BOUND TO THE ENEMY HEIR

The lawyer's office smelled like old paper and the kind of cologne men wear when they want you to know they bill four hundred an hour, and Mia sat with her hands folded in her lap because her mother had told her that morning, more than once, to keep her hands folded and her mouth shut no matter what she heard in that room. She'd agreed to both. She was already regretting the second one before anyone had said a word. Julian Cross sat at the head of the long table like he owned the building, which he probably did, one arm draped over the back of his chair while his lawyer shuffled through a stack of documents thick enough to stop a door. Camille sat across from Mia, younger than she'd expected, picking at the hem of her sleeve and looking like she wanted to be anywhere else. And then there was Damien, three seats down, jaw set in a way that told her he already knew something the rest of them didn't, or thought he did. He hadn't looked at her once since she walked in. She'd counted. The lawyer cleared his throat and started reading, and for the first four pages it was the kind of language that made Mia's eyes glaze — trusts, holdings, subsidiary transfers, a list of assets that could've funded a small country. She'd stopped listening for real content until the lawyer said her name. Not Damien's. Hers. "Miss Calloway is named as a required party to the terms of this transfer." Every head at that table turned at once, and Mia felt the heat of it crawl up the back of her neck before she'd even fully understood what had been said. Julian's face didn't move, which was somehow worse than if it had. Camille's mouth actually fell open. Damien looked at her for the first time since she'd walked in, and it wasn't curiosity on his face, it was something closer to accusation, like she'd planned this, like she'd sat in his grandfather's office at some point and negotiated her way into a dead man's will. She hadn't. She hadn't even known his grandfather's name until three weeks ago, when a woman from this same law firm called her mother's house and asked, very politely, if Mia Calloway still lived at that address. The lawyer kept reading, and the terms came out the way terms like that always do, wrapped in enough legal padding that it took a full minute before the actual meaning landed on anyone in the room. Damien Cross would inherit controlling interest in Cross Holdings on the condition that he marry, within six months of the reading, a woman named specifically in the trust documents and the name attached was hers. If he didn't, the company's controlling shares transferred to a board of trustees who'd spent the last decade trying to force Julian into early retirement. If she didn't accept, same outcome. The old man had built himself a trap with two locks and only one key, and both of them were sitting in the room being told they were the key. "This has to be a mistake," Damien said, and it was the first thing he'd said out loud since she'd walked in, and he wasn't talking to her. He was talking to the lawyer, like Mia wasn't even in the room, like she was a clause instead of a person. "There's no mistake, Mr. Cross." The lawyer didn't even look up from the page. "Your grandfather was very specific." Mia should have said something. She had things to say, plenty of them, none of which belonged in a room full of Crosses. Instead she sat there with her hands still folded the way her mother told her to keep them, and she watched Damien's jaw tighten another notch, and she thought about the folder her mother kept in the bottom drawer of her dresser, the one with her father's old business cards and the newspaper clippings nobody in that family would recognize her by, not with a different last name on a marriage license, not for a while. Julian finally spoke, and his voice had none of the shock everyone else's did. "Well. I suppose congratulations are in order." He said it like he was reading off a menu. Something about the way he said it made the back of Mia's neck go cold, though she couldn't have said why, not yet, not with what she knew that afternoon, which was nothing. Damien stood up so fast his chair scraped the floor loud enough that Camille flinched, and he walked out of the room without looking at Mia again, without a word to his father, without so much as glancing at the lawyer who was still holding the papers that had just rearranged both their lives. Camille went after him a second later, throwing Mia an apologetic look on her way out that Mia didn't know what to do with. That left her alone with Julian Cross and a lawyer who was already gathering his files like the whole thing had been a routine Tuesday. Julian looked at her for a long moment, longer than felt normal, longer than a future father-in-law sizing up a future daughter-in-law should look at anyone. "Calloway," he said finally, testing the word out loud like he was checking it against something in his memory. "That's an unusual name to hear in this office." Mia kept her face still, the way she'd trained herself to since she was sixteen years old and reporters used to camp outside her mother's house. "It's not that unusual." "No," Julian said, and there was something underneath the word that she couldn't quite name yet, something that would take her months to understand fully, "I suppose it isn't." He stood, buttoned his jacket, and left the room without another word, and Mia sat there by herself for a full minute before she let her hands unfold, before she let herself breathe the way she hadn't since she'd sat down at that table. She thought about the house her mother might lose. She thought about a man she'd never met walking out on his own reading of his grandfather's will rather than sit in the same room as her for one more second. She had six months to marry a stranger who already hated her, and she still didn't know why his father had looked at her like he recognized something he'd spent twenty years trying to forget.