Page 47 of Marrying My Ex's Brother
His eyes harden with shame. “More than I can pay.”
My throat tightens. I think of the house. The cracked marble. The flickering garden lights. The old furniture polished forguests. The way he always pretended everything was fine while the walls quietly rotted around us.
All this time, I thought he was proud. Maybe he was only desperate.
“To whom?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer.
“Papa.” The word slips out before I can stop it.
His face changes, just slightly. Then he looks away. “To people who lent under Volkov guarantee.”
I go still.
Now I understand why he came.
“No,” I whisper.
“After you ran from the wedding, that guarantee disappeared.”
He looks exhausted now. Not sad. Not sorry enough. But exhausted in the way of a man who has spent days running from doors closing one after another.
“They will kill me unless I pay,” he says.
For a second, all I hear is the traffic outside the hotel window. A horn. A truck passing. Someone shouting from the street below.
They will kill me.
I hate him.
I do. I hate him for bringing me into this. I hate him for seeing my marriage as a solution before he saw me as his daughter. I hate him for every time he told me to be quiet, be pretty, beuseful. I hate him for knowing what Dmitri was and still pushing me toward him because the Volkov name could save him.
But I don’t want him dead.
The realization comes quietly, and I hate that too.
“So this is what this is about,” I say.
His shoulders tense.
“You’re not here because you were worried about me. You’re not here because your daughter disappeared for days. You’re not even here because I ran from my own wedding.” My voice cracks, but I keep going. “You’re here because without the Volkovs, they’ll come for you.”
“And you think I don’t know how that sounds?”
“I think you know exactly how it sounds.”
He looks at me then, and the fear in his eyes is still there. Raw. Undignified. Human. “I am not asking you to forgive me,” he says. “I’m asking you to understand that if I don’t find a way to settle this, I will be dead before the week ends.”
My chest feels tight.
I want to tell himgood. I want to tell him he earned this. I want to be the kind of daughter who can turn away from a father who tried to sell her comfort for his survival. But when I imagine him dead, really dead, not just punished in some clean emotional way, I feel sick.
He’s still my father.
“What do you want from me?” I ask.
He exhales slowly, like he has been waiting for the question and dreading it at the same time. “I have a proposition.”
