Rival Hearts

Chapter Three: Not a Joke

For a second I actually laughed.

It came out wrong, more air than sound, the kind of laugh that happens when your body doesn't know what else to do with a sentence that big. "That's not funny, Dad."

"It isn't a joke." He said it the way he said everything that mattered to him — flat, final, already three steps past the point of discussion. "Julian and I have been working on this for years. It's done."

"Years." I set my bag down slowly, like the weight of it had suddenly doubled. "You've been planning my wedding for years and never once mentioned it."

"There was nothing to mention until now. Timing matters in these things."

"These things." My voice cracked upward, sharper than I meant it to. "This isn't a merger, Dad. This is my life."

"It's both." He finally turned to face me fully, and for the first time since I had walked in the door, his expression shifted — the posture of a man bracing for a fight he had already rehearsed in his head. "The company needs this. The Voss name carries weight we don't have anymore, not since the industry shifted the way it has. A partnership like this secures us for the next generation."

"Secures us." I shook my head, trying to find the version of this conversation that made sense and coming up empty every time. "You're talking about me like I'm a line item."

"That's not what I said."

"It's exactly what you said." I pressed my palms against my eyes for a second, willing the last twenty minutes to rearrange themselves into something less absurd. "I don't even know this person. I've never met him. You're asking me to marry a stranger."

"You'll meet him." My father said it like that solved everything, like an introduction could undo eighteen years of never once hearing his name at our dinner table. "Soon. Within the week, I would imagine, once the details are finalized."

"The details." I laughed again, no air behind it this time. "There are details. Of course there are details."

"Wren."

"No, I want to hear them. Go ahead." I crossed my arms, daring him to keep going, half hoping he would back down and tell me this was some elaborate test of how I would handle bad news. He didn't back down. My father never did.

"The engagement will be announced within the month. The wedding will follow within the year — sooner, if the company's position requires it. Both families have agreed the arrangement serves everyone's interests." He recited it like a memo he had read a hundred times, which, I realized with a sick lurch in my stomach, he probably had. "You'll have input on details. The venue. The date, within reason."

"Input on the venue." I stared at him. "That's what I get. Input on the venue."

"Wren, be reasonable."

"I am being reasonable." My hands were shaking again, the same way they had outside that bar a few hours earlier, and I hated that my body kept doing this tonight, kept betraying exactly how unmoored I felt. "You're the one who decided my entire future without asking me a single question about it."

He was quiet for a moment, his expression turning calculating, a man weighing exactly how hard to push.

"I know this isn't what you pictured," he said, and his voice softened just enough to feel worse, not better. "But you've been gone five years, Wren. You came back with a business degree and a plan to help run this company. This is part of that. Whether you like it or not, this family's future depends on the Voss partnership holding, and marriage is the surest way to make sure it does."

"Surest way." I echoed the phrase back at him, disgusted by how easily it fell out of his mouth. "You make it sound like a contract clause."

"In a way, it is."

That, more than anything else he had said, was what finally broke something loose in my chest — a hot, furious ache that had nowhere to go. I turned away from him before I said something I couldn't take back, walked halfway down the hall, and stopped myself, because running from a conversation had never once worked with my father. He always found the next room to finish it in.

"Does Mom know?" I asked, without turning around.

"Your mother has known for months."

Months. I closed my eyes. Everyone in this house had been sitting on this for months while I finished my last semester across the ocean, building a version of my future that apparently never mattered at all.

"And him?" I finally turned back. "Does he know? Does the Voss son know he's marrying a stranger too, or is this a surprise for him as well?"

"Kael has known for some time." My father said the name plainly, without any weight behind it, like it was just a word and not the single most important detail he had handed me all night. "He's been informed of the arrangement. I imagine his family expects him to accept it the same way you're expected to."

Kael. I turned the name over once in my head and felt nothing — no recognition, no shape to attach it to. Just a stranger's name, tied to a stranger's face I hadn't seen and couldn't picture, waiting somewhere in this city for the same conversation I had just had.

"When do I meet him?"

"Soon," my father said again, already turning to head toward his study, already treating the hardest part of this conversation as finished. "There's a dinner being arranged. You'll meet him properly then, and I expect you to be civil about it, Wren. This family cannot afford for you to make a scene."

"A scene." I watched him walk away, the word landing somewhere between insult and warning. "Right. Wouldn't want that."

He didn't answer. He never did, not once he had decided a conversation was over.

I stood alone in the hallway for a long time after his study door clicked shut, replaying the whole thing, trying to make the shape of my future fit into the sentence he had handed me like it was nothing. A name. A dinner. A stranger I was supposed to marry within the year, whether I wanted to or not.

I had no idea, standing there in the quiet, how much smaller this city actually was than I had assumed — that the stranger waiting for that same dinner wasn't a stranger to me at all. That I had already met him, already hated him, already promised him consequences he had no idea were coming.

Soon, my father had said.

Soon turned out to be a lot sooner than either of us was ready for.