CHAPTER FOUR: You're Mine Now

The words hit her like a slap.

"What?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted.

"You heard me."

"I said I'd work. I said I'd pay it off." She backed up until the dresser stopped her. "Not this."

"You don't get to pick the terms." He shrugged out of his jacket and dropped it over the chair, unhurried, like her fear was something he'd seen a hundred times and stopped finding interesting years ago. "Your father signed for it. You inherited it."

His shirt was already half undone at the collar. She hadn't noticed until now, in this light, the ink starting at his collarbone and disappearing under the fabric. Dark lines, something like wings. It should have meant nothing to her. It didn't, and that annoyed her more than he did.

"I'm a person," she said. "Not something you own because of a signature."

"You're both." He stepped closer. "Whether you like the maths or not."

"You met me four hours ago." She folded her arms, chin up, refusing to let her voice shake even though her hands already had. "Four hours, and you're already deciding I owe you my body. Do you do this to every woman you meet, or am I just the unlucky one whose father owed you money?"

Something flickered across his face. Not quite anger. Closer to surprise, quickly buried.

"Careful," he said.

"No, I'm serious. Is this a normal Tuesday for you? Kidnap a girl, dress her up, march her into your bedroom, and expect her to be flattered?" She let the disgust sit plainly on her face, not bothering to hide it. "You're not some tragic misunderstood king. You're just a man who's never been told no, throwing money at the problem until it stops being a problem."

His jaw tightened.

"Watch your mouth."

"Why? Because it's the only part of me you don't currently think you own?" She held his stare, refusing to be the one who looked away first. "You're not seducing me. You're not even trying. You're just used to women falling over for a face and a bank balance, and you assumed I'd do the same the second you got close enough. That's not charm. That's a dog assuming every hand is there to feed it."

The room went very still.

For a moment she thought she'd pushed too far, that whatever leash he'd been keeping on himself was about to snap. His eyes had gone dark, jaw locked tight, and she felt her pulse spike with something closer to real fear than she wanted to admit.

Then, slowly, he stepped back.

"Six tomorrow," he said, voice gone flat and clipped. "My study. Dressed plainly."

"That's it? No comeback?"

He didn't answer. He picked his jacket back up off the chair, shrugged it on with movements too controlled to be casual, and walked out without looking back. The door clicked shut behind him, final.

Ivy stood there a long moment, heart still slamming, half expecting him to storm back in and prove every word she'd just thrown at him wrong.

He didn't.

She sat down hard on the edge of the bed, hands shaking properly now that no one was watching, and let herself think, just for a second, of Daniel back home, who would have put his fist through a wall before letting anyone speak to her the way this house had spoken to her tonight.

She pushed the thought away before it could turn into something she didn't have room for yet.

---

Nero didn't go far. He stood in the corridor outside his own door, jaw still tight, replaying the last five minutes on a loop he couldn't switch off.

A dog assuming every hand is there to feed it.

Nobody had spoken to him like that in over a decade. Not his rivals. Not his own father, on the rare occasions the man still bothered trying. Women didn't insult him. They performed for him, competed for him, occasionally feared him, but they didn't stand in his own bedroom with their arms crossed and call him a dog to his face.

He'd wanted, for one brief and unfamiliar second, to put his hand around that sharp mouth of hers and see how long the defiance lasted up close.

He hadn't. He'd walked out instead, and he still wasn't entirely sure why.

He told himself it was restraint. Strategy. The smart move with an asset he hadn't finished deciding the value of yet.

Standing alone in that corridor, jaw still tight from the effort of appearing unbothered, he suspected it was something considerably less controlled than that, and he didn'

t like how much he intended to find out which one it actually was.