Three days after the heist, I still hadn't slept properly. Every time I closed my eyes, I ran through the same loop — the storage room, the two women on the other side of the door, the receptionist counting out cash like it was nothing — convinced each time that this would be the version where someone finally noticed.
Nobody had. No police. No casino security showing up at the club asking questions. Just silence, which should have felt like relief and instead felt like waiting for a second shoe that hadn't dropped yet.
So when Markus showed up at the club an hour before my shift, leaning against his car with the same unreadable expression he'd worn the day we met, I knew immediately something had changed.
"Young master wants to see you," he said. "Tonight, if you can."
"River wants to see me," I repeated, equal parts confused and unable to stop the small, traitorous flutter in my chest at the idea.
"His name's not River," Markus said, watching my face carefully. "It's Law. Lawrence Grey. He owns the Mist Horizon."
The words landed slow, then all at once, like ice water down my spine. "He owns the casino," I said. "The one I—"
"Yes," Markus said, not unkindly. "He knows what you did. He's known since you walked out the front door with the cash."
I felt the blood drain straight out of my face. "Is he calling the police?"
"He wants to talk to you first," Markus said. "That's all I know. Get in the car, Alex."
I almost didn't. Every instinct I had said to run, to disappear, to figure out some other way to survive this that didn't involve sitting across from a man who apparently owned the building I'd robbed and had spent the last three days letting me think I'd gotten away clean. But running wasn't really an option — not with Karen's surgery scheduled, not with Frank's club as the only address anyone had on file for me, not with a mother who'd notice immediately if I vanished.
So I got in the car.
Law was waiting in a private room at the back of the casino when Markus brought me in — no cards, no noise, just a table, two chairs, and the same cold, unreadable stillness I remembered from our first conversation, except now it made considerably more sense.
"Alex," he said, gesturing to the empty chair across from him. "Have a seat."
"You lied to me," I said, staying exactly where I was. "Your name isn't River."
"No," he agreed easily. "It isn't."
"You knew the whole time. About the money."
"I knew before you even walked in the door," he said. "Markus flagged you on the cameras. I gave you that key card myself."
The floor tilted slightly under me. "You set me up."
"I gave you an opportunity," he said, like the distinction actually mattered. "What you did with it was entirely your choice."
I sat down, finally, mostly because my legs had stopped being reliable. "So what now. You're turning me in?"
"I haven't decided," he said, leaning back, studying me with the same focus he'd used at the club, like I was a puzzle he'd already half-solved. "That depends on you."
"On me how."
"I have a problem," he said. "My parents want me married within the year, or the casino doesn't pass to me when they're ready to step back. They have a list of women. Suitable families, the right amount of money, none of which I have any interest in."
"I don't see how that's my problem," I said, though something cold and certain was already settling into my stomach.
"You stole ninety thousand dollars from me," he said. "I could call the police right now, and you'd spend the next several years explaining yourself to a judge instead of paying for whatever that money was actually for. Or—" he paused, letting the word sit there, "—you marry me. Four years. Long enough to satisfy my parents, get the casino legally transferred, and put this whole theft far enough behind us that nobody ever looks at it again. After that, you walk away. Debt erased. No charges, no records, nothing tying you to any of this."
I stared at him, waiting for the part where this turned out to be a joke. It didn't. "You want me to marry you," I said slowly, "as a cover story."
"I want a wife who isn't actually a wife," he said. "And you, apparently, want ninety thousand dollars to disappear from your life without consequences. It solves both our problems."
"This is insane," I said, standing up so fast the chair nearly tipped behind me. "I don't even know you. You blackmailed me into this."
"I'm aware," he said, entirely unbothered. "I'm also aware you have a sister in long-term care and a mother who can't cover whatever's left of that bill on her own. Four years of looking happily married to me buys you a clean record and whatever else you need covered along the way. I can be generous, when it benefits me."
"And if I say no."
"Then I make a phone call," he said, "and you find out exactly how unpleasant a theft charge can get for someone with no money for a decent lawyer."
I hated him in that moment, more purely than I'd hated almost anyone in my life — and underneath the hate, infuriatingly, I still remembered the way he'd smiled at me across that table at the club, the way some stupid, hopeful part of me had wanted him to actually be waiting at four in the morning.
"I need to think," I said.
"You have until tomorrow," he said. "Markus will bring you home."
I walked out of that room with my hands shaking and my whole future rearranged in the span of fifteen minutes, and somewhere underneath the fear and the fury, a small, exhausted part of me had already started doing the math on whether four years of pretending might actually be survivable.