The Guardian's Clause

Synopsis

Three weeks after I buried my parents, a will I never knew existed made me the ward of a man I had met three times in my life. Aleksander Marek is forty-four, my late father's reclusive business partner, and the coldest man I have ever stood in a room with. His house sits at the end of a snowed-in track on a frozen lake, half its doors locked, and the night I arrived the storm closed the road behind me so that there was no leaving until spring. Everyone warned me he was dangerous. My uncle, the only family I have left, was warm and bereaved and full of papers for me to sign, and Marek took every one of them out of my hands before I could. I thought the cold man was my jailer. I was wrong about which door the trap was behind. The guardianship was never meant to protect me, it was meant to hold me still until my twenty-fifth birthday handed someone everything I own, and the forbidding stranger who locks his rooms against the world is the only person standing between me and the people who smile when they ruin me. He will not touch me while he holds power over me. He has told me so, in that flat voice, with his hand an inch from mine on the bannister and the snow coming down. He broke first. He hates himself for it. And I am learning, slowly, in a house that is finally getting warm, that the strong hand I have always mistaken for safety was only ever the shape of a cage, and that I will not be free, or loved as an equal, until I learn to hold my own.