, no trace of what she'd witnessed less than an hour ago.

"Mrs. Kastellan," he said pleasantly. "Augustin would like a word with you. Tonight, if you're not too tired."

Elena's pulse quickened. "Now?"

"He said it couldn't wait," Elias said. Then, after a pause just long enough to feel deliberate, he added, "He mentioned something about Viktor's shipment. Said you might have questions about the timing."

Elena's blood went cold.

She hadn't said a single word about the number fifteen to anyone.