Chapter 2
Alina's POV
My birth parents were investigative journalists who spent their careers digging into the criminal underworld. Their specialty was underground boxing — exposing match-fixing rings and the organized crime networks that ran them.
You don't go poking around that world without consequences. They were threatened constantly. Once, someone tried to poison them. But they never backed down, and the thing they said to me most often was: "Be a good person. There's no good end for people who do bad things."
They came from decent, ordinary families — the kind of people who believed in doing right by the world. The people whose livelihoods they threatened believed in no such thing.
When I was nine years old, someone cut off their heads and left them on our doorstep.
The neighbors were screaming. Police cars came wailing down the street. I just stood there, numb, and looked up at the officers and asked when my parents were coming home.
The two heads had been so badly mutilated that from a distance they looked like nothing more than two dark, bloody masses.
I didn't learn they were my parents' until a forensic examiner handed me the report. The neighbor who had been sitting with me broke down sobbing and pressed her hand over my eyes, trying to keep me from reading it.
That was the day hatred took root inside me. I made a vow to spend my life finishing what my parents had started.
What I never imagined was that I would one day become part of the very industry they died fighting.
The memory came to me as I lay in my foster father's arms, my body shaking, a vibrating rod being worked into me while he held me. That was when his associate made the proposition — he wanted me to take a dive in my next boxing match. Throw the fight. Let the other side win.
He set two cases of American cash on the floor between my spread legs, apparently convinced that was enough to buy me.
His twisted smile curdled something in my chest. I looked straight at his face, so close to mine, and spat.
The smile froze. The wrinkles on his face went rigid, layering over one another like lava cooling into rock.
His thick, rough hand clamped down on the soft flesh at the top of my inner thigh, fingers digging in. "You little bitch. I'm offering you an opportunity, and you dare say no?!"
I couldn't form words with the rod still inside me. I lay back against my foster father's chest, my head tilted up, feeling like the man's grip was about to tear the skin from my leg.
My foster father spoke then, his voice measured: "Let go. I have a way to make her cooperate."
The man released me, only out of deference to him, and gave a cold laugh. "Women who don't listen end up auctioned off as sex slaves. Think carefully about which way you want this to go."
My foster father pressed a kiss to my damp forehead, his hand still working the vibrating rod without pause. "Don't worry. She'll agree in the end. Won't you, my little pet?"
When he pulled the device out, still buzzing, he pressed his palm low against my abdomen and guided what followed — making me squirt onto the two cases of cash.
While I moaned and wept, the two of them laughed. My foster father declared that I'd agreed, peeled off a thick roll of banknotes, and pushed it inside me.
I had never intended to give in.
I played along, pretending to comply, and spent the weeks that followed quietly gathering evidence — records, contacts, documentation of the match-fixing operation — and passing it to journalists and radio stations who might be able to do something with it.
The night before the match, it all fell apart. They found out what I'd done.
The retaliation was swift and brutal. With my foster father's silent approval, the man arranged to have my pre-fight water drugged. I lost the match without knowing why. When I came to, I was here — locked in a cage inside this castle, waiting to be auctioned off to whoever could afford me.
All I had done was refuse to cheat. And for that, I was to become a plaything for the powerful.
All I had wanted was to live with integrity. And for that, I was to be ground into the dirt.
If the only other option is bowing to men like these, I'd rather die.
So I stood where I was and said nothing.
The man's patience ran out. He drove his fist into my stomach.
The blow punched the air out of me. I doubled over, a strangled grunt escaping my throat, cold sweat breaking out across my skin.
"Are you going to apologize or not?!"
I clenched my teeth and shook my head.
The commotion had drawn attention. Scarface tightened his grip on me and sneered, his voice loud enough for the crowd forming around us to hear. "Look at this one. She picks a fight and still won't back down? Someone ought to throw her in the red-light district where she belongs."
A ring of men closed in around us, all masked. Through the eyeholes of their animal-faced masks, their gazes moved over me with the casual entitlement of predators.
Someone in the crowd called out: "Is she still a virgin?"
Scarface reached down and grabbed between my legs. His hand found metal. "Ha. This dirty little thing's got a labia ring. She's no virgin."
Laughter rolled through the crowd like a wave.
The mockery crashed over me, flooding my head, dragging up every moment of shame and violation I had buried. The humiliation my foster father had carved into me — all of it surged back.
The first time he assaulted me was on my eighteenth birthday.
I had overheard him in his study, talking business. The foundation he ran, the orphanages he funded — I heard it all. He had been using them, across multiple cities, to supply children to high-end private clubs. I don't remember how I walked away from his study door. I only remember feeling as though my entire body had been submerged in ice water.
I sat down at the birthday dinner he had arranged — candles, flowers, the whole careful display — and forgot entirely how to arrange my face.
He came downstairs after seeing his guests out, settled into the seat beside me, and spoke in that warm, unhurried voice of his: "Today you're an adult. Are you happy? I've got something planned for the next few days as well — I bought you an island. I've had fireworks set up for you there. Something to look forward to."
I couldn't reconcile the man sitting next to me with what I had heard. Eight years he had raised me. My understanding of the world cracked straight through. I sat there trembling, unable to say a single word.
He noticed something was wrong. He didn't press me. He simply put a birthday hat on my head and had the household staff gather to sing to me.
He watched me make my wish and blow out the candles. Afterward, he reached over and gently wiped a smear of cream from the corner of my mouth. "There's still one more gift."
The butler brought out a box. I opened it slowly. Inside was a jewelry set — the kind of thing that belonged in a museum case — deep blue gemstones catching the light.
I thought about how much suffering must have funded something like this. The moment I understood the breadth of what my foster father had built, everything he had ever given me seemed coated in someone else's blood and tears.
My hands shook. I didn't want to touch it.
He mistook my reaction for overwhelmed gratitude. He lifted the necklace from the box and fastened it around my neck, as casually as someone clasping a collar on an obedient dog.
I sat with my head bowed, trembling.
He finally read something in my face. "What did you see? Or hear?"
I couldn't meet his eyes. I told him it was nothing.
A brief silence settled over the room. Then I heard him give a quiet, soft laugh. "Do you like the gift?"
I grabbed the change of subject like a lifeline. "Yes. Thank you, Father."
It was only then that I became aware of how close he had gotten — far beyond anything a father and daughter would ever be. He took my hand and pulled me into his lap. Against the back of my neck, I felt his breath, uneven, thick with something I had no name for yet.
At some point the staff had slipped away without my noticing. The satin ribbon from the jewelry box had wound itself around my wrists, guided there by his fingers, moving like a quiet snake.
He looked at me, a smile spreading across his handsome face. "As long as my darling is happy. Now — I'm going to unwrap my gift."
He swept everything off the dining table and pressed me down against it.
I heard the crash and clatter of china and glass. Not a single word came out of me. Fear had locked my entire body rigid.
I saw him free himself from his trousers. My dress was torn from my body and thrown aside. I felt him pressing against me, slick and insistent.
I screamed. I beat my fists against his shoulders with everything I had.
He thrust forward.
Blood ran down my inner thigh and spread across the table. I tried to curl away from the pain and couldn't — his hands held me open, held me flat.
"Baby," he said, "you've been the one inviting this."
He moved against me, his body pinning down every attempt I made to fight back. I screamed at him, cursed him — the most raw, frantic I had ever been in my life.
"I never — I never invited anything — let go — please — it hurts — it hurts—"
"It always feels like this the first time." He pressed his mouth to my throat, and my sounds seemed to spur him on. "You'll get used to it, my darling—"
His tongue caught the tears at the corner of my eye. He kept talking, kept insisting, the whole time, that I had wanted this.
I kept telling him he was wrong. He kept forcing me to confirm something that wasn't true.
Pain breaks people. He had me tied to the bed, immobile, and he used me again and again, telling me with each thrust that I had been tempting him every moment of every day. I don't know whether my mind or my body gave out first. Somewhere inside the anguish and the screaming, I finally said what he wanted to hear — that I had seduced him. Only then did he stop.
"There we go. A woman, raised by my own hand, shouldn't play innocent after getting what she asked for. If you tempted your own foster father, at least be honest enough to own it."
I flinched back to the present with an involuntary shudder, his face swimming in my vision, close as it had been that night.
My awareness drifted in the borderland between then and now. The jeering voices around me were tearing at something inside my skull.
"Shameless, honestly. If she were a virgin I might consider buying her for that face of hers—"
"Trust me, a woman like this is an animal in bed."
"Then go buy her! Ha—"
Their silhouettes warped and buckled around me. A violent pain split through my head.
Just as Scarface drew his fist back for a third blow to my stomach, something broke loose in my chest and I screamed —
"No—!"
"Wait."
Scarface dropped his fist immediately. He turned with an ingratiating smile. "What can I do for you, sir?"
"I'm buying this woman. Have her brought to my car."
