Leverage

His usually vacant gaze is tinged with disdain as he looks down at me.

"You're a failure, Hanna - so eager to disappoint."

If it isn't for the raging resentment at the candour in his stinging words, one might attribute my thudding heart to the manner in which his tongue savours the first taste of my name.

"Tell me something I don't know," I say.

The grip beneath my face tightens.

"Tell you something you don't know?" The elegant fingers cupping my chin tug me forward. "How about I give you something you don't know."

***
Hanna has nothing to lose.
Entering her second year of boarding school, she has the whole year planned out: eat, sleep, work, sleep, and all in all - survive.
She is, for the first time in her life, prepared and accepting of what is to come.

Except she isn't prepared. At all.

Instead, Hanna finds herself shouldering the looming dangers accompanying her professional identity, one last chance to win the approval of her mother by procuring something that possesses the potential to wreak chaos upon one of the biggest transactions the criminal underworld has seen in decades, and Him.

He who's every other word is an insult.
He who pries and hurts.
He who appears to know every, single. thing.

He is a plague, and Hanna avoids him because suddenly she has everything to lose.