Forced To Marry My Dead Fiance's Brother

022 The Fine Print Nobody Read

Sebastian

Christabel's father looked smaller than I remembered him from the funeral, seated on the chair across my lawyer's desk with a stack of papers in front of him that he kept touching and not touching, like he wasn't sure whether he wanted to be the one holding them.

"Mr. Chen," I said, taking the seat beside Christabel. "You said there was something in the loan agreement."

"I should have read it more carefully the first time." He pushed the stack toward us, hands unsteady. "I was so relieved, when Beatrix's people came with the paperwork, I signed everything without going through it line by line. My lawyer finally got a chance to review the full document yesterday. There's a clause on page fourteen. I need you both to see it."

My own lawyer, a sharp, quiet woman named Sophie who'd handled every contract I'd signed for a decade, flipped to the marked page and read it aloud, her voice carefully neutral in the way lawyers cultivate for exactly this kind of moment.

"The debt forgiveness and associated terms outlined in this agreement remain valid and binding contingent upon the continued legal marriage between Sebastian Vettel and Christabel Chen for a minimum period of eighteen months from the date of marriage. Should the marriage be dissolved, annulled, or otherwise terminated prior to the completion of this term, the full original debt, plus accrued interest, becomes immediately due in full."

The room went quiet.

"Eighteen months," Christabel said slowly. "Nobody told me eighteen months."

"It wasn't in the summary Beatrix's people gave me," her father said, guilt written across every line of his face. "I only saw the first month, first quarter language, and general terms. This exact clause was buried in an appendix I didn't think to ask about."

"Beatrix drafted this," I said, though it wasn't really a question, more a confirmation of something I already suspected the moment Mr. Chen mentioned page fourteen. "Sophie, did our legal team review this before it went out?"

"It went through Beatrix's personal counsel, sir, not ours. Given the sensitivity of the situation, she handled it directly and had you sign off on the final summary, not the full document." Sophie's mouth thinned into a hard line. "I should have flagged that as unusual at the time. I apologize."

"It's not your fault. It's mine, for trusting her to handle something this important without oversight." I rubbed my temples, feeling the shape of Beatrix's careful architecture settling into place around all of us, a marriage built not just on grief and obligation but locked in place by financial consequence, eighteen months of binding contract standing between any of us and freedom, whether we wanted it or not. "So if this marriage ends before eighteen months, for any reason, Mr. Chen loses the shop entirely."

"That's my reading of it, yes," Sophie said. "And given the scale of the original debt plus interest, it would likely mean personal bankruptcy as well, not just the business."

Christabel had gone very still beside me, and when I looked at her, I found her staring at the paper like it had personally betrayed her, which, in a way, it had.

"She trapped us," Christabel said quietly. "Not just pressured us into marrying. She built a cage around it, so even if we hated each other, even if this whole thing fell apart the way anyone would expect a forced marriage to fall apart, we'd still be stuck, for eighteen months, because the alternative is destroying my father."

"I think that was exactly the point," I said.

"Why, though. What does she get out of forcing us to stay married that long. What does the timeline even mean to her."

I didn't have an answer for that, not one I could say out loud yet, not with a theory still forming in the back of my mind that felt too dark, too specific, to voice in a room full of people. Eighteen months was oddly, precisely long. Long enough to matter for something. Long enough to complete something, or wait something out, or ensure something stayed exactly as it needed to be for exactly as long as someone required it.

"I want a copy of this clause," I said instead, to Sophie. "And I want you looking at every other document Beatrix has had a hand in over the last three years. Estate paperwork, trust documents, anything with her signature or her counsel's fingerprints on it."

"That's a significant scope, sir."

"I don't care. I want to understand what she's actually building here, because I no longer believe for one second that this is only about protecting the family's reputation."

Christabel's father cleared his throat, hesitant, guilt still etched deep into his face. "Christabel, I am so sorry. If I had read it properly, if I hadn't been so desperate to fix things—"

"It's not your fault, Dad." Her voice was steadier than her face suggested she felt, and she reached over to squeeze his hand, some old, practiced comfort passing between them that I recognized, having done the same thing for Jane more times than I could count. "We'll figure it out. We always do."

I watched her say it, watched her mean it despite everything, and something settled in my chest that felt dangerously close to certainty, that whatever Beatrix's endgame actually was, I would rather burn the entire company down than let it land on either of them.

Sophie's phone buzzed against the desk, and she glanced at it, frowning, before looking up at both of us with an expression I didn't like at all.

"Sir, I think you should see this. It's from the records team, about the estate trust. There's a beneficiary clause tied to your father's original will that nobody's flagged before, and given what we just found, I think it might be connected."