Reborn As The King Of Wealth

What They Do to Girls Who Say No

"Let go of me!"

Natasya's voice tore through the empty parking garage, sharp with panic, as two men she'd never seen before wrenched her toward a waiting van, one gloved hand clamped hard over her mouth to muffle the sound, the other twisting her arm behind her back at an angle that sent white-hot pain shooting up into her shoulder.

She'd stayed late at the library, same as always, cutting through the garage because it was faster, because she'd walked that route a hundred times without incident — until tonight, when a car had idled too long by the exit and two figures had stepped out of the shadows with the calm, practiced efficiency of people who had done this before, who knew exactly how long it took a scream to go unheard in an empty concrete stairwell.

"Quiet," one of them hissed, dragging her backward as she kicked and thrashed, nails raking uselessly against a leather glove. "Boss just wants to talk. Should've minded your business."

She didn't know what business he meant. She didn't know, couldn't have known, that Berta — desperate, humiliated, watching her family's empire collapse and convinced with a paranoid, cornered certainty that the mysterious transfer student's obsession with Natasya was somehow the key to reversing her fortunes — had hired men through a cousin's shady contact to make an example of the girl nobody would miss, the girl she had decided, somewhere in the wreckage of her own unraveling life, must be the reason her luck had turned so violently against her.

"Ugly little rat," the second man muttered, shoving her into the back of the van, "thinking she matters enough for someone like him to care. We'll teach you what happens to trash that gets ideas above its station."

Natasya's scream was cut short as the van door slammed shut, the sound swallowed by the concrete silence of the empty garage, swallowed the way so many things had always been swallowed before anyone came looking.

She thought, with a strange, detached clarity that surprised even her in the middle of her own terror, of the boy she used to bandage in that dark stairwell. She wondered whether he would have fought harder than she was fighting now, or whether he, too, would have simply gone still and quiet and let the world do what it wanted with him, the way he always had. She hoped, fiercely, that wherever he was — dead or transferred or simply gone — he had never had to feel anything close to this.

Inside, pinned between the two men, she fought with everything she had — teeth, nails, elbows, a desperation that came from somewhere far beneath conscious thought — but it wasn't enough, it was never going to be enough, and somewhere in the growing dark of her own fading strength, a single useless thought looped over and over in her mind.

Nobody knows where I am. Nobody is coming.

"Please," Natasya tried again, forcing her voice to steady despite the terror clawing up her throat, some instinct telling her that if she could just keep them talking, keep this from escalating, there might still be a way out of this that didn't end badly. "Whatever you think I did, whatever you were told — I'm just a student. I don't have money. I don't have anything anyone would want."

"Not our business what you have," the first man said, checking the straps binding her wrists with clinical indifference. "Boss pays, we deliver. That's the whole arrangement."

"Delivering me where?" Her voice cracked on the last word despite every effort to hold it steady.

Neither man answered. The silence that followed was somehow worse than anything they could have said.

The van lurched into motion, tires screeching against concrete, carrying her toward a warehouse on the edge of the city where Berta was waiting, jaw clenched, mascara smudged from crying tears of rage rather than remorse, ready to make someone — anyone — pay for the ruin closing in on her from every direction.

"Bring her in," Berta snapped at the men as the van doors opened, dragging Natasya's bound and struggling form out into the flickering fluorescent light of the warehouse. "Let's see how special she really is."

"You don't have to do this," Natasya managed, voice raw, blood at the corner of her mouth where she'd bitten down hard against the glove. "I don't even know you. I've never done anything to you."

"You exist," Berta said, and there was something genuinely broken in the way she said it, something that had long since stopped being about logic at all. "That's enough."

Natasya's eyes, wide with terror, found the exit doors chained shut on the far side of the room, found no phone, no weapon, no way out, found nothing but concrete walls and cruel faces and the growing certainty that whatever happened next, no one was coming to save her.

And then, from somewhere just outside the warehouse, a single black car door slammed shut — quiet, deliberate, final — and every head in the room turned toward the sound.