Forced To Marry My Dead Fiance's Brother

014 Always A Old Habit

Sebastian

I couldn't sleep with everything happening. I sat in my office with security footage looping on three screens, grainy black and white of a service entrance at two in the morning, a figure in a dark coat testing the door, pausing when it didn't open on the first try, trying again with what looked like genuine confidence that it should have.

"Run it again," I told my head of security, who'd been standing in my office since midnight looking increasingly like a man who wished he'd taken a different job.

"Sir, we've run it eleven times. The angle doesn't get better."

"Enhance it."

"It's already at the limit of what the camera captured. I can bring in a specialist, but that takes days, and honestly, sir, days might not tell us much more than we already know."

"Which is what. That someone used a dead man's access code to try to get into my home in the middle of the night."

"Which is concerning, yes." He hesitated, the way people hesitated when they had a theory they didn't want to be the one to voice first. "It could be someone who worked closely with Mr. Vettel. An assistant, a contractor, anyone who had the code before the accident and never had it revoked. It doesn't have to mean anything more than a security oversight."

It didn't have to. I knew that. I also knew, sitting there at two in the morning with my daughter finally asleep down the hall and a woman two doors past that who'd held my daughter through a nightmare better than I ever had, that some cold, unreasonable part of me didn't believe the oversight explanation for a single second.

I sent security home around three, told them to change every code in the building by morning, and sat alone in my office until the sky outside started going gray at the edges, thinking about grocery lists and blue eyes and a hand I'd almost held the night before without giving myself permission to.

Evelyn arrived at nine, unannounced, which should have told me everything about how the rest of the day was going to go.

"I heard about the security scare," she said, breezing past my assistant like the woman didn't exist, settling into the chair across from my desk before I'd even looked up from my screen. "Sebastian, this is exactly what I was worried about. A stranger in your home, a scandal in the press, and now someone trying to break in in the middle of the night. This family needs stability, not more chaos."

"I appreciate the concern. I don't need it managed for me."

"I'm not trying to manage anything. I'm trying to help." She leaned forward, and I recognized the posture, the same one she'd used on me a hundred times over the years we'd known each other, practiced intimacy dressed up as sincerity. "Let me take Jane for the day. My driver can pick her up, keep her somewhere quiet and safe while you sort this out. You know I'm good with her."

"She's fine where she is."

"Is she." Evelyn's eyes narrowed slightly, calculating. "With a woman who's known her for barely two weeks, in a house someone apparently just tried to break into. Sebastian, I know you feel some obligation to this arrangement, but you don't have to pretend it's working."

That was the moment Christabel walked in, Jane on her hip, both of them dressed for the morning, clearly on their way somewhere before they'd stumbled into whatever this was.

The room went quiet in a way that felt loud.

"I'm sorry," Christabel said, already backing toward the door, reading the tension immediately, the way she seemed to read most things about this house faster than I gave her credit for. "I didn't know you had company."

"Stay," I said, before Evelyn could say anything to fill the silence first. "Evelyn was just leaving."

Evelyn's smile didn't waver, but something behind it went sharp. "Was I."

"Yes."

She stood, unhurried, gathering her bag with the same deliberate calm she always used when she wanted to make clear she was choosing to leave, not being asked to. On her way past Christabel, she paused, just long enough to be deliberate about it.

"You're very brave," she said, "walking into a marriage that isn't real, in a house where someone apparently thinks they still have the right to walk in unannounced. I hope it's worth it, whatever you're getting out of this."

"I could say the same to you," Christabel said, quiet, even, "except I'm not entirely sure what you're getting out of showing up here at nine in the morning uninvited."

Something flickered across Evelyn's face, surprise, maybe, that the woman she'd clearly expected to fold hadn't, and then she recovered, smoothing it into that same practiced smile, and left without another word.

The office went quiet once the door shut behind her. Jane wriggled down out of Christabel's arms and wandered toward the window, unbothered, already losing interest in adults being complicated at each other, and Christabel crossed her arms, watching me with an expression I was starting to recognize as the one she wore right before she asked a question she actually wanted answered.

"Was she a problem I should know about," she said, "or a problem you're planning to keep handling on your own the way you handle everything else."

"She's an ex. From a long time ago. It ended before Elena."

"That's not what I asked."

I looked at her for a long moment, tired in a way that went deeper than one sleepless night, and something in me, some wall I'd been rebuilding all morning after nearly letting it fall the night before, gave way again anyway.

"She's a problem," I admitted. "I don't entirely know how big of one yet."

Christabel nodded slowly, like that honesty had cost me something and she recognized the price of it, and for a moment neither of us said anything else, the quiet between us different from the tense silence Evelyn had left behind, something gentler, more fragile, the kind of quiet you're careful not to disturb.

Jane's voice broke it instead, small and clear from the window, the first full sentence I'd heard her say in over a year.

"Mama, look, it's snowing."

Neither Christabel nor I moved. Neither of us breathed. And in the silence that followed, I watched the word land on Christabel's face like something she hadn't been ready for, hadn't dared hope for, and didn't know, in that moment, whether to celebrate or run from.