Cruel Vows (Indebted to the Billionaire #2)

1. Lena

LENA

The paper was soft at the edges now. Worn from handling it over and over again. I had read the document so many times that the words had lost their meaning, become shapes instead of language, but I couldn’t stop looking at them.

Volkov Capital. Beneficial owner. Raphael Antonov.

I sat at my father’s desk. My desk now, I supposed, though nothing about this office was mine.

The leather chair still held the ghost of his cologne, and every time I shifted, the scent rose up like an accusation.

The humidor in the corner still smelled faintly of the cigars he hadn’t smoked in months.

Even the light filtering through the windows that overlooked the lobby below was borrowed, cheerful artificial brightness that didn’t belong to me any more than the mahogany desk or the oil paintings on the walls.

I was trespassing in a dead man’s space. Pretending to be a businesswoman I had never been allowed to become.

Eight weeks since the funeral. Eight weeks since I had stood in this office and learned that everything I thought I knew was a lie. Two months of staring at these documents, counting the betrayals, trying to make sense of a life that had been dismantled piece by piece while I wasn’t looking.

I touched the paper again. Apex Lending ownership structure, traced back through shell companies and holding firms to its source.

The lawyer’s neat handwriting in the margins, explaining each layer.

Apex Lending, wholly owned by Granite Holdings.

Granite Holdings, a subsidiary of Volkov Capital.

Volkov Capital, sole proprietor: Raphael Antonov.

His company from the start. His money funding my ruin. His trap, and I had walked right into it.

The debt had never been real. Or rather, it had been real, but it had been his from the beginning.

Every sleepless night I had spent worrying about foreclosure, staring at my laptop until the numbers on the screen blurred.

Every desperate phone call to banks that wouldn’t help, listening to their polite rejections while my heart hammered against my ribs.

Every moment I had believed I was fighting for my family’s survival, scrambling to find any way out of the hole my father had dug.

All of it choreographed by the man who had offered to save me.

I pressed my fingers against my eyes until I saw stars.

The exhaustion pressed down on my shoulders, my chest, my skull.

I hadn’t slept more than a few hours at a time since the will reading.

Coffee kept me upright. Rage kept me moving.

But underneath both, the tiredness waited, ready to swallow me whole the moment I stopped fighting.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw his face. The cold dismissal the morning after he had taken everything from me. The way he had looked at me like I was a stranger, like the woman he had held through the night had simply ceased to exist.

The contract is fulfilled. The debt is paid. We’re done.

It was adequate.

My throat ached where the collar used to sit.

I kept reaching for it without thinking, my fingers seeking that familiar weight, and finding nothing but bare skin.

The phantom sensation haunted me. Two months since he had unclasped it and let it fall to the floor like garbage, and my body still expected to feel that chain against my pulse.

Still searched for evidence of what I had been to him.

What I had thought I had been.

I pulled the marriage clause document from beneath the Apex papers. Another trap. Another cage. My father’s final gift, delivered through his lawyer’s apologetic voice. Proof that even in death, he didn’t trust me to run my own life.

“Must be legally married within one year of his death, or the hotel will revert to a charitable trust.”

Three hundred and five days. I had started counting without meaning to, the number ticking down in the back of my mind like a bomb. A countdown to losing everything I had just sold myself to save.

The irony should have been funny. It wasn’t.

I read the clause again, searching for loopholes I knew weren’t there. My father had been many things, but he wasn’t careless. He had built this trap with precision. Married. Legally married. Not engaged, not promised, not in a relationship. The language was specific. The deadline was absolute.

And the message underneath was clear. You’re not enough. You need a man to handle things for you.

Even from the grave, Richard Hughes didn’t believe in his daughter.

A knock at the door made me flinch. I shoved the papers into a pile, though I wasn’t sure why. Everyone knew. Clara knew. The lawyer knew. The hotel staff probably knew, or would soon enough. Gossip traveled fast in places like this.

Soon the whole world would know that Lena Hughes was a fool who had been played by a man who had never seen her as anything but a pawn.

“Come in.”

Clara entered carrying two cups of coffee and wearing the expression she had had all week, that careful concern and gentle vigilance of someone watching a friend standing on a ledge, trying not to spook them into jumping.

“You need to eat.” She set one of the cups on my desk, ignoring the papers I had tried to hide. The coffee smelled burnt. Hotel coffee always did, no matter how expensive the beans. “And sleep. When’s the last time you actually slept?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.” She settled into the chair across from me, her dark hair pulled back in a practical knot.

My cousin had been staying in my apartment since the funeral, sleeping in one of the guest rooms, refusing to leave me alone.

I wasn’t sure if I was grateful or suffocated.

Both, probably. “You’re running on rage and caffeine, and eventually one of those is going to give out. ”

“The caffeine, probably.”

“That’s not funny.” But her mouth twitched, just slightly. Clara had always appreciated dark humor, even when she was worried. “Staring at those documents won’t change what’s in them, Lena. You’ve read them a hundred times.”

“I know.”

“So stop torturing yourself.” She took a sip of her coffee, watching me over the rim.

Her eyes were sharp, assessing. Clara came from the banking branch of the Hughes family, the kind of money that taught you to read people like balance sheets.

She had been more older sister than cousin for as long as I could remember, and she had never once treated me like I was fragile.

“We need to talk about the marriage clause.”

I had been avoiding this conversation. Avoiding the math. Avoiding the obvious conclusion that every calculation pointed toward.

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“Do you?” Clara set her cup down. “Because I’ve been running the numbers, and I don’t see a lot of options here.

You need to be married within a year. That means finding someone willing to marry you in time.

Someone who won’t try to take the hotel out from under you the moment the ink dries.

Someone who actually has the resources to help you keep it running while you learn the ropes. ”

I waited. She didn’t say his name. Neither did I.

“The men you know,” she continued, ticking off fingers, “are your father’s business associates.

Old money types who think women belong in drawing rooms. The trust fund crowd your ex ran with, and we both know how that turned out.

Hotel industry contacts who would marry you for the property and nothing else. ”

“I know.”

“Any of them would want control. That’s the whole point of the clause. Your father wanted someone else running things. Someone with the right equipment between their legs.”

I flinched at the bluntness, but Clara had never been one for softening blows.

“The alternative,” she said, “is losing the hotel to charity in three hundred and five days. Watching everything your mother loved get handed over to some foundation that will probably sell it to developers.”

“I know what the alternative is.”

“I’m not saying your father was right.” Her voice gentled, just slightly. “I’m saying he built the trap, and now you’re in it. So who? Who could you marry in the next year who wouldn’t try to take everything from you?”

The answer hung between us, unspoken. A name neither of us wanted to voice.

There was only one man with the resources, the connections, and the leverage. Only one man who might have a reason to want this marriage as badly as I needed it.

The same man who had orchestrated my ruin from the very beginning.

“I would rather burn the hotel down,” I said, and my voice came out harder than I intended, “than let him touch me again.”

Clara didn’t argue. Just watched me with those careful eyes, the ones that saw too much and said too little.

“What about the contract?” she asked after a moment. “The one you signed with him. Is it over?”

I froze.

The contract. The twelve-month contract I had signed in his office, my hand trembling as I wrote my name at the bottom of each page.

Trading my body for my family’s debt. Trading my time, my obedience, my virginity.

I had assumed it was finished. The debt was paid.

He had taken everything the contract specified. What else was there?

But Clara’s question lodged in my mind like a splinter, and suddenly I couldn’t remember the exact terms. The exact language. What I had actually agreed to, in my desperation to save the hotel.

“I need to check the contract.”

The safe was hidden behind a portrait of my grandmother, a stern-faced woman I had never met who watched over the office with disapproving eyes. My hands shook as I worked the combination. Twice I got it wrong, had to start over, my fingers clumsy with sudden dread.

The safe held jewelry I never wore, the deed to the hotel, and a manila folder containing my copy of the contract.

I pulled it out and carried it back to the desk. Read it once, the words swimming before my eyes, then forced myself to read it again.