BOUND TO THE ENEMY HEIR

Chapter Two: Terms And Conditions

Her mother didn't yell, which was somehow worse than if she had.

Ruth Calloway sat at the kitchen table with her hands wrapped around a mug of tea that had gone cold an hour ago, listening to Mia explain the whole thing twice because the first time through she'd been too stunned to actually follow it, and by the second time through she wasn't stunned anymore, she was just quiet in the way she got right before she said something Mia didn't want to hear.

"You are not marrying a Cross." She said the name like it left a taste in her mouth. "I don't care what's in that will. I don't care about the house. I don't care about any of it, Mia, I would rather lose this place tomorrow than watch you walk into that family."

"You say that now." Mia kept her voice level, mostly for her mother's sake, because falling apart in front of her wouldn't help either of them. "You'll say something different when the bank calls again."

Ruth flinched at that, which Mia hated herself for, but it was true and both of them knew it. The house had been three months behind before this whole thing started, and Ruth had been picking up shifts at the pharmacy on top of the two jobs she already had, coming home too tired to eat most nights, and pretending in front of Mia that none of it was as bad as it actually was. Mia had stopped believing that performance a long time ago.

"You don't know what that family is like," Ruth said, quieter now. "You don't know what it costs to be inside a house like that."

"I know what it costs us to be outside of it." Mia hadn't meant for it to come out as sharp as it did, but once it was out there wasn't any pulling it back. Her mother's face did something complicated, grief and guilt tangled up together, and Mia looked away before she had to watch the rest of it happen. Her father's name still lived in that kitchen even though he'd been gone for years, not dead, just gone, vanished the same month the story broke, and nobody in that house had ever said the word abandonment out loud, though it sat there anyway, underneath every conversation they'd had about money since.

Ruth didn't say anything else that night. She just reached across the table and put her hand over Mia's, the way she used to when Mia was small enough to still believe her mother could fix anything, and Mia let her, even though they both understood by then that the decision had already been made somewhere between the lawyer's office and that kitchen table.

The call came two days later, not from Damien, but from someone on his legal team, asking if Mia could come in Thursday to go over terms. She almost laughed at how bloodless it sounded, terms like she was being onboarded for a job instead of a marriage, though she supposed in a way she was. She said yes and hung up before she could talk herself out of it.

Thursday came with rain that didn't let up the whole drive downtown, and Mia sat in the waiting area of the Cross Holdings legal office for twenty minutes past her appointment time, watching assistants move around her like she was furniture, until a door opened and Damien walked out of a conference room looking like a man who hadn't slept much since the reading either.

He didn't offer his hand. He didn't offer anything, really, just stood there for a second like he was deciding whether talking to her was worth the effort, and then he said, "You could've said no."

"So could you."

That got something out of him, not quite a smile, more like the ghost of one, gone as fast as it showed up. "My grandfather built in penalties for that. I'm guessing yours didn't."

"No. Mine just built in a house my mother's about to lose." She hadn't planned on saying it that plainly, but there was something about the way he looked at her, like he was still trying to figure out whether she was a person or a problem, that made her want to say it anyway, just to watch what it did to his face.

It didn't do much. He nodded once, like he was filing the information away rather than reacting to it, and gestured toward the conference room behind him. "The lawyers are going to walk us through the terms. I'd tell you it's straightforward but nothing about this is straightforward, so I won't waste your time pretending."

She followed him in. The room was full of people whose names she wouldn't remember an hour later, papers stacked in front of two empty chairs at the end of the table, and Mia sat down across from Damien with a table's width between them, which felt about right for two people who were apparently going to be married inside six months and hadn't said more than a dozen words to each other total.

The terms took ninety minutes to go through. Public appearances, a set number of family events, a media strategy nobody bothered asking her opinion on, a prenup thick enough to double as a doorstop. Damien answered questions when the lawyers directed them his way and said almost nothing to Mia directly, and she matched him for it, answering only what she had to, volunteering nothing, watching him across the table the way you watch weather you're not sure is going to turn.

Near the end, one of the lawyers mentioned the wedding date, some window in the next few weeks, and Damien's expression didn't change, but something in his jaw did, a tightening that came and went so fast most people wouldn't have caught it. Mia caught it. She'd spent years learning to read rooms full of people who didn't want to be read, and Damien Cross, for all his money and his silence, wasn't nearly as unreadable as he probably thought he was.

She signed where they told her to sign. He signed after her, pen moving fast, like the faster he did it the less real it would feel.

Neither of them said goodbye when the meeting ended. He just stood, buttoned his jacket the exact same way his father had in that other office days before, and walked out ahead of her without a word, and Mia sat there a moment longer than she needed to, staring at her own signature on a page that had just decided the next six months of her life, wondering how long it would take before one of them slipped and said something true.