Percival Rozen

Catch me if you can.

That was the game. The only game two monsters like you could ever play.

Seven years. Seven years married to Percival Rozen, and in those seven years, not once did it feel like something holy. It was a sentence diplomacy sealed with a ring.

He doesn’t love you. He can’t and will never be. Not after what you did. Not after what hedid.

Because it was then,

Seven years ago—thirty-six corpses scattered across two cities. Massacre. Two dynasties brought to their knees. Rozen stood over the ashes of your estate—your home smoldering, your parents unrecognizable in the wreckage. And you? You stood over the twisted bodies of his men..including his ex-lover, her throat slit open beneath your knife.

And still, the worst part wasn’t the killing. It was the silence afterward. Because when the smoke cleared and the blood congealed, there was only one solution. A fucking wedding.

You and Rozen were unfinished vengeance wearing human skin before you were husband and wife.

So no, you didn’t fall for him. God knows you knew fucking better and you will make him fall apart.

So then, cut to the present—on one mundane Thursday.

Rozen returned that night in silence, though the world had been screaming his name all week. Three ports had burned. A Bratva informant’s body was fished from the Danube. And two of your safehouses no longer existed.

Because you had vanished.

Methodological and without noise. Only a cold-pressed seal left on his desk with one line in your handwriting

“Catch me if you can.”

The estate was suffocating in its quiet, every corner soaked in tension like gasoline waiting for flame. His gloves were still stained with someone else’s blood when he walked through the door, his coat dripping from rain or ruin—you couldn’t say which.

Rozen didn’t speak to the guards. Didn’t ask questions. He already knew where to go.

Your office.

Where the hunt had always started.

He opened the door like a blade carving through silence. The scent hit first—your perfume. Faint, like a ghost he couldn’t exorcise. And then, the sight of your chair, empty. Your laptop screen, cracked. The windows wide open to the winter night. You’d been there. Moments ago.

Gone.

He didn’t move. Not at first.

Because Percival Rozen wasn’t built to be outmaneuvered. Not by anyone. And especially not by the woman the world believed he owned.

His voice, when it came, was low and glacial.

“She’s playing games.”

Lucas stood still at the threshold, careful not to breathe too loud. “Sir, we’ve traced her last movement to Budapest—”

The glass shattered in Rozen’s grip—his whiskey untouched, forgotten. The cut bled, slow and deliberate. But he didn’t care. Pain meant nothing. Not compared to this.

You weren’t running. You were challenging him. And he knew why.

You’d never forgiven him. Not for burning down your whole estate—leaving your parents grilled through the ashes.

But Rozen never forgiven you also. For leaving his dead lover choked in her own blood. He never killed you for it. And that was his first mistake.

“Activate Protocol Vanta,” he ordered, voice clean and final. “Wipe the Eastern accounts. Call in every debt. If she’s anywhere in Europe, I want the ground scorched before her feet even touch it.”

Lucas hesitated. “Sir... that will collapse three alliances—”

“Then let them fall.”

Rozen wasn’t chasing his wife.

He was pursuing possession. You were his proof of power.

He’d burn every city and Rip the underworld inside out.

Because letting you go meant admitting you were never his. And that—that—he could not allow.

And if he does catch you—

He won’t let you walk again. Not as his wife nor as his enemy. Only as the last thing left standing inside the ruins of his world.