HIS FORBIDDEN WIFE THE DEVIL'S SON

Chapter 1: The Price of a Brother Elena Marsh had forty-one dollars, a brother in a hospital bed under a false name, and a debt owned by the most dangerous family in the city. Theo had always been the charming one. Charming enough to borrow money from the wrong people. Charming enough to lose it all in one night at a table in the back of a Draven-owned club. Now he lay in a private ward with two broken ribs and a warning stitched into his skin, and Elena was standing in a marble office on the sixtieth floor of Draven Global, waiting to be told how much of her life it would cost. "Sit," said Viktor Draven. The city called him the Devil. He was seventy, silver-haired, and soft-spoken, which was worse than shouting. He slid a folder across the desk. "Your brother owes four million dollars. I don't want your money, Miss Marsh. You don't have any. I want a wife for my son." Elena laughed. It came out cracked. "I'm sorry. What?" "Dylan must be married by the end of the year or he loses his claim to the family. My enemies are circling. A wife makes him harder to unseat." Viktor's eyes were the color of old ice. "You'll do it for one year. The debt is erased. Your brother walks free." "Why me?" Something flickered across the old man's face. Not quite a smile. "My son chose you." The door opened behind her. She had seen his photograph in business magazines. Dylan Draven, twenty-seven, the youngest CEO in the city's history. The magazines never mentioned what the whispers did: that the press called him the Devil's Son, that a rival's warehouse had burned with the man still inside, that no one had ever seen him smile. The photographs also failed to show his eyes. Dark, steady, and fixed on her as though he'd been waiting a long time for this exact moment. "Miss Marsh," he said, and his voice was low and cold as winter water. "Read the contract before you sign. I'd hate for you to say later that I lied." She read it. One year. Separate wings of the penthouse. No public appearances as his wife. No photographs. No one outside this room may know of the marriage. And Article Seven: The wife shall not fall in love with the husband. Elena looked up. "This one's a joke