MY EVIL STEPFATHER

CHAPTER TWO: THE PRICE OF PRIDE

DAISY'S POV

I told myself, on the taxi ride home, that the smile meant nothing.

Men like that smiled at everything. It was a reflex — the automatic confidence of someone who had never once been told no and actually believed it. He had seen me lying to my mother and found it amusing, the way people find amusing the small panicked scrambles of someone beneath them. It meant nothing. He was nobody. I would never see him again.

I almost believed it by the time I got home.

I believed it completely by the time I showered, changed, and made it to the studio forty minutes late with concealer under my eyes and a story prepared for Sunny about traffic on the east bridge.

I did not believe it at all by the time Sunny looked up from her desk with an expression I had never seen on her face before.

Sunny did not do uncertain. She was the kind of woman who walked into rooms like she had personally designed them, who delivered bad news with the brisk efficiency of someone ticking items off a list. In the three years she had managed my career, I had seen her negotiate contracts, fire photographers, and face down a tabloid editor without blinking once.

She was blinking now.

"Sit down," she said.

"I'm sorry I'm late, the traffic on—"

"Daisy. Sit down."

I sat.

She opened a folder and turned it toward me, and I looked at the single printed page inside. My eyes moved across it twice before the words fully assembled into meaning.

Suspension of professional engagements. Effective immediately. Pending review.

The air left the room.

"What is this?" My voice came out very quiet.

"Every project." Sunny's voice was careful in the way it only got when she was managing me. "The cosmetics campaign, the drama series, the magazine feature. All of it, pulled as of this morning."

"That's not — they can't just—" I stopped. Pressed my fingers to the desk. Started again. "On whose instruction?"

Sunny looked at me for a moment too long.

"Sunny."

"It doesn't matter whose—"

"Whose instruction?"

She closed the folder. "Someone with enough reach to call four different companies before nine in the morning and have them all agree." She paused. "Someone you apparently upset last night."

The lobby of the hotel assembled itself behind my eyes. The man in the expensive jacket. The smile.

My hands curled into fists under the desk.

"He can't do this," I said. "I haven't done anything wrong. I can fight this, I can call the production company directly and—"

"And tell them what?" Sunny's voice wasn't unkind. It was worse than unkind — it was realistic. "That a man they've all been in business with for years is punishing you for a personal slight? Daisy, these people aren't going to choose you over Maxwell Barrett."

The name landed like something physical.

Maxwell Barrett.

I had heard it before, of course. Everyone in Velmora had heard it. The kind of name that appeared on the sides of buildings and at the top of donor lists and in the breathless introductions at events where the champagne cost more than most people's rent. Maxwell Barrett, tech empire, Barrett Industries, philanthropist, bachelor, untouchable.

I had just never had a face to put to it.

Now I had considerably more than a face.

"He did this," I said. Not a question.

Sunny didn't answer, which was its own answer.

I stood up slowly. "Then I'll walk away. From all of it. I'll break the contract, I'll pay the penalty, I'll start over somewhere he doesn't have reach—"

"Daisy." Sunny stood too, and she put both hands on my shoulders, which she had never done before in three years. "Listen to me very carefully. The contract penalty is four hundred thousand. Do you have four hundred thousand?"

I said nothing.

"Your mother's medical bills from last year are still partially outstanding. Your apartment lease renews in six weeks. And without income, you have approximately—" she paused, calculating, "—eight weeks before this becomes a very different kind of problem."

I stepped back from her hands.

"He arranged all of this," I said. "Knowing that. He knew exactly what it would do."

"Yes," Sunny said simply. "He did."

The rage that moved through me then was so clean and so complete that for a moment it felt almost like calm. I picked up my bag from the chair. I smoothed my jacket. I looked at Sunny, who was watching me with something close to pity, and I decided, quietly and completely, that I would rather live in my car than let Maxwell Barrett purchase me.

"Set up the meeting," I said.

Sunny blinked. "What?"

"You were going to suggest a meeting. I can see it on your face. You've already thought of a way to frame this as an opportunity." I looked at her steadily. "Set it up. I'll go. And then I'll say no, and I'll walk out, and we'll figure out the rest."

Sunny stared at me for a long moment.

Then she picked up her phone.

The restaurant was the kind of place that didn't have prices on the menu because the kind of people who ate there didn't need them. Private rooms off the main floor, golden light designed to make everyone look like the best version of themselves, staff who moved like they had been choreographed.

Sunny walked me to the door of the private dining room, squeezed my arm once — the closest she had ever come to affection — and left me there.

I stood outside the door for three seconds.

You've performed for harder audiences than this, I told myself. Walk in. Say no. Walk out. Survive.

I pushed the door open.

He was already seated, which I had expected. He was holding two glasses of wine, which I had not. He looked up when I entered, and whatever expression I had prepared — cool, professional, completely unbothered — faltered for exactly half a second before I locked it back into place.

He looked different without the chaos of the previous night. Sharper. More deliberate. He had the particular stillness of someone who had learned that patience was more powerful than noise.

"I ordered for us," he said. "I hope that's alright."

"It isn't," I said pleasantly, and sat down across from him.

Something shifted in his eyes. Amusement, maybe. Or recalibration.

He held out one of the glasses. I looked at it and did not move.

"You drank last night," he said.

"Last night I was drugged at a party and made a series of decisions I wouldn't otherwise have made." I held his gaze. "It won't happen again."

"The drinking, or the rest of it?"

"Either."

He set the glass down slowly. Leaned back in his chair with the ease of a man on his own territory — which, I was increasingly understanding, was wherever Maxwell Barrett happened to be sitting. "You're angry."

"I'm many things. Angry is the most polite of them."

"Because of the projects."

"Because you reached into my career and closed your hand around it like it belonged to you." My voice stayed even. I was proud of that. "It doesn't."

"No," he agreed. "But I could make it flourish in ways you haven't imagined."

"In exchange for what, exactly?"

He reached into his jacket. Placed a small velvet box on the table between us. Opened it.

The ring inside caught the light — not ostentatious, nothing so obvious. Just precise and expensive and chosen by someone who understood that the most effective traps look like gifts.

I stared at it for one long moment.

Then I laughed.

It came out genuine, which surprised me. A real laugh, short and sharp, because the audacity of the thing — the sheer, breathtaking assumption of it — was almost impressive.

"You don't know me at all," I said.

"I know more than you think."

"You know my name and my face and how to make calls to the right people in the morning." I stood, collecting my bag. "That's not knowing someone. That's researching a target."

He stood too, and when he spoke, the pleasantness in his voice had taken on an edge. "You're willing to give up everything you've built. Your career, your security. Your mother's stability."

I went very still.

"She's a lovely woman," he continued, carefully. "Your mother. Warm. Trusting. The kind of person who believes the best of everyone." A pause, precisely weighted. "She must worry about you. A young woman alone in this city, in this industry."

I turned around slowly.

His expression was entirely neutral. Entirely calm.

"Don't," I said. One word. Flat and cold as January.

He tilted his head slightly. "Don't what?"

I looked at him — really looked, past the handsome face and the expensive suit and the performance of reasonableness — and I saw it clearly for the first time. What was underneath. What he actually was.

The coldness that moved through me was not fear.

It was recognition.

"I'll pay the contract penalty," I said. "Every cent. And then I'm going to rebuild everything you've touched, from the ground up, without a single piece of your help." I picked up the velvet box from the table and placed it back in front of him. "And if you go near my mother, I will make you regret it in ways your lawyers won't have language for."

I walked to the door.

"Daisy."

I stopped but didn't turn.

"I always get what I want." His voice was quiet. Almost gentle. "I just prefer when it doesn't take long."

I walked out.

I was in the elevator, descending, watching the numbers drop, when my phone rang. Mum's name on the screen. I answered immediately — I always answered immediately — and her voice came through warm and slightly breathless, the way it got when she was excited about something.

"Daisy, sweetheart. I know you're busy, I won't keep you long. I just wanted to tell you — something wonderful has happened."

The elevator reached the ground floor. The doors slid open.

"I've met someone," she said. "Isn't that funny? At my age. He's wonderful, Daisy. He's kind and he's patient and he makes me feel — I don't know how to explain it. He makes me feel chosen."

My hand tightened on the phone.

"He wants to meet you," she continued. "He's coming for dinner on Friday. Will you come? He's been so eager—"

"Mum." My voice came out strange. "What's his name?"

A smile in her voice, warm and full and utterly trusting.

"Maxwell," she said. "Maxwell Barrett."

The lobby of the restaurant spun once, slowly, around me.

He had done it already.

I was still in the elevator, still walking out, still delivering my ultimatum — and he had already moved.

He hadn't just planned for her refusal. He had planned because of it. And Daisy was beginning to understand, with a cold clarity that settled in her chest like stone, that she had never been the one setting the terms.