Promised To The Devil On Ice

Chapter Five

Nikolai

She's thirty-one minutes late.

I know because I've been counting, the way I count most things I'm not supposed to care about. By minute twenty, my mother has already rearranged the flowers on the table twice, and my father has checked his watch four times without saying a word about it.

Rosa Bellrose sits across from us looking like she'd rather be anywhere else on earth. Her husband's face fills half the laptop screen propped at the head of the table, frozen somewhere between irritation and exhaustion, connected from whatever city he's currently avoiding this family from.

"She knows what time we agreed on," my father says quietly.

"She's coming," Rosa answers too quickly, the way people talk when they're covering for someone they love.

I don't say anything. I'm still thinking about last night...the phone against my ear, the voice on the other end low and clipped, careful in the way people get when they know exactly how bad news lands.

You need to be here. Now.

I think about arriving at the rink and finding two squad cars already parked outside, their lights still turning, nobody willing to tell me why. I think about how close I came, sitting across from Elowen in that sitting room an hour earlier, to actually telling her something true.

I didn't.

I won't.

Not until I understand what I'm protecting her from.

The door opens.

Elowen walks in like she's not thirty-one minutes late at all, like the room hasn't been sitting in its own tension waiting for her. Her bag hangs over one shoulder, her chin is up, and there isn't a trace of apology anywhere near her face.

"Sorry," she says, in a tone that suggests she isn't. "Traffic."

Nobody in this house has ever once been late because of traffic.

Something almost like a smile touches the corner of my mouth before I kill it.

"Sit down, Elowen," my father says.

"I'd rather stand."

Interesting.

"We're here," my father continues, "to discuss the engagement announcement. Timeline. Press. The venue..."

"Actually," Elowen says, "I have a different proposal."

The room stills. Her mother's hands tighten around her mug, and on the laptop screen, her father leans forward as though he's suddenly wondering whether his connection is working.

"A proposal," my father repeats.

"You want us married. Fine." She says it simply, like she's agreeing to something far smaller than what it actually is, and I watch my mother's shoulders drop half an inch in relief before Elowen finishes. "We'll get married. Eventually. If, after everything, it still makes sense."

"Elowen..." her mother starts.

"I'm not finished."

I'm watching her the way I watch a play developing on the ice, trying to see where it will go before it gets there. I'm usually good at that.

With her, I'm not so sure.

"You're rushing this," she says. "An announcement in a month. A wedding shortly after, I assume, because that's usually how these things go once the announcement is public. And you're doing it because it's convenient...for the families, for the business, for whatever this is actually about underneath the version you're telling me."

She looks directly at my father.

His jaw tightens.

"But you're not thinking about what happens if it goes wrong."

"It won't go wrong," my father says.

"You don't know that. You've watched us in the same room exactly twice since yesterday, and both times we've been one sentence away from actual violence."

She's not wrong.

"So let me ask you something. What happens if you rush this...if you announce it, plan it, marry us off in a few months...and it turns out we can't stand each other? Really can't. Not dinner-party tension. Real, unfixable, can't-share-a-house incompatibility?"

Nobody answers.

"You'll have a legally married couple who despise each other," she continues. "And then there are the lawyers. Property. Assets. Inheritance. Business interests. Whatever legal agreements you've buried under this arrangement. You want to tell me none of that becomes complicated if we marry and then divorce?"

My father's expression shifts.

Barely.

But she's got him.

"And that's before we get to the part where neither of you can actually promise me we won't hate each other by then," she says. "How sure are you? Really? Because I'm not sure at all."

"So what exactly are you proposing?" my father asks, quieter now.

"We date."

She says it like the answer is obvious.

"Publicly. Convincingly. Everyone believes it...the school, the press if it ever gets that far, even us half the time, because if we're doing it right, there won't be a difference anyone outside this room can see."

She pauses just long enough to let the next part land.

"No legal contract. No court. No lawyers. No outside paperwork that turns messy the second it ends. Just an agreement between the six of us, kept exactly where it started...inside this family, where it can be quietly undone if it needs to be instead of dragged through a courtroom for the entire city to watch."

"For how long?" Rosa asks quietly.

"Three months. Long enough to actually know."

Elowen finally looks at me. Quick. Assessing. Then she's looking back at my father.

"If it works, you get exactly what you wanted, except this time it's real, or close enough to it that nobody has to ask. If it doesn't, nothing's signed, nothing's legally tangled, and it ends the way things end inside a family instead of the way they end in the papers."

My father looks at his wife.

My mother looks at Rosa.

Rosa looks at the laptop, where her husband hasn't said a word in almost two full minutes.

"And if it turns out you two genuinely cannot stand each other," my father says slowly, "you're suggesting we simply let it go."

"I'm suggesting you avoid finding out the hard way, in public, with lawyers involved." Elowen's voice doesn't waver. "You get your alliance either way. You just get to control how it ends if it has to."

On the laptop screen, her father suddenly leans toward the camera.

"Now wait just a moment, I don't think we should be..."

Elowen reaches over without even looking at the screen and taps the mute icon.

Her father's mouth keeps moving, soundless and increasingly furious.

Rosa makes a small, strangled sound that might be horror and might be something closer to pride.

"He'll thank me later," Elowen says.

She doesn't unmute him.

I almost smile.

She's good.

Genuinely good.

She's laid the entire thing out cleanly, hitting every place my father actually cares about without raising her voice once. Money. Reputation. Control. She's found the seams in the thing he built and pulled on every one of them in under three minutes.

"I don't like it," my father says finally.

"You don't have to like it." Elowen's answer comes immediately. "You just have to admit it's smarter than what you had planned."

Silence stretches across the table.

My father looks like he's about to say no. I know the particular set of his mouth that comes right before he ends a conversation, and I can see it forming now.

Then he glances at my mother.

She doesn't say anything.

She rarely needs to.

She reaches up slowly and tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

That's all.

My father's jaw unclenches.

"This is reckless," he says, but there's less conviction behind it now.

"It's controlled," Elowen says. "That's different."

I've been quiet through all of it, watching her build the argument brick by brick, watching my father's resistance erode one calculated sentence at a time.

And somewhere in the last few minutes, I've stopped thinking about the flashing lights two blocks from campus and started thinking about her.

She's not just smart.

She's strategic.

She thinks in consequences and leverage and exit clauses, the same way I do, the same way I was raised to. Except nobody ever taught her to think like this...or if they did, I've never heard about it.

Which leaves two possibilities.

She's either naturally very good at this.

Or she's been preparing for something I don't know about.

Either way, interesting.

"This looks," I say, and every head in the room turns toward me, "like the smartest thing anyone's proposed since we sat down."

"Nikolai..." my father starts.

"She's right. A legal marriage neither of us wants creates exposure we don't need. And she's right that if this fails publicly, it costs the family more than a quiet arrangement that simply doesn't work."

I look at Elowen.

I give her nothing.

"I agree."

Something flickers across her face.

Surprise, perhaps, that I gave in so easily.

She recovers quickly.

She always does.

"Fine," my father says after a long moment, clearly unhappy about arriving here but unable to find a hole in her logic. "Three months. Public. Convincing. And if it doesn't work..."

"Then it doesn't work," Elowen says. "Quietly."

Rosa exhales like she's been holding her breath the entire meeting. On the laptop screen, Elowen's father finally speaks again, something short that sounds suspiciously like approval, but I'm only half listening.

I'm still watching Elowen.

She doesn't look relieved.

She looks satisfied.

Like she got exactly what she came for and is already thinking three moves ahead.

She thinks she just bought herself time.

Distance.

Three months to investigate me without a ring on her finger forcing her into anything permanent.

She's not wrong.

She just doesn't know yet that I'm going to use those same three months for precisely the same reason.

Either way, by the end of this, I get what I actually want.

She just doesn't know what that is yet.