Maria Romanov POV
The room smelled of polished mahogany and expensive leather — smells that should have been comforting. Instead, they felt like chains. My father’s lawyer smiled at me with teeth too white, too sharp. The snow outside blurred the world into white silence, but inside, the storm had already begun.
“Miss Romanov,” he said, sliding a thick folder across the table. “This is your inheritance settlement. Sign here.”
I froze. My inheritance. My family’s dynasty. Everything I had worked for — the villas, the private estates, the artwork — reduced to this single sheet of paper. My hand hovered above the pen, but instinct told me it was a trap.
“You’ve read it?” I asked.
“Entirely,” he said smoothly. “It’s all in order. The signatures are valid.”
I flipped the first page. My eyes caught the fine print — clauses I never agreed to, stipulations I had never even seen. And then, the kicker: the marriage clause. Not a suggestion. A demand. My life, my name, my fortune — all transferred to one man. One man I had never met.
“You’ll marry him,” he said, as if speaking to a child.
I blinked. My breath caught. “Who?”
“Mikhail Dragunov,” the lawyer replied, cool as frost. “Heir of the Dragunov dynasty. You will sign, or you forfeit everything.”
The pen trembled in my hand, though not from fear. Rage burned through me, white-hot and consuming. My father had promised protection. My family had sworn loyalty. And yet here I was, cornered in my own home, betrayed by the very people who should have had my back.
The walls seemed to close in. Snow rattled against the massive windows of my St. Petersburg estate, like the city itself warning me to obey. My pulse thundered. Obedience was not in my nature.
I slammed the folder shut. “This is illegal.”
“Miss Romanov,” he said, standing now, his expression never faltering, “you do not have a choice. Sign, or everything you love is gone.”
The fury I felt was blinding. Every fiber of me screamed to reject, to fight, to tear this life apart and start over. But reality hit me harder than any betrayal: I had no leverage. The Dragunov name was untouchable. The papers were ironclad. My signature — the one that bound me — was inevitable.
I looked out the frost-covered windows. The city beyond sparkled under winter’s gray sky, oblivious to the war unfolding in my own home. And then, the thought I tried not to allow: the man I would marry. The stranger who held my fate in his hands. Mikhail Dragunov.
The very name made my skin prickle. It was a name that commanded respect, feared in boardrooms, whispered in society circles. And soon, it would own me.
I picked up the pen, not out of submission but calculation. If I had to walk into the lion’s den, I would do it with fire in my veins.
And yet, just before my hand touched the paper, a shiver ran down my spine. Something dark lingered in the air — the inevitability of the Dragunov heir, the absolute control he would demand.
“You’ll marry him,” the lawyer repeated. Not a question. A verdict.
I exhaled slowly. My eyes burned, but my lips were steady. “Then let him come,” I whispered, more to myself than anyone in the room.
Snow swirled outside, frost forming sharp patterns against the glass. And inside, my life had been rewritten.
The pen was colder than I expected. It burned between my fingers as I signed my name, each letter stripping something from me I couldn’t name. When I looked up, the lawyer was already closing the folder, as if my future were nothing more than paperwork.
Outside, snow continued to fall — silent, endless, indifferent. Inside, I understood the truth with terrifying clarity: I hadn’t just lost my inheritance.
I had been delivered.