The Two Year Wife

Chapter 2: The Man Across the Table

Camille’s POV

Three weeks after the ball, my father is gone.

It happens fast. A heart attack in his sleep, no warning, no last conversation, nothing I can point to and say I should have seen it coming. One week he is still walking into the office every morning, tired but too stubborn to slow down no matter how many times I ask him to. The next week I am standing at his funeral in the same city where I once wore a mask and forgot, for a single night, that any of this was falling apart.

Grief does not leave much room for numbers, but the numbers do not care. I go back to the office three days after we bury him because the board will not wait any longer, and I am the only Laurent left to sit behind his desk.

“You cannot fix this by staring at it,” Elodie says, dropping into the chair across from me with two coffees she does not ask if I want.

“I can try.”

“You look like you have not slept since the ball.”

I have not, though not for the reasons she assumes. There is another version of that night I have not told her. It involves a mask, a stranger, and a room down a long hallway. I still find myself thinking about it far more than I should, especially for a man whose name I never learned.

“I am fine,” I say.

“You are the worst liar I know.”

I take the coffee from her instead of answering.

The truth is, Laurent Ateliers has only weeks left, not months. Our largest lender pulled out after the last quarterly report, and now the investors are beginning to panic. Once news of my father’s illness gets out, it will no longer be a private matter, and news like that always gets out. I have called every bank in Paris that is still willing to take my calls, but only one name keeps turning up wherever I turn.

Marchetti Group.

I hate the sound of it. My father still flinches whenever it is spoken in this house, a reaction that has lasted twenty years. It comes from a business war I only partly understand, something about a hostile takeover, a betrayal, and a rivalry that never truly ended, even after both sides stopped speaking about it.

But Marchetti Group is the only firm still willing to talk.

“They want a meeting,” I tell Elodie. “Tomorrow. Milan.”

“Are you sure you are ready for that? It has barely been three weeks.”

“I do not have the luxury of waiting until I am ready..”

She studies me for a long moment.

“You are terrifying when you get like this,” she says finally.

“I am desperate. It looks similar.”

I fly to Milan the following morning with a folder of figures I know by heart and a headache that has refused to leave me since the ball. The Marchetti Group building looms over the city, all glass and steel, stretching so high into the sky that I have to lean back just to see where it ends.

The lobby is made of marble, quiet and expensive in a way that does not need to draw attention to itself. A woman at the front desk checks my name on a list and leads me directly to a private elevator.

“Mr Marchetti is expecting you,” she says.

Mr Marchetti.

I have never met him, but I know the version of him the newspapers have created. Cold, precise and exceptionally good at taking control of companies that are already falling apart. He is the son of my father’s old rival, now running the empire his father built with the same reputation but none of the mercy people once claimed his father had.

The elevator opens onto a private floor, glass walled offices looking out over the city, and a man is already waiting near the window with his back to me.

“Miss Laurent” he says, without turning. “Thank you for coming.”

“You did not give me much choice.”

He turns.

The floor tilts under me.

I know that jaw. I know that mouth. I know the exact shade of grey his eyes turn when they are studying something they intend to win.

It is him.

The mask is gone, but none of that matters. I would recognize him anywhere now, with or without it. The man from the terrace. The man from the room down the hallway. He stands before me in a dark suit, and the look on his face tells me that he recognizes me just as quickly as I recognize him.

“You,” I say, before I can stop myself.

Something flickers behind his eyes. Not quite shock.

Something closer to a man recalculating very quickly.

“Miss Laurent,” he says again, slower this time, like the name is a warning he is giving himself as much as me.

“You knew,” I say. “You knew who I was this whole time?”

“No.” His voice is flat, controlled, but there is something underneath it that was not there a second ago. “I did not.”

“You expect me to believe that.”

“I do not particularly care what you believe.”

The coldness of it stings more than it should, considering three weeks ago this man had his hands in my hair and my name meant nothing to either of us on purpose.

“This is insane,” I say. “I cannot do business with you.”

“You flew to Milan to do exactly that.”

“That was before I knew Marchetti Group belonged to you.”

“It has always belonged to me,” he says. “You simply never asked whose name was on the building before you needed something from it.”

The words land like a slap,mostly because they are true.

I straighten my shoulders, forcing my voices steady even though nothing in me feels steady at all.

“Nico Marchetti,” I say, testing the name out loud for the first time.

“Camille Laurent,”he replies,and for a moment something almost human crosses his face. “I did not expect this.”

“Neither did I.”

“I assume the mask was not simply for the aesthetics.”

“I assume you had your own reasons.”

He studies me for a long moment, the same way he studied me on the terrace, like he is reading something I have not said out loud.

“Sit,” he says finally, gesturing to the chair across from his desk. “We have business to discuss, regardless of the rest of it.”

I sit because I do not have another option. My father’s company will survive on pride alone.

“Laurent Ateliers needs a loan restructured within the month,” I say, sliding the folder across the desk.

“Reasonable terms. Nothing more.”

He does not open the folder.

“I know your numbers, Miss Laurent. I have known them for weeks.”

Cold runs through my chest.

“You have been watching my company.”

“I watch every company that might actually need me.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one you are getting.”

I press my palms flat against my knees to keep my hands from shaking. This is not the man from the terrace. This is someone colder, sharper, someone who speaks like every word has already been weighed for advantage before it leaves his mouth.

“Will you help us or not,” I say.

He leans back slightly, studying me.

“There may be a solution” he says. Though I suspect you will not like it.”

“Try me”.

The door behind him opens before he can answer. A calm, dark haired man steps in carrying a folder of his own, glancing between us with the practiced blankness of someone used to walking into tense rooms.

“Luca,” Nico says, without looking away from me.

“Miss Laurent’s father’s estate documents. You said there was something in them worth discussing.”

Luca hesitates, glancing at me with something close to pity.

“You have not told her yet,” he says.

My stomach drops.

“Told me what?”

Nico’s jaw tightens, the first c***k I have seen in his composure since I walked in.

“Your father’s will,” he says slowly, “was filed with a clause neither of us knew existed until this morning.”

“What clause?”

Luca opens the folder and slides a single page across the desk toward me instead of answering directly.

I read it twice before the words make sense.

Majority control of Laurent Ateliers transfers to the board unless Camille Laurent is legally married before her twenty fifth birthday.

My birthday is in six weeks.

I look up slowly, my heart pounding in my ears, and meet Nico’s gaze. His expression is impossible to read.

“There is a solution to your loan and a solution to this,” he says quietly. “They happen to be the same solution.”

I already know why he is about to say before he says it, and every part of me wants to walk out of this office and never come back.

I do not move.