Contracted to the Dark CEO

Chapter 3

Elena sat on a plush soft by the window with her laptop. The weather outside was gray and gloomy, matching her current mood. The encrypted file she’d stumbled upon, a digital Pandora’s Box linked to her late mother, still made confusion and questions churn in her mind. The notes she has been receiving anonymously made everything worse. There is the dark figure she saw in the wood too. She can’t even tell Stefan what has been happening. They are barely standing each other as it is. He’ll be sure to make her life much more hellish if she so much as ask for more than she’s getting.

The sound of an approaching car jolted her out of her trail of thought. She signs as she closed her laptop. Her things had been moved to the suite across from Stefan with a view to the driveway and the other to the lush garden. From there, she watched him get out of the car and she wished for a hole to crawl in and hide but wishes were not horses and none of hers ever come true anyway.

She raised her head defiantly, refusing to cower from any confrontation Stefan would bring because she knew there would be more and he had made it his mission to pull her strings.

He is here and she might as well get it over with since the insufferable man had insisted, she comes out to meet him whenever he comes home.

Stefan gave her a once-over and smirked with disdain. “Elena Bennett or should I say Elena Wolfe,” he began circling her like a wolf looking for the perfect angle to grip their prey “not so mighty now are we, without daddy? I’m going to take apart your family one piece at a time until you are left bare, with nothing to shield you from the rest of the world.”

Elena felt hatred burn in her core and the anger bubbled up inside her steaming and refusing to be held down any longer. This has been going on for weeks and she refused to take any more of his mood swings. She looked up and couldn’t resist throwing a jibe at him.

“How the world will be flabbergasted to know the great and mighty Stefan Wolfe has so much time to spare on trivialities like…taking time to make fun of a poor defenseless woman?!”

She laughed dryly. “Or the fact that beneath all that charm and charisma, you are but a petty arrogant brute who hides himself behind power, too afraid to confront their own demons?”

His jaw tightened and she knew she had hit a nerve. Elena didn’t push her luck for fear of the consequences if her anger takes the better of her.

For a split second, as he turned and light hit his face, she thought she saw something soften in his eyes. Regret? No. That was impossible.

He made to leave but stopped walking. “Elena,” he said, and his voice was almost quieter now. “You’re not a victim. Not anymore. You’re a Wolfe now. Learn to use your teeth.” She looked at him, and for the first time, she wondered what he was protecting behind all that control. What secrets lie buried in Stefan Wolfe, and what had broken him so badly that love had become a contract?

Still rattled and sour, she turned to leave but he stopped her in her tracks. “Don’t walk out on me Elena.” She didn’t stop. “I’m talking to you” “Watch me” she threw back over her shoulder. She heard his footsteps behind her as she opened the door to her suite. She ignored him calling to her, went in just as he got to her door and shut it in his face. She imagined how he must be seething and it felt great!

v

Later that night, she couldn’t sleep. She is Elena Wolfe now. A name that felt like a noose around her neck and outside her window, the stars glittered like an image from a world just out of reach. She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. She thought about the encrypted file, not Stefan. Her mother, hidden transactions at her father’s company, digital breadcrumbs someone had tried to erase. Everything seems wrong. She has to know more. She needs to understand why Stefan had swooped in with such surgical timing. Why this marriage was the answer. Why she is the price. What her role is in all of these.

She needs to know if she is dancing to music of an evil puppeteer.

She crept back to her laptop and reopened the encrypted file. This time, she forced it open using a password her mother once whispered to her in childhood, "Solstice." The file was decrypted. What she found made her gasp. Photos, bank transfers, and some notes written in symbols and languages that seems like gibberish to her. Pages and pages of them. Especially one with the sketched of both male and female model form. She is smart enough to know this is anything but notes on human anatomy because why would someone go to such lengths to keep such notes if not to hide something?

Questions swirl in her head and nausea slammed through her. She felt a fear she couldn’t explain as realization crashes into her brain. The past wasn’t just present. It was living inside the marriage she’d just agreed to, and suddenly everything made sense. Stefan wasn’t marrying her for her father and this marriage is anything but simple and her role is anything but a trophy wife. Something dark and sinister is at play. It seems she has been drawn into the plot of an evilly orchestrated agenda and whoever is behind it has chosen her to be the sacrificial lamb. She will be damned before she lets anyone think in their deluded mind that she will gift- wrap herself and let herself be their willing victim.

Elsewhere, a dark silhouette stared at the image of Elena and her laptop, captured from a hidden camera in her room on a single screen. The race has begun!