Claimed By the Ruthless Mafia

The pen feels heavier than it should.

Julian slides it across the table without looking at me.a sleek black thing, impersonal, already knowing what it's going to do before I touch it. The marriage certificate sits open between us, cream-white paper stamped with official seals that mean nothing to me except the name printed at the top in clean, unforgiving typeface.

Elara Croft.

My sister's name. Not mine.

"Ms. Croft." Julian's voice carries the warmth of a courthouse floor. He taps one finger against the signature line. "We don't have all evening."

Across the room, my father stands near the window with his hands folded in front of him like a man in a church pew, waiting for absolution he'll never receive. His eyes find mine for only a second before he looks away. That single glance carries everything.the apology he's already offered a hundred times, the helplessness he can't shed no matter how much money he used to have, the quiet devastation of a man watching his daughter walk into the fire he built.

He tried to stop this. Two weeks ago, he sat at the kitchen table with both hands wrapped around a glass of whiskey and told me it wasn't my debt to pay. I told him it was.

'It's mine because I caused it. It's mine because Elara can't carry it. It's mine because someone has to.'

I pick up the pen.

The paper doesn't resist. It doesn't know the difference between the right name and the wrong one. I sign Elara Croft in handwriting that isn't quite mine.a little rounder, a little softer, the way I remember her signatures on birthday cards when we were children. Julian collects the certificate before the ink is fully dry, slides it into a leather folder, and snaps it shut with the finality of a sentence being handed down.

"She'll be ready within the hour," he says to no one in particular, and leaves the room.

My father crosses to me. He doesn't say anything. He puts one hand on the side of my face.just for a moment, just long enough for me to feel how cold his palm is.and then he says it so quietly it barely makes a sound.

"I'm sorry, mia cara."

I don't let myself cry. I smile instead, the way you do when the alternative is something you can't afford.

The sky outside White Florals has gone the color of bruised stone by the time I carry my single bag to the front door.

Julian stands beside a black town car idling at the bottom of the steps, checking something on his phone with the focused indifference of a man running late for a meeting that matters and an appointment that doesn't. I am, clearly, the latter.

My father follows me to the threshold. He stops there, as if crossing it would make it too real.

I take one last look at the house. The white wisteria over the east gate. The cracked flagstone path I've known since I was four years old. The upstairs window where Elara and I used to press our faces to the glass during thunderstorms, pretending we weren't scared. I've lived my whole life inside these walls, and standing at the edge of them now, I understand.not intellectually, but in the marrow.that I am not coming back.

'Don't make a scene. Don't make it harder for him.'

I turn and walk down the steps without looking at my father again.

But I hear him. Behind me, barely above the wind, a sound that isn't quite a word.just a broken inhale, the sound of a man swallowing something that won't go down. I keep walking. The car door opens. I get in.

Through the tinted glass, as the car pulls down the drive, I watch my father standing at the front door of the house with one hand raised, not quite waving, tears tracking silently down his face. He looks very small. He looks very old.

I face forward and don't look back again.

Two hours. The kind of silence that fills a car when no one in it wants to speak.Julian in the front with his phone, me in the back with my hands folded in my lap, watching the city dissolve into wealthier neighborhoods and then into something that barely registers as a neighborhood at all.

When the car finally slows, I look up.

The house is enormous. All glass and dark steel, angular and cold, built like something that was designed less to be lived in and more to be seen.a statement rather than a home. Light glows behind the floor-to-ceiling windows in a way that illuminates nothing, just brightness behind glass. No warmth. No movement.

The smell hits me the moment Julian opens the car door.

Roses. Dense and suffocating, the kind of concentration that doesn't come from a garden.it comes from intent, from someone deciding that this place would smell exactly like this, always. My stomach turns immediately. I press two fingers to my upper lip and breathe through my mouth, but it doesn't help. It never does.

'Volkov.' The name surfaces again, the way it has every time Julian has said it over the past week. Volkov. Something about that name sits wrong in my chest.not recognition exactly, more like the feeling before recognition, the moment when a familiar sound is still just out of reach.

Julian leads me through a front entrance that echoes with the sound of our footsteps and nothing else. No staff. No music. No signs that anyone lives here at all. He shows me up a staircase and down a corridor to a room that's been prepared with the mechanical precision of a hotel: clean surfaces, folded linens, a closet already half-filled with clothes in my size.

"This is your room." He says it the way someone says this is your seat on the flight.transactional, inconsequential. "Mr. Volkov will arrive tonight."

He leaves. The door doesn't lock behind him.

I stand in the center of the room for a long moment, breathing through my mouth, surrounded by someone else's roses.

The nausea crests about twenty minutes after Julian leaves.

I make it to the bathroom just in time, kneel on the cold tile, and stay there until my body decides it's finished punishing me. When it's over I sit back against the wall with my knees drawn up, staring at the grout between the floor tiles, and let myself think it for once without flinching.

Elara didn't want this wedding. She never wanted this. Whatever this man offered, whatever deal was struck, she was terrified.

She'd sat across from me three days ago with her hands wrapped around a mug she wasn't drinking from and said, very quietly, I don't know what he is, but I know what he does. She wouldn't say more. She never does, my sister.she keeps her fear very small and very private, like something she's ashamed of. I'd made her put down the mug and looked her in the eye and told her she wasn't going.

I'm going instead. I told myself it was atonement. I still believe that. But kneeling on this bathroom floor with someone else's name signed on a marriage certificate and the smell of roses making my eyes water, I am also just afraid.

I dig the surgical mask out of my bag.the small plain kind, nothing dramatic.and loop it over my ears. The rose smell drops to something manageable. I exhale.

My phone buzzes. Chloe's name lights up the screen.

I stare at it until it stops.

She'd want to know where I am. She'd want to talk through it, dissect it, offer something practical and warm. I don't have the capacity to be talked through anything right now. I silence the phone and set it face-down on the nightstand.

The room is too still. I've always dealt with stillness the same way.I move. I push the furniture a few inches to clear space near the window, pull up something with a beat on my phone's speaker at low volume, and start stretching. It's the only thing I know how to do with a body that won't relax any other way.

I'm in the middle of a slow turn combination when I hear it.

Downstairs. The particular hollow sound of a large empty house when something disrupts its silence.footsteps, heavy and unhurried, and then a sound that doesn't belong. Glass. The sharp, decisive crack of something breaking, followed by a low sound that I feel more than hear, a human sound, somewhere between a groan and a breath forced out by impact.

I stop moving.

Every nerve in my body pulls toward the staircase like a current.

'Don't. You don't know who's down there. It could be staff. It could be nothing.'

I wait. Another sound.not glass this time, but something wet and deliberate. My feet are already moving before I finish the thought.

The lower hall is dark except for the ambient glow bleeding in through the glass walls. I come down the stairs slowly, one hand on the railing, my eyes adjusting.

The first thing I see is the flowers. A large vase, toppled, its contents scattered across the marble floor in a dark wet spread.water, rose stems, white petals, and something else. Something darker. I crouch without thinking and touch the edge of it.

Blood. Fresh enough to still be vivid.

'Get back upstairs. Right now. Go back upstairs.'

I straighten. Turn.

The sensation arrives before I can locate its source.the distinct, crawling certainty of being watched, of a gaze with weight pressed against the back of my neck. My body floods with cold.

I run.

I make it three steps before a hand closes around my arm from behind.iron grip, no hesitation.and the momentum turns me and drives me backward into the wall so fast the air leaves my lungs in a single shocked burst. A forearm pins across my collarbone. A hand closes around my throat. Not enough to cut off air. Enough to make absolutely clear that it could.

I can't see his face. The hall is too dark. But the voice is right beside my ear, low and without inflection, the kind of voice that doesn't need volume to carry a threat.

"Who are you."

Not a question. A demand with a period at the end.

My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth. The hand at my throat tightens.fractionally, a reminder.and I drag in a breath to answer. But then the light shifts. The ambient glow from the glass wall catches his face at a different angle, and I see it.

The angle of his jaw. The set of his mouth. The particular coldness of eyes that are not quite grey and not quite any other color.eyes that I have spent two years trying to forget.

The word dies in my throat.

I know this man.

Damien.

The name surfaces from somewhere deep and buried, from a place I sealed shut and walked away from two years ago, from the version of myself that believed she could disappear and never be found. My mouth forms the shape of it without a sound.

Damien Volkov looks at me, his hand still around my throat, and the darkness of the hallway holds everything in place.his face, my terror, the blood on the floor, the white petals scattered around our feet like something ruined.

The nightmare didn't stay in the past.

I married it.