Page 184 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

Never before in all of his life had he ever confused work with play.

Rux was getting to him in ways he could not understand.

He did notwantto understand.

She was secured. It didn’t matter whatfeelingswere assaulting him—all that mattered was that simple truth. She was secured, as intended, and he underscored that by stepping back, crossing his arms over his chest, and gazing down at her as impassively as possible.

Maybe he was proving to himself that he could.

A thought that made him feel—

He stopped himself right there and reminded himself who the fuck he was. Then did his best to act like it.

As if he was still the man who hadn’t felt his own heartbeat in longer than he could recall.

He watched as she tested the cuffs, and, again, understood that something in him respected that. Only a fool accepted that a door was locked without testing it himself.

When she was finished, she let her arms hang so that the wires held them aloft instead of fighting against them, he found that interesting, too. Once again, Rux seemed more relaxed than he would have expected. More relaxed than most could have been, given her predicament. Certainly more relaxed than any other person he’d had in a position like this.

But the last time he’d asked her why she wasn’t afraid, it had changed something in him. It had fundamentally altered something in him that he couldn’t name, but he could stillfeelit, like one of those hangovers his cousins joked about.

Jovi had never experienced one of those, either. His entire life was about maintaining control and wielding it in service of his uncle.

And here he was, standing in a bare, stripped-down room where he held every last scrap of power there was. Where he controlled every single thing that had happened or could happen.

There was no reason that he should feeldrunk, or what he assumed drunk must feel like, having witnessed it so many times in others.

He thrust that aside.

“Now we will decide how much of an actress you are,” he said in a forbidding voice—his usual voice, he corrected himself. “I will take a video. In it, you will beg and plead for your father to save you.”

He expected her to burst into tears, but instead, she laughed.

Perhaps he should have expected that, he thought. Most people were so terrified of him they did whatever he asked, but Rux had already proved that was not her.

“That’s a colossal waste of time,” she told him.

“I beg your pardon?”

“He wouldn’t care. That’s the point, right? To get him to care? To make him feel badly about something?Anything?”

“The point is to impress upon him that his own child is suffering for his decisions,” Jovi said. Repressively.

But she only laughed again, this time jangling the wires enough that they swung and made noise. “What makes you think that would bother him?”

Jovi gazed down at her. “Of course it would bother him.”

It would, he was quite certain, offend the man on every level, since he seemed to think himself the master of all he surveyed. This would take the message left behind in Rux’s bedroom and underscore it.

“No,” Rux said, quietly, and there was something so grave in her gaze. “It won’t bother him. He doesn’t care if I’m hurt. I suppose that he might be enraged that I’ll fetch a lower price, or be taken off the market entirely, because that would affect his bottom line.” She did not seem upset when she said this. There was no resignation, no hint of pain. She soundedcertain, that was all, and it was the kind of certainty that took years to reach this level of calm. “My father has more emotional attachment to the packages he has delivered.”

It wasn’t only that she was saying these things. Certainly, Jovi had met others in the course of the work he performed for his uncle who went out of their way to make it clear that they were not a strategic source of pressure against anyone, especially not the given target.

But none had ever stated it so matter-of-factly. Or while laughing.

In point of fact, Jovi could not recall very many people laughing in his presence, ever.

He had always assumed that was because they all knew what he did. What he was—a monster on a leash.