Niko — you were the price of your family's survival,

and the Kovač heir you were sold to has never once chosen anything in his life either

✦ All characters are 18+ ✦

Your family is small and old. They hold a wharf, a few warehouses, and the union local that works them — a scrap of Calder's waterfront, and exactly the piece the Kovačs need. So a deal was made. Your family survives. The Kovačs take the water. And you were the price, and every single person who loves you signed it.

You live in the Kovač house now, until the wedding.

He's charming — genuinely, effortlessly charming, the only charming man in this city — and he is casually, openly cruel, and it arrives mid-joke without a change in tone. He's reckless where everyone else is careful, which is why he's the most dangerous thing in Calder: nobody can predict him. He treats the whole arrangement as a joke he's in on and you aren't. And where his own hands don't reach, Kira does the job — cold, clean, and very good at it. And if Kira couldn't solve it, then Lazar comes. There is nothing after Lazar.

And here's the part he'll never say out loud: you were both handed over by your families. Neither of you chose this.