Page 82 of His Contract Queen

Terror coils hard in my stomach.

A realization hits me with brutal clarity. He’s going to kill me. For a strange, suspended moment, my mind becomes very quiet.

After everything… the gala, the exposure, the fight… this is where my story stops. In a freezing basement, barefoot, staring down the barrel of a gun.

Maybe I’d deluded myself into thinking they wanted me alive.

It would have made sense, in a way. Drag me into some windowless interrogation room, keep me locked away while they tore apart every detail of what I knew about my father’s operations. Use me as leverage. Use me as evidence. Use me until every useful scrap of information had been extracted.

That’s the version of events I’d been bracing myself for.

Taking my father and me out and completely wiping the Borchin name from existence before any more of his crimes can surface publicly fits perfectly within their playbook.

Dead people don’t leak information. They don’t embarrass the military on international television. If both of us disappear tonight, the narrative becomes simple—a disgraced colonel and his mentally unstable daughter lost in a tragic incident.

Case closed.

My gaze flicks briefly to the darkness behind him.

Only a few steps beyond him is freedom. I can almost smell the snow outside, that clean, biting scent of winter that means the world beyond this house still exists.

Three steps.

Maybe four.

That’s all that stands between me and escape.

The man watches my eyes move. His head tilts slightly, following the direction of my gaze before he slowly straightens to his full height.

To my surprise, he lowers the gun. The movement is slow, as if he’s trying not to startle a nervous animal. He slips the weapon back into the holster at his hip before lifting one hand and gesturing casually toward the tunnel.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go.”

My brows knit together immediately.

Does he think I’m stupid?

Maybe he believes the earlier display of the gun is enough to make me compliant. That I’ll obediently follow him anywhere he tells me to just to stay alive a little longer. Little does he know I’m willing to risk everything for the slim possibility I’ll make it out of here and back to Aleksandr.

I don’t move.

For a brief moment, irritation flashes across his face before he smooths it away again, faint boredom returns like a mask slipping back into place.

He steps forward.

Instinctively, I step back.

The distance between us closes slowly until I realize with a sharp jolt that he’s herding me away from the door. Away from the tunnel. By the time I register what he’s doing, I’m already halfway back across the basement.

My eyes dart toward the tunnel entrance, and then I move. I lunge sideways, darting around him in a sudden burst of motion and sprint straight for the opening.

I almost make it.

His hand clamps around my arm before I can take two full steps. The force of it jerks me backward hard enough to steal the air from my lungs. I twist violently in his grip, kicking and clawing at him with every ounce of strength I have.

“Let go of me!” I snarl, driving my knee up toward his groin.

He pivots smoothly out of the way, my knee missing its target by inches. Before I can recover, his arm hooks around my waist. He lifts me clean off the floor like I weigh nothing. I thrash wildlyin his grip, nails scraping down the side of his face as I claw at him. My fingers catch skin this time, dragging hard enough that I feel the resistance give way beneath them. Blood wells instantly along the shallow cuts.