Chapter 1 Lily #2
His eyes are ice blue. Pale and piercing and filled with something cold and calculating.
He's looking at me like I'm a problem he needs to solve.
And my stupid, traitorous body responds to him anyway.
What is wrong with me?
He's terrifying. Everything about him radiates danger—the way he stands, the way he watches, the tattoos I can see creeping up his neck above his collar. He's wearing all black. He looks like death personified.
But he's also... beautiful. In a brutal, devastating way. The kind of face that would make you look twice even as every instinct screamed to run. High cheekbones. A jaw that could cut glass. That scar through his eyebrow only makes him more striking, not less.
The senator is handsome in a polished, politician way. This man is something else entirely. Something raw and dangerous and magnetic.
I hate that I notice. I hate that my pulse quickens for reasons that have nothing to do with fear. I've been sold, I'm standing barefoot in a stranger's penthouse, and some part of me is looking at this man and thinking him.
You're broken, I tell myself. You're absolutely broken.
"This is her," the senator says, gesturing at me like I'm a piece of furniture. "Lily. Nineteen. Virgin, verified. I thought she might... suit your needs."
The Russian doesn't respond. He just keeps staring at me.
I can't breathe.
And I don't know anymore if it's fear or something else.
"Well?" The senator's voice is tight. Nervous. "Do you accept?"
The Russian still doesn't speak. He walks toward me—slow, deliberate—and I want to run. My body screams at me to run. But I'm frozen in place, a rabbit staring down a wolf.
Except rabbits don't feel heat pooling in their stomachs when the wolf approaches.
Stop it. Stop it. STOP.
He stops in front of me. Close enough that I have to tilt my head back to see his face. He smells like cedar and leather and something warm underneath, something that makes me want to lean closer even as I'm shaking with terror.
"What is your name?" His voice is low. Rough. Heavily accented. It rumbles through me like thunder, and I feel it in places I shouldn't.
"L-Lily," I manage. "Just Lily."
"No surname?"
"I was in foster care. I don't... I don't have one."
Something flickers in his eyes. Gone before I can identify it. His gaze drops briefly—not to my body, not the way the senator looked at me—but to the bruise on my collarbone. His jaw tightens.
"How old are you?"
"Nineteen."
"And how did you come to be here, Lily who is nineteen?"
My throat tightens. "My foster parents sold me. A month ago." I hate how small my voice sounds. How scared. How aware I am of him standing so close. "I was supposed to turn nineteen next week. They told me the men were going to help me find a job. Instead they—" My voice breaks. "They sold me."
His jaw tightens further. A muscle ticks beneath the scar on his eyebrow. He looks angry, but not at me. At the situation. At the people who did this.
That shouldn't make me feel safer. It shouldn't make me want to step closer instead of away.
"The senator says you are a virgin."
Heat floods my cheeks. I want to look away but I can't. His eyes hold me in place. "Yes."
"Is this true? Or were you told to say this?"
"It's true." My voice cracks. "I've never... no one's ever..."
I can't finish the sentence. The tears I've been holding back for weeks are suddenly threatening to fall.
No one's ever wanted me like that, I almost say. No one's ever looked at me the way you're looking at me right now.
Because he is looking at me. Really looking. Not at my body, not assessing my value—but at me. Like he's trying to see something underneath the fear and the blood and the bare feet.
He stares at me for a long moment. Then he asks a question I don't expect.
"What do you want?"
I blink. "What?"
"If you could have anything." His voice is quieter now. Almost gentle, though that seems impossible. "What would you want?"
The senator makes an impatient noise behind him. "Leonid, this is hardly—"
"Quiet." The word is sharp as a blade. The senator shuts up.
The Russian, Leonid, is still watching me. Waiting.
What do I want?
No one has ever asked me that. Not once in my entire life. Foster parents didn't care. Social workers had too many cases. The Hendersons certainly didn't ask before they handed me over for cash.
And now this terrifying stranger wants to know.
"I..." I swallow hard. The answer comes out before I can stop it. Small and broken and honest. "A family. Someone who wants me." The tears spill over. I wipe them away quickly. "That's all. That's all I've ever wanted. Just... someone who wants to keep me."
Leonid is completely still. His ice-blue eyes are fixed on my face, and something has changed in them. Something I can't read.
Then he turns.
In one fluid motion, he pulls a gun from somewhere beneath his jacket and points it at the senator's head.
"Leonid—" the senator starts, his face going white.
The gunshot is deafening.
Blood sprays across the white marble floor. The senator crumples, a hole in his forehead, dead before he hits the ground.
I scream.
My legs give out. I'm on my knees, staring at the body, at the blood pooling around his silver hair, at his eyes still open and staring at nothing.
Leonid stands over him. Gun still in hand. Expression completely blank.
"He trafficked in human beings," Leonid says calmly. "He sold children. He deserved worse than this."
I can't speak. Can't think. There's blood on my dress. The senator's blood. Some of it is on my face.
Leonid crouches in front of me. He tucks the gun away and reaches out slowly, carefully, like I'm a wounded animal that might bolt.
"Lily." His voice is quiet. "Look at me."
I force my eyes away from the body. Up to his face. He's close now, and I can see the lines around his eyes, the silver in his stubble. He looks tired. Old. And somehow, impossibly, sad.
"I am not going to hurt you," he says. "Do you understand? I am not going to touch you. I am not going to sell you. What that man did—what he wanted to give you away for—that is not who I am."
I'm shaking so hard my teeth chatter. "You just... you killed him..."
"Yes."
"In front of me."
"Yes." No apology. No explanation. Just fact.
"Why?"
His jaw tightens. "Because men like him are a disease. And I am the cure." He stands and offers me his hand. "Come. You need to get cleaned up. Get out of those clothes. You are safe now."
Safe.
I stare at his outstretched hand. Big. Scarred. Knuckles rough from violence I can only imagine.
He just killed a man in front of me without blinking. I should be terrified. I should be screaming, running, fighting—anything but standing here considering whether to let him touch me.
But the senator is dead. The traffickers don't care what happens to me. No one is coming to rescue me.
No one ever was.
So I take his hand.
His fingers close around mine—warm, firm, impossibly gentle for hands that just held a gun—and something electric sparks through me. My breath catches. There's blood drying on my face, a body cooling three feet away, and all I can focus on is the heat of his palm against mine.
What is wrong with me?
"Come," he says again, and leads me away from the carnage, down a hallway into the depths of his penthouse.
I don't look back.
He opens a door to a bathroom—white marble, soft lighting, bigger than any bedroom I've ever slept in—and gestures for me to go inside. Those ice-blue eyes watch me with something I can't decipher. Not hunger. Not cruelty. Something else.
I step past him, hyperaware of how close we are, how easily he could grab me, hurt me, do anything he wanted.
He doesn't.
You're safe now, he said.
I don't believe him. I can't afford to believe anyone, not after the Hendersons, not after everything.
But when I turn to look at him one more time—really look, past the blood on his shirt and the scar through his eyebrow and the coldness he wears like armor—I'm not sure what I see.
Monster? Savior? Something in between?
I don't know which possibility terrifies me more.