Page 6 of Curvy Sold Mate

She said nothing.

He crouched in front of her, close enough to smell—woodsmoke, sweat, the faint metallic tang of a body running on cortisol and diminishing reserves. “Your brother’s going to pay a great deal to get you back. I want you to know that.”

“You want me to feel expensive. Is that supposed to be flattering?”

“It’s supposed to be honest. You’re worth a significant amount to me, Olivia. Not because of who you are. Because of who your brother is.”

“At least you’re straightforward about it.”

“I find it saves time.” He stood and brushed his knees. “You’ll be comfortable here. My men won’t touch you. Food, water, shelter. This doesn’t need to be unpleasant.”

“You drugged me with a suppression shard and zip-tied my wrists.”

“Precautions.”

“You kidnapped me from my own territory during a sacred ritual.”

“Timing.” He held her gaze. “Your brother will have my terms within the hour. If he’s pragmatic, this ends by morning.”

He moved toward the flap and paused. “For what it’s worth—this isn’t personal.”

“Marcus.”

He turned, and she looked at him from the floor—bound, wolfless, wearing a dress she’d chosen that morning because it made her feel commanding, the silk ground with dirt now, a tear along the left seam where she’d fought for her life. She let him see exactly what she thought of him. There was not a trace of fear in her eyes.

“When my brother comes,” she said, “I want you to remember this conversation. I want you to remember standing here telling me it wasn’t personal, while I sat on the floor of a tent you put me in.”

Marcus held her gaze for three seconds before the tent flap dropped and the padlock clicked.

Alone with the shard pulsing against the inside of her forearm—a second heartbeat, foreign and wrong—she cataloged sounds. Noted patrol intervals. Counted the seconds between the coughing man’s circuits, because a cough meant a pattern and a pattern meant a gap.

There was always a gap.

Chapter 4 - Viktor

Viktor smelled the camp before he saw it—sour canvas, damp wood smoke, and the sharp animal stink of men living rough on depleted supplies.

He cataloged the rest as he stepped through the perimeter. Tents patched beyond the point of dignity, a fire pit choked with wet ash, rations stacked in the open because no one had built storage. Three men visible—one on the tree line, armed and fidgeting, two near the central tent standing in the posture of men who wanted to look like guards but hadn’t done enough of it.

He’d brought the ransom in a leather satchel. Gold and pack bonds—transferable ones, redeemable for territory access and trading rights, currency that bought influence rather than goods. Kahn had assembled it in under an hour. The speed at which it was gathered was a message in itself.

Marcus emerged from the largest tent wearing a composure that didn’t fit—too careful, too practiced, a calm that cost visible effort to maintain, which meant it wasn’t calm at all.

“Viktor Hale.” Marcus smiled. “I expected Kahn.”

“You got me.”

“I did. And you brought my price.”

“I brought a price. Whether it’s yours depends on the next three minutes.”

Marcus’s smile thinned. He gestured to one of the men near the tent, and the man disappeared inside. Viktor heard the metallic click of a padlock, the zip of a tent flap, a sound that might have been a voice cut short.

They brought her out, and everything he’d spent the last four hours holding in place detonated.

The leash he’d kept cinched tight—during the nine-minute run back to the compound, the briefing, the drive to Marcus’s coordinates with the satchel on the seat beside him—snapped taut and held.

She was alive, upright, walking under her own power, which he noted first because he’d spent the drive constructing and discarding scenarios in which she wasn’t. Dirt on her dress, a tear along one seam, zip ties on her wrists. Her hair had come loose from whatever she’d done with it that morning, falling across her face in a way she would hate. He knew her, knew that Olivia hated it when things were out of place.