My mother used to say the world was cruel to soft-hearted women.
She died proving it. I was seventeen when cancer took her slow, brutal, and merciless. She fought with everything she had, and in the end, it wasn't enough. We buried her in the rain, and my father didn't even cry. He didn't look at me, either.
That was the day he stopped being my father.
In the years since, I learned to live with absence of love, of safety, of a parent who should've protected me. I worked two jobs, clawed my way through school, and swore I'd never need anyone again. Especially not him.
After that, I had no one. No family. No friends. Just Micah the quiet, brilliant analyst I shared a cubicle with at work.
We were close, not exactly. But he noticed when I skipped lunch, covered for me when I broke down in the staff bathroom, and once walked me home in a thunderstorm without saying a word. He was the closest thing I had to someone real. So when dad called me out of nowhere and said, "Come home. It's important," I should've hung up.
But something in his voice weak, scared pulled me back to the house I swore I'd never step into again. And now, standing in the doorway of his dimly lit study, I wish I hadn't come. He's not alone. A man sits across from him, impossibly still. Dark suit, darker eyes. The air shifts when he looks at me like oxygen disappears.
Dominic Voss.
I've seen him in headlines. Billionaire. Business predator. The kind of man who ruins people without blinking. The kind who's always the one to walk away with bloodless hands and a fuller bank account.
What the hell is he doing here?
"Liana," my father says, rising. "I—I didn't expect you so fast." "You sounded like you were dying," I reply flatly. "What's going on?" Enough withthe family reunion; He said with his cold voice filling the room like a storm cloud. I turned to look at him,my eyes betray me tracing the hard line of his jaw, the way the stormlight catches in his silver watch admiring his facial features. "Your father and I have a business agreement." he said and I blinked snapping out of my thoughts.
I glance between them. "Since when do you do business with people who live paycheck to paycheck?" My father flinches. Dominic doesn't blink. "Since he borrowed eight hundred thousand dollars and couldn't pay it back."
I feel cold. "You loaned him that kind of money?" "I don't loan," Dominic says. "I invest. With interest." "And what does that have to do with me?"
My father won't meet my eyes. His voice cracks. "I didn't have anything else, baby. He said he'd take the house, and I... I couldn't lose everything. I didn't think he'd "Dominic cuts in with a smirk "So he offered you to be my s*x slave."