My Billionaire Fiancé Is Hiding a Crime

My phone buzzes on the diner counter, screen lighting up with my sister's name, and I almost don't answer it because I already know. I know before she says a word. "Mara, I'm so sorry," Wren says, and her voice is shaking in that way it only shakes when something's actually wrong. "They took the house." I set down the coffee pot. My hand is steady. My chest is not. "What do you mean they took the house?" "The bank. This morning. There were men in suits standing on the porch with papers, Mara, I didn't know what to do —" "Where's Dad?" "Sitting on the curb. He won't move." I tell my manager I have a family emergency, which is true, and I tell him I need the rest of the week off, which is a lie because I don't have a week. I have maybe an hour before everything I've spent three years protecting collapses into the gutter along with my father's pride. The drive home takes eleven minutes. I make it in seven. Dad's exactly where Wren said he'd be — sitting on the curb in his work boots, staring at the house like it might change its mind. Sixty-one years old and looking smaller than I've ever seen him. "Dad." He doesn't look up. "I had it handled." "You had it handled three months ago when you told me the loan was paid off." "It will be." "Dad, there are eviction notices stapled to the door." He finally looks at me, and there's something in his face I haven't seen since Mom died. Not anger. Defeat. And that's worse. "I didn't want you to worry," he says. "I'm always going to worry. That's the job description." Wren's crying behind me, sixteen years old and watching her whole world get repossessed, and I do what I always do. I become the wall. I become the thing that doesn't fall down so everyone else has somewhere to lean. "How much," I say. "The real number. Not the number you tell yourself in the shower." He says it. I don't flinch, but something inside my ribs does. Two hundred and forty thousand dollars. Due in full within thirty days or the house — the house Mom planted the garden in, the house with my height marked in pencil on the kitchen doorframe — is gone for good. I have eleven thousand dollars in savings. I have a job that pays me $14.50 an hour to pour coffee for men who call me "sweetheart" and tip in loose change. There is no version of this math that works. That night I'm scrolling job listings with the desperation of someone bailing water out of a sinking boat with a teaspoon, and that's when I see it. Companion / Executive Assistant needed. Live-in. High discretion required. Compensation: negotiable, substantial. Must be available immediately. No company name. No real description. Just a phone number and a warning at the bottom: Time-wasters need not apply. I call before I let myself think about it. A man answers. Not warm. Efficient. "You're calling about the position." "Yes." "Are you available to start tomorrow?" My heart is doing something violent in my chest. "What exactly is the position?" "You'll learn everything you need to know if you're hired. Mr. Calloway doesn't waste time on people who ask too many questions before they're useful." Calloway. I know that name. Everyone in this city knows that name. It's on the side of three skyscrapers and a hospital wing and half the local news whenever something goes catastrophically right or catastrophically wrong in finance. "What's the salary?" "Twenty thousand a month. Plus housing. Plus a signing bonus if you're hired tonight." I almost drop the phone. "There's an interview at nine a.m.," the man says. "Penthouse, Calloway Tower. Don't be late. Mr. Calloway has no patience for excuses." The line goes dead before I can ask anything else — what the job actually is, what discretion means, why a billionaire needs a "companion" badly enough to pay this much. I look at Wren's door, light still on, the shadow of her moving back and forth like she can't sit still with fear. I look at the eviction notice sitting on our kitchen table like a death sentence. Twenty thousand dollars covers the loan in one year. One year of whatever this is, and my family keeps their home. I tell myself I'm not scared. I'm lying. At 8:58 the next morning, I'm standing in front of Calloway Tower, sixty floors of glass stabbing into gray sky, wearing the only blazer I own and praying my hands stop shaking before the elevator opens. They don't. The elevator doors part on the top floor, and a man is already waiting there. Not the assistant who called me. Someone else entirely — tall, dark-suited, jaw cut like he was carved out of bad decisions, eyes the color of a storm that hasn't decided yet whether it's going to pass you by or destroy you. "You're late," he says. I check my phone. 8:59. "I have one minute—" "You're late," he says again, like the clock answers to him personally, "because I expected you four minutes ago, and you spent those minutes outside deciding whether you had the nerve to walk in." My mouth goes dry. He's not wrong. "I'm Mara Ellison," I say instead, because it's the only thing I can manage. He studies me the way you'd study a contract you're already planning to rewrite in your favor. "Adrian Calloway," he says. "Sit down, Miss Ellison. We have a great deal to discuss, and very little of it will be pleasant."