The Bought Roma Bride

Chapter 1 — Nine Men, One Breath

A drop of sweat stung Jack's left eye, but he simply blinked it away. He didn't move a muscle. The heavy service helmet clamped down on his skull like a vise, and his dark trousers clung hot to his thighs. The shimmering air above the close-cropped grass of the soccer field tasted of dust, sunscreen, and the sharp, biting stench of two-stroke fuel.

Breathe. Just breathe.

He felt Martin right beside him, heard the shallow, ragged breathing of the other seven men at his back. Nine hearts hammering to the same racing rhythm. Out here, on this white chalk line, the world was crystal clear. No urgent looks from his father, no crushing responsibility for the farm—that multimillion-euro operation, built up over generations, that tugged at him day and night. And on top of everything else there was Evelyn, the final straw: four weeks ago she had ended it for good, after a year of hoping in vain for the proposal he had never managed to make—out of sheer hesitation, a hesitation he now regretted with every fiber of his being. He pressed his hands flat against his thighs until his knuckles stood out white. He needed this run. These few seconds of absolute, brutal control, when he wasn't the ex who had hesitated too long, but only a muscle that knew exactly what it had to do.

Out on the grass, the chief judge stepped forward in his white shirt. Half the village behind the barrier fell silent. The silence fell like an axe, crushing and heavy. Jack tensed his thighs, a human steel spring a breath from release.

Then the shrill whistle pierced the silence. And Jack ran.

His cleats dug into the soft earth, his breath burned in his lungs, but his mind had long since switched off. Martin sprinted beside him, the water crew behind them. No thinking, no room for doubt. Every move hit its mark. They worked like the well-oiled gears of a Swiss watch.

Jack coupled the heavy hose to the manifold. A loud, metallic clack. In the same split second, the pump operator yanked the lever of the portable pump. The engine howled to life, and water shot through the white fabric under massive pressure.

Jack reached the red finish line. He threw himself onto his stomach and wrenched the nozzle up. The water burst out and hit the target dead center.

The chief judge flung his hand into the air. The stopwatch clicked. Time stood still.

To an outsider from the city, it might have looked like absurd slapstick: nine grown men stumbling over hoses on a soccer field, a meaningless small-town competition. But for these men and the crowd behind the white barrier, it was a moment of deep, almost spiritual significance.

The time that crackled over the loudspeakers was unheard of. They had won.

A jolt went through Jack. A massive wave of relief and triumph surged up from inside and took his breath away for a moment—a rush no victory had ever given him before.

Then the cheering broke loose, one single roar of screams, applause, and pure abandon. The tension fell away from the men like a suit of iron armor. Men who normally kept a cool distance, their faces weathered by hard farm work, suddenly fell into each other's arms without restraint.

Tears carved their way through the soot and dust on their cheeks. They laughed, they bellowed, they wept and clung to one another, unguarded and vulnerable as small children.

Jack stood in the middle of it all. He smelled the sweat, the water, the gasoline, and felt the hard, pounding hands of his comrades on his shoulders. In that moment he was a hero of his small, unbroken world.

The joy burst out of Jack, unfiltered and with a force that surprised even him. He was usually the quiet one, the one who kept to himself; as the only son on a farm that had grown over centuries, he had matured early into a rock, the kind of young man people trusted without a second thought.

But as he stood on the grass now and let the jubilant crowd embrace him, it suddenly felt hollow. All he could think was that it had been his own fatal mistake, driving Evelyn away with his endless hesitation. While the men around him screamed and laughed, his eyes swept the spectator stands on the sly. She was nowhere to be found.

The whole crew swept off the grass and into the beer tent like an unstoppable wave. There was no chance for Jack to slip away; he was trapped at the center of the triumph. The trophy they'd won already stood on the rough wooden table, filled to the brim with beer, and was making its way around the group. Everyone was flushed with victory and beer—everyone but one. Jack.

When the heavy metal cup was pressed into his hands, all he wanted was to forget. He took the trophy and tipped it back for a proper swig.

And at the exact moment he tilted the cup, he saw her.

Evelyn. She was standing over by the group that had been cheering them on earlier. But she wasn't standing there alone. A stranger's hand rested possessively on her hip.

The cool beer ran down Jack's throat, and at the same time an invisible dagger drove deep into his chest. His mind had grasped the situation instantly, razor-sharp, but his heart screamed and refused to accept it. After only four weeks, she had already replaced him. He set the trophy down. His gaze searched for her through the celebrating crowd, and now their eyes met.

Evelyn didn't look away. Just the opposite. She reached quite deliberately for the stranger's hand on her hip and held it there. And then, cold and calculating, in full view of the entire celebration, she turned her head and kissed the stranger square on the mouth—her eyes boring into Jack's the whole time. That's what you get for all your waiting, the gesture seemed to shout.

It hit Jack like a blow to the gut, knocking the air out of him. He stared at her fingers closing around the stranger's hand on her hip with such easy familiarity that his throat tightened shut. The laughter in the tent boomed in his ears like biting mockery. Without taking his eyes off her hand, he reached for the heavy trophy. He felt the cold metal against his lips until the beer washed his revulsion down in one bitter, foaming wave. He didn't let go of the trophy until it was drained to the last drop—hoping to flush away the burning image in his head along with it. The beer tent roared, his comrades bellowed and hammered on the tables and celebrated their indestructible hero. But for Jack, everything around him vanished; the cheering faded to a dull, meaningless drone. The only trouble was that the beer wasn't releasing its longed-for, numbing alcohol into his blood anywhere near as fast as Jack wanted to drown his grief.

So he drank himself into oblivion. With every glass, he pushed the memory of that defiant look and the stranger's hand a little deeper into the darkness, until at last a thick, numbing fog settled over his mind, blurred the faces, and pulled him down into a deep, dreamless sleep.

He was past noticing the net of comradeship that carried him. His men didn't let him fall. Without much talk, they grabbed the burly fellow, heaved him up, and hauled him outside. The trip to the Black Sea had been planned for months, a pure boys' trip—and of all people, it was Jack who had toyed with backing out until the very end, in the quiet hope of spending the weekend with Evelyn instead and patching things up. Now nothing was keeping him in the valley. Everyone had stashed their suitcases behind the beer tent before the competition; now they loaded not only their luggage but also their unconscious hero onto the back seat of the rented coach. Behind the wheel sat a Romanian-born driver who had been running the eastern routes for an Austrian company for years and knew the region, its language, and its customs better than almost anyone.

While the bus rolled east along the nighttime autobahn, Jack slept. The steady vibrations of the engine and the cool air-conditioning wrapped around him as his body, hardened by years of heavy farm work, silently set to work on the heat of the tent and the poison of the alcohol.

Twelve hundred kilometers farther east, on the same scorching day, Clara's sweat dripped into a bucket of murky gray water.

Her knees burned like fire on the hard linoleum floor of the Romanian open-plan office, but she kept scrubbing in the same steady rhythm. The air hung motionless and tasted of cheap chlorine cleaner and years of grime. Despite the unbearable heat, she wouldn't have dreamed of taking off the thick, threadbare sweater clinging to her body. It was her armor. Just like the baggy trousers and the stringy hair.

Make yourself small. Be invisible. That was the only mantra keeping her alive.

For years she had traveled across Europe as a tightrope walker with a small touring troupe—her only escape from the heavy hand of her foster family. Up there, on the thin wire under the big top, she had been free. On tour she had even picked up a little German, and for the first time she had felt something like real respect. But then the old owner fell seriously ill, the circus went bankrupt, and with it died the only place where she had ever been allowed to be somebody. With no other choice, she had returned to her foster clan and landed right back at the very bottom: a clanless foundling, now scrubbing floors in the bowels of an unfamiliar building. As long as she stayed unremarkable, kept her head down, and faded into the background, the men in the corridors left her alone. She dug her cracked fingers deeper into the wet brush and prayed silently that the booming footsteps on the floor above would pass her by.

Clara's shift didn't end until late in the evening. Twelve hours on her knees, twelve hours of biting chlorine stench in the endless corridors. The stocky, hard-voiced forewoman herded the cheap worker bees together. They were all utterly spent.

Dead tired, Clara sat in a small, rusted bus that rattled and clattered out of the city toward the remote settlement—a full hour's drive. The interior was far too cramped, and the air smelled of cleaning fluid and the sweat-soaked clothes of the women pressed shoulder to shoulder. No one spoke a word. Up front, the driver had an old radio playing soft, wistful music.

The women stuck together, not out of affection but out of bitter necessity: if the work in the offices fell short of the clients' standards, it had to be redone—by all of them, unpaid and grueling. But Clara could be counted on. She scrubbed harder and longer than most. It still didn't earn her a real place in the clan—she remained the clanless foundling, with no blood tying her to them—but the women respected her for it. Clara wasn't allowed to keep any of the money for herself; her share was the ramshackle shack she was allowed to sleep in, one meal a day, and cast-off clothes.