Elara's POV
"Excuse me."
He didn't look up immediately. He finished the line he was reading first, which was either extremely rude or extremely focused, and I hadn't decided which yet by the time his eyes finally came up to meet mine.
I had a script already. I'd built it in the elevator, clean and efficient, every angle covered. Money. Timeline. Legal framework.
Exit strategy. I'd treated it like a business acquisition because that was exactly what it was, and because I was done making emotional decisions. Emotional decisions had killed me once already.
Then Ethan Vale looked up from his report and the script went somewhere I couldn't immediately locate.
His eyes were wrong. That was the only word I had for it. Not wrong badly, just wrong for the context, wrong for the cheap suit and the mid-level salary and the quietly unremarkable desk in the middle of a finance floor. They were sharp in a way that didn't belong here, the kind of sharpness that comes from paying attention to things most people don't know they should be paying attention to.
He looked at me and something happened that I didn't have language for yet. Not attraction. Or not only attraction. It was more like the specific discomfort of being seen clearly by someone you expected to look straight through you.
I pushed through it.
"Could we speak privately?" I asked.
He studied me at first, took a deep breath then he closed his report, capped his pen, and stood.
He was taller than I'd expected. I didn't know why I'd expected anything different. I'd barely looked at him across the floor before deciding he was the solution to my problem.
I looked at him now and made myself focus on the suit instead, cheap fabric, slightly too short at the wrist, the kind of detail that said either broke or indifferent. His desk, I noticed, was the only immaculate one on the entire floor. Every other surface had stacks or coffee rings or both.
I filed that away and said nothing.
I led him to the small glass meeting room at the end of the floor. Closed the door. Turned to face him.
He stood with his hands in his pockets, watching me with that same unsettling patience, waiting.
"I'll be direct," I said.
"Please," he said.
"I need a husband. Temporary. One year, legally binding, purely contractual. You would need to appear at required functions, sign the necessary documentation, and conduct yourself appropriately in public settings." I kept my voice even. "In exchange, I'll pay you ten times your current monthly salary for the duration of the arrangement. At the end of twelve months, we divorce. Clean. No complications."
Silence.
He didn't laugh. He didn't look shocked. He didn't do any of the things I'd braced for. He just stood there and looked at me with those sharp eyes, and the silence stretched long enough that I almost filled it, which I'd told myself I wouldn't do.
"Why me?" he asked.
I'd prepared for that one. "Your work record is clean. Your personal profile is uncomplicated. You have no public associations that would create problems and my timeline doesn't allow for complexity." I held his gaze. "You're the practical choice."
He nodded slowly. Processed that. Then he asked the question I had not prepared for.
"What are you afraid of?"
The room went very quiet.
I stared at him. He didn't look away. Didn't shift. Didn't soften the question with a smile or walk it back with a small laugh. He just waited, like he had all the time in the world and fully expected me to answer.
I had died in a hospital room three hours ago, subjectively. I had come back to life in a boardroom and walked out on my uncle and taken an elevator to this floor and crossed this room and I was standing here with my hands perfectly still at my sides because I had decided, in the elevator, that I was done being the woman who shook.
This man in a bad suit had looked at me for four minutes and seen straight through all of it.
"Do you want the job or not?" I said.
Something moved across his expression. A decision being made. I watched it happen and couldn't tell which way it went until he spoke.
"One year," he said. "Then we walk away clean."
"Agreed."
"I have conditions."
I blinked. That was the one thing I genuinely hadn't prepared for. I'd prepared for negotiation on salary. I'd prepared for hesitation, for questions about legality, for greed. Not conditions. Conditions implied leverage, and a man with no footprint and a $5,000 salary had no leverage here.
Or he shouldn't have.
"Such as?" I said.
"No questions about my personal life." He said it simply, like a fact rather than a demand. "No unexpected visitors in whatever space I'm required to occupy." He paused. "And if at any point this arrangement puts you in genuine danger, I will handle it. My way."
The last sentence sat between us differently than the others.
I turned it over. A finance employee. A stranger. A man I'd chosen specifically because he was nobody, because nobody would look at him twice, because he was supposed to be the uncomplicated solution to a complicated problem. And he was standing in a glass meeting room telling me he would handle danger his way, with the calm certainty of someone who had handled things before.
I almost asked him what he meant. The question was right there.
I let it go. I needed a husband. I didn't need a mystery, and I definitely didn't have time for one.
"Fine," I said. "We are getting married now."
He didn't blink. "Now? That's impossible. I still have work on the ground that I haven't finished…"
"Forget it. Let's get going."
*********
The courthouse was exactly what a courthouse should be for two strangers getting married for business purposes: efficient, indifferent, and slightly fluorescent.
A justice of the peace who had clearly performed this particular ceremony more times than he'd ever expected to when he took the job. Two witnesses pulled from the building's administrative staff who didn't know either of us and would forget us by lunch. A form. Two signatures. The scratch of pen on paper that turned a contract into a legal fact.
I looked straight ahead through the whole thing and said my lines when I was supposed to say them.
I didn't look at Ethan.
The justice of the peace said the words and I signed the certificate and it was done in eleven minutes. Eleven minutes to legally bind myself to a stranger with sharp eyes and cheaper suits and conditions I hadn't interrogated nearly enough.
We walked out into the afternoon together.
The courthouse steps were wide and grey and the city moved past below us, completely unaware that anything had happened.
I turned and held out my hand.
He looked at it for a half-second. Then he took it. His grip was firm and brief and impersonal, exactly the way a business transaction should end.
"I'll have the contract sent to you by tonight," I said.
"I'll review it."
"My assistant will be in touch about…"
"Elara." He said my name like he'd been deciding whether to use it. "You should go home and sleep. You look like someone who hasn't stopped moving long enough to breathe."
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
"Goodnight," he said, and walked down the steps before I'd assembled a response.
"You know...you can move into my house. That would make it more believable we are both married."
"Okay…thanks. But right now, I have something I need to do."
He turned and walked straight to me. He gave me a number in a card to call him whenever I wanted to. And then he turned and I watched him go. Then I turned, walked to my car, and got in.
I sat for a moment in the driver's seat with both hands on the wheel and let myself breathe, one real exhale, the first one since a boardroom that smelled like mahogany polish and everything I'd lost. I'd done it. I had a husband. I had a legal marriage and a twelve-month timeline and Victor Hart could take his document and his sweetheart and his carefully engineered patience and do absolutely nothing with any of it.
I was going to survive this. I was going to fight this time.
My phone buzzed.
I picked it up expecting my assistant, expecting a calendar notification, expecting anything except what was actually on the screen.
Unknown number. No name. Just a message, six words, sitting there in plain text like something dropped through a crack in the world.
"You have no idea who he is."
I read it twice. Three times. Then I looked up through the windshield at the courthouse steps.
Ethan Vale was already gone.