Page 172 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

Sometimes I liked to dream that my mother had disappeared by her own hand, driving that car over the side of that embankment and careening straight on into the Vltava River herself. Whether she was thrown into the river and drowned—the official story—or simply made it look that way—my preferred narrative—she was free.

I liked to dream about that a lot.

My father had paraded me around at the slick, revolting parties he attended after graduation, often leaving me in the tender care of my latest stepmother while he talked business with men who usually looked even scarier than him. This stepmother was the youngest one yet. She was only a couple of years older than me, but I thought she might be the one who lasted. Because as far as I could see, Katarzyna had nothing in her but spite and vitriol.

That was the very least a woman would need to survive my father.

Just because I knew better than to show it didn’t mean I hadn’t nursed mine for years.

You are lucky, she’d told me at one of those parties, not long before my twenty-first birthday.He is taking his time with you. He wants to make certain you fetch a good price. There are not many fathers who would do this for their daughters.

I was under the impression he was doing it for himself, I’d replied, because I didn’t have to watch my mouth aroundher.

She’d scoffed.Men are disgusting, she’d said offhandedly, and it made me think a variety of unpleasant things about my father—more unpleasant than usual, that was.But it is true that if they pay a lot, they will see you as expensive. A luxury item.She shook her head, her pale eyes on mine.You silly girl, don’t you understand? It’s not a question of escaping your fate. You have no fate your father does not control. My own father sold my virginity to the highest bidder, and believe me, those bids were high.

I’m sorry, I’d said quietly, unable to pull up the usual veneer.

Katarzyna had blinked, as if she’d never had a response like that before.

Life is too short forsorry, she’d replied, after a moment.I had to develop certain skills. Different skills. You will not need to do that, because he is sellingyouas a bride.

I must not have looked enthused, because she’d sighed.Yet somehow, I know that you will not be grateful.

She was right. I wasn’t.

And I knew better than to be histrionic where anyone could hear me, but some nights over the last year—as my father narrowed down his choices and I could feel the noose tightening around my neck—I would put my head in my pillow, scream, and wish that he would just kill me instead.

I was used to death as a companion, because whatever happened, it was coming for me.

That was a fact.

Whether at the hands of one of the terrible men who watched me as they negotiated with my father foralliances, their eyes hooded and their mouths grim, or if I made a bid to escape the way I liked to think my mother had. Or the way a daughter of one of my father’s business associates had. I wouldn’t say she was a friend—our lives were too fraught with peril for that—but she had fallen in love with one of her guards and had made it all the way to France before they’d found her. Them.

I didn’t like to think about that one too much.

All of this to say that when death came for me at last, I wasn’t surprised.

What I did not expect was for him to be so beautiful.

“Sakra,” I breathed out when I looked up from my book that night.

Because something infinitesimal had changed in my heavily guarded bedroom. Some inkling perhaps, if it was even that, because I heard nothing. I sensed nothing, but something made me glance up, and there he was. Standing there against the wall opposite my bed, his dark, glittering gaze seemed to wrap itself around me. Tight.Too tight.

I tried to take a breath and failed. “This is unfair.”

I set the book down. Maybe I dropped it. There was some part of me that thought that he was an apparition. That I’d dreamed him up or he’d merely leaped, fully formed, from the pages of one of the books I liked to read—but I knew better.

Immediately.

The hairs on the back of my neck were prickling. I had sudden goose bumps, everywhere. And I didn’t recognize him as one of my father’s guards—the only people I saw who weren’t family these days—so I knew he wasn’t one of them.

Besides, there was nothing about this man that wasn’t terrifying.

Including that sharp, impossible beauty of his.

It was a kind of…disheveled glory. His hair was thick and dark. His eyes were a lighter shade of brown, unreadable, and gleaming with something like a cool flame that I could feel lick all over me. His nose was a grand Roman affair and it brought his face the kind of sculpted authority it needed, because it would otherwise be too pretty. That sensual, stern mouth of his. Those cheekbones that defied gravity.

I shivered, and that was not even getting into theshapeof him. Perfectly formed, like something out of an art book, carved by masterful hands into the sort of lyrical marble that belonged in museums.