Resist Me

“You’re offering me a service, and in return I have to do something?..” I raise my eyebrows.
“—You didn’t mishear, Vladimir. Marry my daughter.”
“And if she doesn’t want to?”
“No one asks what she wants,” the future father-in-law snorts. “She’ll do what she’s told.”
“If she resists?” Artëm Fëdorovich leans closer and asks, slyly:
“And what, in your opinion, should be done with resistance?”
I hold the other man’s gaze and, narrowing my eyes, deliver clearly:
“Suppress it harshly.”

_______
My father sold me. In the twenty-first century, in a legal state. And nobody did anything to him for it. And they won’t.