Forced To Marry My Dead Fiance's Brother

023 What Edward Vettel Actually Wanted

Christabel

Sophie spread three documents across the desk, each one thicker than the last, and I watched Sebastian's face go carefully blank in the way I was learning meant he was bracing for something.

"Your father's original will," Sophie said, tapping the first document. "Standard enough on its surface. Full control of Vettel Corp to you, provisions for Jane, a smaller allowance for Beatrix and, at the time, for Gabriel. But there's a codicil, added eight months before your father died, that nobody in our legal team had cause to look at closely, because on paper it looked like a standard contingency clause."

"What does it say," Sebastian asked, voice tight.

"It says that full, unconditional control of Vettel Corp only transfers to you if, at the time of your father's death or within five years following it, you are, in the codicil's words, quote, married in a legitimate and enduring union, unquote. If that condition isn't met, control defaults to a family trust, managed jointly by the surviving Vettel heirs, which at the time your father wrote this, meant you and Gabriel, equally."

The room went very still.

"He wanted me married," Sebastian said slowly, like he was working out a puzzle he didn't want the answer to. "Before he died, my father kept pushing me toward finding someone. I thought it was ordinary, a father wanting grandchildren, wanting me settled. I didn't know he'd written it into the will."

"There's more," Sophie said, and something in her voice made my stomach drop before she continued. "The codicil defines legitimate and enduring narrowly. It requires the marriage to remain unbroken for a minimum continuous period, and it explicitly states that a marriage entered into primarily for financial or business purposes, if proven as such by the trust's appointed arbiter, does not satisfy the condition."

"So if anyone can prove this marriage was arranged, forced, business first," I said slowly, the shape of it finally clicking into place in my mind, "control of the company doesn't stay with Sebastian at all. It goes to a trust. Managed jointly by the surviving heirs."

"Which, at present, given Gabriel's presumed death, would default entirely to Beatrix, as his surviving parent and next of kin, until any further inheritance question involving Gabriel's own estate is settled." Sophie closed the folder slowly, like even she found the shape of it unsettling. "I want to be careful here, sir. I'm not saying this proves intent. But it means that if this marriage were ever successfully challenged as fraudulent, or ended prematurely, Beatrix would gain significant, possibly total, control over the company, at least temporarily."

Sebastian sat back in his chair, and I watched something harden behind his eyes, three years of quiet resentment toward his stepmother finally finding a shape sharp enough to hold.

"She's had access to this codicil the entire time," he said. "She helped my father draft his estate paperwork toward the end, when his health was failing and he trusted almost no one else with it. She knew exactly what this said. She's known, this whole time, that if my marriage fell apart, or was proven fraudulent, she'd end up controlling everything."

"Which explains the eighteen month clause in the loan agreement," I said, the pieces slotting together faster than I wanted them to. "It's not just about trapping us in the marriage to protect the family's reputation. It's timed to something. Maybe the trust's own review period, maybe some window in your father's estate paperwork that closes after a certain point."

Sophie nodded slowly. "That's a reasonable theory. I'd need to review the trust documents in full to confirm, but the timeline alignment is suspicious enough that I don't think it's coincidental."

Sebastian stood abruptly, pacing to the window, hands braced against the frame, and I recognized the posture, the same one from that first night in his office when Beatrix had cornered him with an offer he never wanted, except now there was something colder underneath it, something that looked less like grief and more like resolve.

"She's not protecting this family," he said quietly, to the window, to nobody in particular. "She's positioning herself to take it. She has been since before my father even died."

I stood and crossed the room to him, unsure what to say, unsure if there was anything to say that would make any of this less enormous, and settled instead for standing beside him, close enough that our shoulders touched, letting the simple fact of my presence do whatever talking needed to happen.

"Then we don't give her the opening," I said. "We make this real, Sebastian. Not for the codicil, not for the eighteen months, not for any of it. For us. Because it's true, whatever it started as, and because the only way she loses is if nobody can ever prove otherwise."

He turned to look at me, something raw and unguarded moving behind his eyes, and for a moment I thought he might kiss me right there in his lawyer's office with three documents spread across the desk between us and a woman's careful, decades-long scheme unraveling in real time.

Sophie cleared her throat, apologetic, breaking the moment before it could finish forming.

"There's one more thing," she said. "I hesitated to mention it, given everything else, but I think you need to know. The trust review, if it were ever triggered, requires an independent arbiter to assess the marriage's legitimacy. I pulled the appointment records to see who currently holds that role in your father's estate structure."

"And," Sebastian said.

Sophie hesitated, glancing between the two of us before she finally answered.

"The arbiter position was never formally filled after your father's death. It's been sitting vacant for three years. Which means whoever gets appointed to it next holds an enormous amount of power over whether this marriage, and this company, belongs to you or reverts to the trust. And two days ago, someone submitted a formal petition to fill that vacancy."

"Who submitted it," I asked, though some cold, certain part of me already suspected the answer before Sophie said it out loud.

"Beatrix Vettel," she said. "She's petitioning to appoint the arbiter herself."