Page 15 of His Contract Queen

I try not to let it get to me.

My father is a careful man by nature, always has been. He would never risk sending unnecessary replies that could expose me if he thought they would. He wouldn’t jeopardize an operation or my safety by offering comfort when silence is safer.

That’s what I tell myself as I sit there staring at the dim glow of the burner phone’s screen, waiting for a reply that never comes, hoping that tonight will be different.

After an hour, I power the phone down and slide it back into its hidden seam. With every passing night as I slip the burner back into its hiding place, the silence begins to feel less like strategy and more like a distance growing wider between us that I did not anticipate.

I force myself not to spiral, not to chase these possibilities into dark corners of my mind where fear starts to nest and take root before I can stop it. My training, my discipline, and my upbringing have taught me better than that.

This mission demands my composure, no matter what.

All I can do now is continue what I’ve been sent here to do and have faith my father is following through with his own assignment on the outside.

The next timeI run into Aleksandr Volkov happens late one evening.

It’s my own fault, really.

Not because he ever gave me a curfew. Aleksandr doesn’t operate like that. As far as I can tell, he’s not interested in playing warden to the people who live under his roof, staff or otherwise, no matter how pointedly he’d barked out his rules the first day we met. He simply sets expectations in a way that makes it abundantly clear that deviation will be noticed and dealt with accordingly.

So, while he never explicitly confined me to my wing after dark, it has been implied since day one that I’m to return to it anyway. It’s one of the many unspoken rules I’ve decided to ignore outright.

I move carefully through the west corridor and down to the main floor, the marble cool beneath my bare feet. The temperature difference sends a quiet shiver up my spine. I hadn’t intended to come barefoot, but I’ve noticed how much rubber soles echo on this kind of flooring. Silence, at this stage, is more important than comfort.

As soon as I get to the main floor, I take an immediate left. This hallway is rarely used at this hour, a fact I confirmed several nights ago. I even wrote it in my report and asked my father whether he thought it was time to start gathering physical intelligence in the form of voice recording and pictures.

But as usual, there was no reply.

I’d told myself that his silence meant trust. He believed I was capable of making the call myself as he’d stated multiple times the day I’d left our family home to be taken here. If he felt something like this was dangerous or ill-timed, he would have found a way to warn me.

So here I am.

The hallway stretches ahead like a dimly lit tunnel, broken only by a single sliver of light spilling out from beneath a door at the far end of it. That warm golden stripe is my beacon. My target, rather. When I reach it, I slow and strain to listen. It’s hard to hear through the thick door, but with how quiet this part of the estate has gotten, voices whisper from underneath the slight crack under the door.

They don’t sound angry, but they do sound serious.

Whatever is being discussed, it’s not the kind of idle conversation I hear at the dining room during breakfast when lieutenants share a joke or compare notes about routine business operations when they forget I’m there. This sounds like more than just business.

I move closer to the door, careful to keep to the darkest edges of the hallway where security cameras won’t pick up on me so easily. My heart thuds against my ribs, not out of fear but with a razor-sharp awareness that I am crossing a line tonight.

It’s a deliberate one I can’t take back, a purposeful one that will hopefully get me the answers I need so my father can get me the hell out of here.

I press my ear to the wood and I hold my breath.

At first, all I catch are murmurs. Blurred tones melt into each other, making it impossible to decipher what’s being said. Their cadence rises and falls, nothing clear enough for me to latch onto to use in my report.

Just as I’m leaning in closer, practically molding myself to the wood, an unmistakable sound shatters the quiet.

A scream.

It slices through the muffled conversation so violently that I nearly stumble back from the door, my heart lurching up into my throat. Before I can fully process the shock, a voice erupts from the other side, raw with panic.

“—don’t have the money!” His words are cut off instantly by another scream, louder this time. A harsh impact follows with the distinct, sickening sound of something solid colliding with flesh.

Each blow lands with a heavy thud, loud enough that it faintly vibrates through the wood beneath my ear. The screaming twists into a guttural cry, then into desperate pleas. There aren’t words anymore, just incoherent sounds strung together by terror and pain.

My stomach flips. This is not the controlled business talk I expected or coded exchanges my father trained me to decipher and uncover. No, this is the violence rumored behind closed doors and whispered through the political grapevines that Aleksandr Volkov is capable of. The violence that props up his empire and the ruthlessness my father warned me to never underestimate.

It’s the same he now expects me to help infiltrate, manipulate, and dismantle from within.