Sold To a Corpse, Claimed By a King

CHAPTER ONE :The Wedding Nobody Wanted

The champagne in Ivy Sinclair's glass had gone flat an hour ago, which felt about right, because everything else at this party had gone flat with it.

She stood at the edge of the ballroom in a dress that cost more than most people's cars, holding a drink she wasn't going to finish, watching her family perform. That was the only word for it. Perform. Richard Sinclair laughed too loudly at something a board member said, his hand landing on the man's shoulder like they were old friends instead of business partners who didn't trust each other. Diane drifted between clusters of guests in ice-blue silk, collecting compliments the way other people collected mail automatically, without really looking at what she was holding. And Bianca, glowing, endlessly glowing, was already being toasted by someone across the room, though the party wasn't even for her.

It was for Ivy. Technically.

Happy birthday, sweetheart, her father had said that morning, not looking up from his phone. Try not to end up in the tabloids this time.

She'd laughed, because that was the correct response. She'd learned a long time ago which responses were correct.

"You're doing the thing again," said a voice at her elbow. Bianca, stepping into the space beside her with a glass of her own, smiling the smile she wore for rooms full of people. "The thing where you look like you're at a funeral instead of a party."

"It's my party. I'm allowed to be bored at it."

"You're allowed to be a lot of things." Bianca's eyes swept the crowd, already looking past her. "Mostly you're allowed to be careful. Dad's watching."

Of course he was. Richard Sinclair was always watching, in the specific way a man watches an investment he's worried might depreciate. Ivy had understood by the time she was twelve that her value to this family was measured in headlines — good ones, ideally, but even bad ones had their uses, as long as they kept her name in circulation and the Sinclair brand relevant. Pampered. Reckless. Spoiled. She'd read every version of herself the press had ever printed, and none of them had ever once used the word loved, because the people who fed those stories to reporters weren't the people who loved her. They were the people who owned her, in every way that mattered except legally.

She had stopped being surprised by that a long time ago. Since she was seventeen, if she was honest with herself. Since a July afternoon in a pool house that still, eight years later, showed up behind her eyes when she wasn't careful — Bianca's laugh through the door, and a boy's voice she used to think loved her, and the particular quiet of realizing that in this family, nothing was ever really hers, not even the people she'd trusted.

She had never told anyone that was the year she stopped believing in any of it. Marriage. Loyalty. The idea that love was something you could keep instead of something that got taken from you the moment you looked away.

Which made the timing of what happened next almost funny.

"Ivy." Her father's voice, cutting through the noise of the party as he crossed the room toward her with a man she didn't recognize ,silver-haired, expensively dressed, wearing the specific expression of someone about to deliver news he'd already decided was good. "There's someone I want you to meet. Come."

She went, because going was easier than not going, and because some small, stubborn part of her was still curious what new use she was about to be put to.

"This is Arthur Cross," her father said, and something in his voice had shifted into the register he used for business careful, pleased, a man closing a deal. "Old friend of mine. We've been talking, and I think we may have found a solution that works well for both our families."

"A solution," Ivy repeated.

"You've heard about his son, of course. Julian." Richard said it the way he said everything unpleasant — quickly, so it would be over faster. "Terrible thing, the accident. He's been in care for over a year now. No real change expected." A pause, delicate as a blade. "Arthur and I think it's time the boy had a wife. Someone to look after the estate. Keep things stable while he — while things are as they are."

It took Ivy a full three seconds to understand what her father was actually saying.

"You want to marry me to a man in a coma."

"Don't be dramatic." Richard's smile didn't move. "You'd want for nothing. The Cross fortune is triple what we,"

"I heard you." She looked at Arthur Cross, who had the grace, at least, to look faintly uncomfortable, and then back at her father, and felt something in her chest go very still and very cold, the way it always did right before she decided not to fight something that wasn't worth fighting. Because what was the alternative? Refuse, and become one more headline about the difficult Sinclair girl, one more disappointment to be managed, one more reason for her father to look at her like an expense he regretted. At least this way, she'd be useful. At least this way, someone would finally get what they wanted from her without pretending it was anything else.

"Fine," she said.

Her father blinked, clearly having braced for a fight he wasn't getting. "Fine?"

"Fine." She picked her glass back up, and this time she finished it. "Send me the paperwork."

Across the ballroom, she didn't see Bianca go pale and set down her own drink, or hear her murmur an excuse and disappear toward the terrace with her phone already in her hand. She didn't see Diane watching the whole exchange with an expression of very quiet, very careful satisfaction ,the expression of a woman who had spent a decade making sure certain doors stayed shut, and who had just watched one more of them lock from the inside.

Ivy only knew that somewhere across the city, in a house she had never seen, a man everyone believed could no longer hear anything at all was about to become her husband.

She had no way of knowing that he could hear everything.

And that he was already awake.