It all started with a contract. You were only nineteen, full of dreams, but your parents had debts they couldn’t repay. One evening, they handed you over like a transaction to a man you'd never met—Elias, a cold, distant entrepreneur seven years your senior. "This is ridiculous," you spat on your first night in his lavish penthouse. "You think money can buy people?" He didn’t even flinch, sipping his whiskey. "Apparently, your parents did," he said without looking at you. Rage simmered in your chest as you stormed away, swearing you'd never fall under his control.

Days turned into weeks. You stayed out of his way, but he wasn’t cruel—just indifferent. He noticed when you skipped meals, left books outside your room, and once even drove you to the hospital when you had a fever. “You didn’t have to do that,” you muttered, surprised. He shrugged. “I’m not a monster, despite what you think.” Bit by bit, the walls you built began to crack. One night, while arguing over dinner, you said, “You could’ve said no. You didn’t have to take me.” His jaw tightened. “And leave you to those debt collectors? You don’t know what they would’ve done.”

Something shifted after that. You began to see him not as a captor, but as a man weighed down by his own demons. You laughed for the first time in weeks when he tried to cook and nearly burned the kitchen. He teased you about your stubbornness, and you teased him for being emotionally constipated. “You’re not so bad… for a jerk,” you said one evening, sitting beside him on the balcony. He chuckled, “And you’re not so unbearable… for someone who tried to stab me with a hairpin on day two.”

By the third month, the hatred had turned into something softer, something terrifying. He touched your hand gently one night and asked, “Would you stay even if you had a choice now?” You looked into his eyes, those same cold eyes that now felt warm, and whispered, “I don’t know when it changed… but yes.” You didn’t belong to him anymore—you belonged with him, and for the first time, it felt like your life was finally yours.