Nikolai
It had been too easy.
She’d sat in my lap like a lamb waiting for the slaughter, soft and far too pliant for my liking. She’d even nodded when I told her there’d be no phone, no wandering around the city, no room for disobedience. She probably wouldn’t have even fought if I’d put her back over my knee and told her she’d be getting spanked every single night to make sure she’d be a good girl on her wedding day.
She’d been too quiet.
Sloane Kingsley didn’t do quiet. She didn’t do sweet.
This wasn’t my first rodeo. I’d seen it before, that same look in the eyes of men I’d interrogated, right before they bolted for a fire escape or made a play they didn’t have the cards to win. The glint in their eyes as they started planning their next move. That loud silence that hummed with the weight of anticipation.
She hadn’t said a thing since I’d started laying out the schedule. Her smile hadn’t slipped, her voice hadn’t shaken, but her eyes—those intelligent green eyes of hers—had gone glassy in that way people did when they’d stopped listening and started calculating.
I knew that she was thinking about escape. She hadn’t realized I could feel it. The stillness in her shoulders wasn’t submission. It was restraint. It was focus. I would have been a fool to ignore it, and I was no fool.
I let my hand continue its slow circles on her back. I finished laying out the plan: timelines, details, guests for the wedding. I was giving her the illusion of normalcy, of order. I handed her the script like I expected her to recite it, but I already knew she was planning a rewrite.
She’d wait until she thought I’d turned my back, until she thought my guard had slipped. She was thinking that she could flirt her way past a locked door or find a hidden phone or slip a message through some old contact she thought I hadn’t identified yet.
She was clever, dangerous in that sly, underhanded way, but she was still playing in my house. I could give her that illusion, for now. Let her feel like she was winning, that she had time. I wanted to see how she moved when she thought no one was watching.
The second she actually tried, I’d be there. I’d let her get just far enough to feel the adrenaline rush, just enough to taste freedom and then I’d close my hand around the leash she didn’t realize she was already wearing.
She’d learn for real what it meant to be truly punished, like a bad girl sometimes needed from her daddy.
I pressed a kiss to the crown of her head.
“Good girl,” I murmured, my voice warm, laced with something gentle enough to make her relax.
She was still tucked against my chest, legs hooked over mine, head resting just under my jaw like she’d been made to fit there. Soft, quiet, warm in all the right places, but not safe. Not from me, at least.
She didn’t have her phone, but my men had already recovered it back at her apartment along with the rest of her things. It had only been a couple of hours, but it had been long enough for Ivan to pull what we needed: data, threads, text logs, ghost apps hidden in private folders, burner connections. He’d found the messages she’d sent, the ones to Ghost, her tech guy. Her fixer.
I’d read every word.
It hadn’t ended there. Ivan hadn’t just traced the messages, he’d cracked Ghost. Found the IP, the alias, the VPNs. We already had a trace running on his system. If she reached out to him and he tried to help her vanish, we’d see it.
She might try to bolt, but she’d still be walking down the aisle in a week.
I let her rest her head on my chest and soak up the affection she clearly didn’t know what to do with. I let her think I was wrapped around her finger while she was already knotted tight around mine.
It was later that afternoon when I stepped into the security suite, two floors down, locked behind biometric clearance, invisible on every blueprint except mine.
The room hummed with quiet life. The monitors flickered, the soft buzz of encrypted signals tracing their silent paths across the city. Wall-to-wall displays. Network traffic, satellite sweeps, internal building movement. Everything.
I built this place for problems.
Sloane Kingsley was a beautiful problem.
Ivan was already at the center console, sleeves rolled up, two black coffees sitting untouched next to him. He didn’t look up when I entered. He never did when he was deep in the system.
“She checked the perimeter hall at 2:41,” he relayed. “Stayed by the elevator panel a little too long. Just long enough to think she wasn’t being watched.”
“Phone?”
“I’ve still got the shadow trace running.”
“Ghost?”
“Dormant. No pings from her account to his. But we know the handle. We know where he listens.”
I nodded slowly, stepping closer, arms crossed. The air in here always felt cooler, like the blood ran colder in this space because it had to.
“She’s smart,” Ivan continued. “Smarter than she lets on. She doesn’t act rashly. She watches. Plans. Probably taught herself how to move in shadows just so she wouldn’t ever have to rely on anyone ever in her life.”
He finally turned in his chair and looked at me.
“She’s not going to scream or run out the front door. She’s going to vanish, the second she thinks she can.”
I didn’t say anything at first. Just rested one hand on the back of his chair and watched the live feed cycle through the top floor.
She was in the library now. Browsing books like she was killing time. Calm on the surface, but her posture was all tension. A coiled spring, waiting for the right trigger to let loose.
She didn’t realize the cage was already closed.
“I want full surveillance synced to my phone,” I ordered, voice quiet. “If she opens a browser window, blinks at a keypad too long, I want to know.”
Ivan nodded.
“And if she reaches out?”
“She won’t,” I replied. “Not yet. But she’s thinking about it.”
“Do you want me to make it harder?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“No. Make it easy.”
He paused, brows pulling together. “Why?”
“Because I want to watch her try.” I told him as I straightened, adjusting the cuff of my sleeve. “She thinks she’s going to find a way out, that she can smile, play her part, and slip through the cracks.”
Ivan leaned back in his chair, arms folding. “And when she learns she can’t?”
I smiled slowly, eyes still fixed on her figure moving between the shelves upstairs.
“She’ll understand what it really means to belong to me.”
