Page 9 of Desperate People

Why the way he looked at me—like he was mourning something before it had even happened—still tightens around my ribs some nights like a warning.

Dad wasn’t just talking about my face.

He was talking about the cost of it.

About how beauty can be both blessing and weapon, crown and shackle.

And now that I’m older, I understand.

I really understand.

Because I’m not just beautiful.

I’m famous. Insta-famous, but still I am notorious.

And that can be the most dangerous thing of all.

Because behind all my father’s steel and shadow and cunning, he was warning me.

Not about beauty itself.

But about what the world does to beautiful people.

What it’s trying to do to me every second of every day.

I should have heeded his warning.

Chapter One-Lucy

I hate it when my father is right.

Marat Volkov might have been the face of Volkov Industries for decades—handsome as the Devil, charismatic, powerful, terrifying in boardrooms—but at the end of the day, he’s always just been Dad to me.

And God help me, he’s usually right.

Especially when it comes to men.

Especially when it comes to Balor Cruz.

He warned me. Not in so many words—he's too respectful for that—but I saw it in the way his jaw clenched when Balor first walked into a family dinner.

In the quiet, assessing looks he gave me when I talked about him.

And later, when things between us started heating up and cooling down with whiplash-level force, my dad said it clearly:

“Don’t lose yourself, moya lyubov. No man is worth breaking yourself for.”

But I already had.

Not in some dramatic, fall-to-my-knees kind of way.

But in small, insidious ones.

In the way I waited for Balor to look at me when I walked into a room.

In the way I picked out clothes that I hoped would make him blink.

In the way my heart twisted into a knot every time he showed up at Volkov Towers with that unreadable expression and those goddamn mismatched eyes that looked through me like I was something fragile and dangerous all at once.

---