Pretty Little Rot

If someone offers to pay off your student loans in exchange for signing a non-disclosure agreement and moving into the middle of nowhere, you should probably ask more questions.

I didn't. I was a broke grad student desperate for a lifeline, and the contract offered by the elusive billionaire was too good to pass up. My job was simple: live in a sprawling, heavily fortified glass mansion in the mountains, teach his eight-year-old daughter French and mathematics, and never, ever go into the West Wing of the house.

I thought my new boss was just an eccentric, reclusive tech genius. He is devastatingly handsome, entirely silent, and moves through the mansion like a predatory ghost. He watches me with cold, pale eyes that make my pulse race for all the wrong reasons, but he is a devoted father, and the paychecks clear every week.

I thought I was safe in his snowbound sanctuary.

Until the night I accidentally wake up, walk into the wrong room, and see my quiet, eccentric boss standing over a man bleeding out on a plastic tarp, holding a suppressed pistol with the casual grace of a reaper.

He isn't a tech genius. He is the head of the most ruthless Russo-American syndicate on the continent, and I have just seen exactly what he does in the dark.

I know too much. I am a liability. I should be dead.

But as the Don of the syndicate wipes the blood from his hands and locks the heavy steel doors of the mansion, trapping me inside with him, I realize that dying might have been the easier option.

Because he doesn't want to silence me.

He wants to keep me.