Page 3 of His Contract Queen

“She will come willingly,” he says smoothly. “I assure you. She won’t give you any trouble. My daughter, Katerina, will understand.”

I study him for a long moment before finally speaking. “Understand what, exactly?”

He replies without missing a beat. “That this is a necessary sacrifice to keep my… dealings from being exposed to the public. She cares about the career I’ve built over the last two decades just as much as I do. It’s something we’ve both worked tirelessly to uphold.”

There it is. That word.Sacrifice.Always used by men who never intend to be the ones paying the price.

I lean forward at last, nodding once to the man holding the lighter. The flame flares once again, bright and steady under the dim lighting, and I bring the end of my cigar to it, rolling it slowly as I draw in. Smoke fills my lungs, grounding me, buying me time to think.

Nothing he’s saying makes sense.

As far as I’m aware, his daughter is in her early to mid-twenties. Hardly the seasoned political architect he’s describing. Ramil Borchin has been embedded in government for decades, long before she was anything more than a child trailing behind him at official functions. So how exactly has she “worked tirelessly”to uphold his career?

She couldn’t have.

Which means this narrative isn’t for me.

It’s for her.

Or rather, it’s a story he’s already rehearsed. One he plans to sell her with the same polished conviction he uses on his voters and colleagues to get what he wants. It’s a narrative where duty replaces truth and obedience is framed as virtue.

And then there’s the larger question, the one he hasn’t even attempted to answer. If his debts are what put him here in the first place, why would his daughter sacrifice anything to save him? Why bail a man out of a grave he dug himself, especially when the shovel is still in his hands?

The answer is obvious.

Because he’s counting on love.

He isn’t offering her because he thinks she’ll agree. He’s offering her because he thinks she won’tdareto refuse him.

It tells me exactly how little he values the one person he claims to be protecting.

I don’t hear justification in his words no matter how carefully he packages them. All I hear is the hypocrisy of a man who has spent his entire life hiding behind medals, uniforms, and speeches about duty, now turning those same ideals into weapons and aiming them at his own child. He invokes sacrifice like it absolves him of responsibility when in reality, he’s engineered the situation so that he alone is spared the consequences.

He will not dirty his own hands.

He will never endure shame, exposure, or loss if it means taking a public hit.

Instead, he’ll offer up his only child to carry the weight of his failures, all the while dressing it up as service so he can sleep at night. Trying to frame it as some noble choice when in truth he’s ensuring that nothing of value tohimis lost while his reputation remains intact. His career survives and that squeaky clean image of his stays polished and untarnished.

Sacrifice is just another word for cowardice, in my opinion.

I don’t argue with him.

There’s no point.

Once men like him decide they are virtuous, truth becomes irrelevant. It bounces off the armor they’ve built of self-justification and hollow accolades without care. Men like himwill simply take the blows without remorse and move forward, dragging everyone else behind them, and call it leadership.

So I lean back in my chair and let a lazy smile pull at my mouth, the kind that will put him at ease because he’ll mistake it for indulgence instead of assessment.

“I’ll certainly think about it.” My tone is easy. Almost amused. Exactly what he expects from someone like me. The casual predator being entertained by the notion of leverage. I play the part flawlessly. I always do.

Inside, though, something else has shifted.

I dismiss him with a flick of my hand and a bored glance toward the door. He hesitates only a fraction of a second before standing, relief flickering across his face so quickly, he probably thinks I don’t see it. He believes he’s survived this for the time being, that he’s bought himself a way out.

He’ll leave unscathed only because I haven’t decided to put a bullet in his head the way he feared I might.

When the door closes behind him, the room feels heavier. The air settles differently, thick with something I can’t quite name. I sit there for a long moment, cigar burning slowly between my fingers, smoke curling up toward the ceiling.