Rival Hearts

Chapter Eight: No Way Out

Morning came in gray and heavy, the rain from the night before settling into a fine mist that clung to the windows of my father's study. I sat across from him and a lawyer I didn't recognize, a folder of documents open on the desk between us, and tried to focus on the words instead of the exhaustion still sitting behind my eyes from a night I hadn't really slept through.

"Your grandmother's estate," the lawyer began, adjusting his glasses, "was structured under a specific clause tied to family continuity. I won't bore you with the legal language, but the short version is this — the primary holdings, including the coastal properties and the original hotel license your family built its name on, are contingent on maintaining strategic partnerships as outlined in a supplementary trust agreement."

"In English," I said.

He glanced at my father, who nodded once, permission granted.

"If you decline the marriage, the estate reverts to a holding trust managed outside the family, effective immediately. Your grandmother's properties, the license, the original hotel itself — all of it becomes inaccessible to the Ashcombe name for a minimum of twenty-five years."

The room went very quiet. Rain ticked against the glass.

"You're telling me Odette set this up." I looked at my father, waiting for him to deny it, to tell me this was some administrative accident nobody had actually intended. He didn't.

"Your grandmother believed in this partnership long before either of us formalized it," he said, quiet in a way that felt almost like an admission. "She wanted to make certain nothing derailed it. I didn't ask her to include that clause. I didn't know about it until the lawyers found it themselves."

"So even if I wanted to refuse this—"

"You'd cost this family everything your grandmother spent her life building." My father's voice stayed level, but it had thinned into something closer to plea than command. "I'm not asking you to be happy about this, Wren. I'm asking you to understand there isn't another option left on the table."

I sat with that for a long moment, the weight of it settling somewhere low in my chest, heavier than anything he had said to me in that hallway three days ago. This wasn't just his ambition anymore. This was Odette, the woman who had praised a stranger for carrying her groceries, who had wanted to invite him to dinner before either of us knew who he was, quietly making sure her granddaughter had no way out of a life she had already decided was right for her.

I didn't have it in me to be angry at her. I just felt tired.

---

Across the city, in an office with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the same gray morning, Kael was getting a version of the same conversation, though I wouldn't hear the details of it until much later.

Julian laid it out plainly, no preamble, the way he handled most hard conversations — the Voss family's remaining contracts with Ashcombe Hospitality, worth more to the company's future than any single deal Kael could broker on his own, were bound to the marriage in a clause negotiated years earlier, back when the partnership was still only a possibility on paper.

"If the marriage doesn't happen," Julian told him, "we lose access to every hospitality contract this family has spent a decade rebuilding. We go back to where we started before any of this began."

"Before what began?" Kael asked, and I imagine, from what he told me afterward, that his father's face went through some visible calculation in that moment — the look of a man who wanted to answer honestly and couldn't quite make himself do it.

"Before the company needed rebuilding at all," Julian said instead — not an answer, not really, and Kael, sharper than I had given him credit for in those early days, noticed the gap in it immediately.

"Last night, at dinner," he said carefully. "You mentioned twenty years of history. What did you mean by that?"

"I meant nothing by it. I was frustrated. People say things they don't mean when they're frustrated." Julian's voice had gone careful, controlled, the exact tone of a man closing a door he didn't want opened. "This marriage matters, Kael. That's all you need to understand right now."

Kael let it go, because pushing further clearly wasn't going to get him anywhere that morning, but he told me later that the unanswered question sat with him the rest of the day like a splinter he couldn't quite work free.

---

By that evening, both families had reconvened, this time by phone, brisk and businesslike in a way that made the whole thing feel even less real than it already had. I sat curled into the corner of my bedroom window seat, phone pressed to my ear, listening to my mother relay the details like she was reading off a shipping manifest.

"The engagement will be announced Friday," she said. "Wedding planning starts immediately after. Your father wants the ceremony within three months, given the timeline the estate clause requires."

"Three months."

"I know it's fast."

"It's not fast, Mom. It's insane." I pressed my forehead against the cool glass, watching the last of the rain slide down the other side. "Three months to plan a wedding to a man I met by insulting each other in public. Twice."

"I know," she said again, softer this time, and for a moment I heard something almost like guilt in her voice, buried under all the practicality. "I wish it were different, Wren. I do. But it's happening, and the sooner we all accept that, the easier the next few months will be."

I didn't answer right away. Outside, the streetlights flickered on one by one down the block, and somewhere across the city, in a house I had never once set foot in, Kael was probably having some version of this exact conversation with his own mother, both of us staring down the same impossible timeline from opposite ends of it.

"Fine," I said finally, because there was nothing else left to say. "Friday. Three months. Let's get this over with."

I hung up before she could offer any more comfort I didn't want, and sat there in the dark for a long time, turning Julian's unanswered question over in my mind even though I hadn't been the one to ask it, some instinct telling me it mattered more than either family was willing to admit.

Three months to plan a wedding. Three months to learn how to share a life with a man I still barely knew, whose father flinched at a phrase he clearly hadn't meant to say out loud. I thought about calling Ivy, just to hear a voice that had nothing to do with any of this, and decided against it. Some things I needed to sit with alone first, before I could put them into words anyone else would understand.

Friday felt very close, all of a sudden. Not close enough to feel real yet. Close enough to feel inevitable.