The Billionaire's Binding

The pen was heavier than it looked. Dwi noticed this the way she noticed most things too late, when it was already in her hand and the paper was already in front of her and the man across the desk was already watching her with the kind of patience that didn't feel like patience at all. It felt like a countdown. "Take your time," Lay said. He didn't mean it. She could tell by the way his eyes hadn't moved from her face since she sat down, the way his fingers rested flat against the mahogany not drumming, not fidgeting, just there, like he was a piece of furniture that had decided to become a person. His suit was the color of a night sky with the lights turned off. No tie. Top button undone. The only thing casual about him. Everything else was sharp. The office was on the forty-third floor of Harton Tower and it looked exactly like what it was the room of a man who had never needed to prove anything because the proof was the room itself. Floor-to-ceiling glass on two sides, Singapore spread out beneath them like something that belonged to him, because most of it did. A single painting on the wall that Dwi didn't recognize but suspected cost more than her annual salary times ten. No clutter. No personal photographs. Nothing that said human being works here. Just Lay, and the contract, and the pen she couldn't seem to put down. "Miss Dwi." "I'm reading it," she said, without looking up. A pause. "You've been on page three for six minutes." She had. She knew she had. The problem was that page three had a clause clause 7, to be specific that she had read four times and still didn't fully understand. The language was precise in the way that legal language was always precise, which meant it was designed to say everything and nothing at the same time. The contracted party agrees to fulfill obligations as outlined in Schedule B, which may be amended at the discretion of the primary party with fourteen days' written notice. Schedule B was not attached. "Where's Schedule B?" she asked. Something shifted in his expression. Not a smile more like the idea of a smile, considered and then set aside. "It will be provided upon signing." Dwi looked up for the first time since she'd started reading. He was already looking at her. He was always already looking at her she'd noticed this in the lobby when his assistant brought her up, noticed it in the elevator when she caught his reflection in the doors, noticed it now, the way his gaze was the kind of steady that most people only managed when they weren't really seeing you. Lay was seeing her. She didn't like it. "That's not how contracts work," she said. "It is how this contract works." "That's insane." "It's standard." "For who?" "For people in your position," he said, and his voice was the same temperature as the air conditioning cool, controlled, slightly uncomfortable to be in for too long. "You needed a position filled within the week. I have one. The terms are generous. The compensation is." "Three times the market rate, I know." She'd done the math six times on the MRT on the way here, and then twice more in the lobby. The number kept coming out the same. "That's exactly why I'm asking about Schedule B." "Because the pay is too good." "Because nothing is three times the market rate without a reason." He looked at her for a long moment. Outside the glass, a plane crossed the sky, impossibly small against the clouds. Singapore glittered beneath it, indifferent. "You're smarter than the others," Lay said finally. "What others?" "The ones who signed without asking." Dwi felt something cold move through her that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. She set the pen down on the desk deliberately, so he could see she'd done it and leaned back in her chair. "How many people have signed this contract?" "That's not relevant to your decision." "I'm making it relevant." Another pause. Longer this time. She got the sense he wasn't used to being redirected, the way a river isn't used to encountering a dam not angry, exactly, but aware that something unexpected had happened and calculating what to do about it. "Four," he said. "And they all got Schedule B after signing." "Yes." "And they were all fine with that." "Three of them were." Dwi opened her mouth and then closed it. She looked at the contract. She looked at the pen. She looked at the view Singapore in the afternoon, golden and vast and completely indifferent to the particular disaster she was sitting in the middle of. She thought about her bank account. She thought about the landlord's third message this week. She thought about her mother's voice on the phone last Sunday, careful and light, asking how things were going, and Dwi saying fine, everything's fine in the cheerful tone she used specifically when things were not fine. She thought about the job she'd lost three months ago when the company restructured, which was a polite way of saying they fired half the floor on a Tuesday afternoon and sent everyone home with a cardboard box and a two-week notice of severance pay. She thought about all of this in approximately four seconds, which was not long enough to make a good decision, but was apparently long enough to make a decision. She picked up the pen. "I want Schedule B within twenty-four hours of signing," she said. "Fourteen days is the standard window." "I'm not standard." She held his gaze. "Twenty-four hours, or I walk." The silence stretched. Somewhere below them, forty-three floors down, the city hummed. Lay's fingers hadn't moved from the desk. His face hadn't changed. But something behind his eyes did — a small recalculation, the adjustment of an equation where a variable had behaved unexpectedly. "Seventy-two hours," he said. "Forty-eight." A beat. "Fine." Dwi signed her name on the line before she could think about it again. The ink was barely dry when the door to the office opened and a woman walked in. She was beautiful the way expensive things were beautiful deliberately, precisely, with a confidence that came from knowing your value had been appraised and confirmed. Tall. Dark hair pinned back. A dress that probably cost what Dwi made in a month, before the restructuring. She walked like the room had been waiting for her, and maybe it had, because Lay didn't turn around he just watched Dwi watch the woman, which told Dwi everything she needed to know about who had the advantage in this particular moment. "I didn't know you had a meeting," the woman said. Her English was smooth and accented European, Dwi thought, or educated to sound like it. "I didn't know you were coming," Lay replied. "You never do." The woman's gaze moved to Dwi then, unhurried, the way you looked at something that might or might not matter. "New assistant?" "New contract staff," Lay said. "Mm." The woman smiled at Lay, not at Dwi, which was somehow more pointed than if she'd aimed it directly. "We're still on for tonight?" "I'll let you know." The woman held the smile a moment longer, then turned and left without a word to Dwi, which was worse than being dismissed. Being dismissed meant you'd registered. She hadn't registered at all. The door closed. Dwi looked down at the contract in front of her, at her name signed neatly on the line, at the blank space where Schedule B should have been. "Who was that?" she asked. "Irrelevant." "Is she also under contract?" Lay picked up the document and slid it into a folder with the unhurried efficiency of someone who considered the conversation over. "Your start date is Monday. Dress code is business formal. You'll receive your access credentials by end of day Friday." "You didn't answer the question." He stood. He was taller than she'd clocked from across the desk or maybe it was just the way he moved, like the room organized itself around him as he crossed it. He stopped at the edge of his desk and looked at her, and this close his eyes were darker than she'd expected, and more direct. "Miss Dwi," he said. "You've just signed a very well-compensated contract with terms that will be explained to you within forty-eight hours. I'd suggest spending that time getting comfortable with the uncertainty." "I don't get comfortable with uncertainty." "I know." He picked up the pen she'd left on his desk and turned it once in his fingers, something that might have been habit or might have been deliberate, then set it down again. "That's why I offered you the job." He walked toward the door that connected to the inner office and didn't look back. Dwi sat in the chair for a moment after he was gone, in the too-cold room with the too-expensive view, the signed contract already out of her hands, Schedule B still nowhere, the woman's smile still in the air like something that hadn't finished arriving yet. She reached into her bag for her phone. Three new messages from her landlord. She put the phone away. Fine, she thought. Fine. Forty-eight hours. She would read Schedule B, she would understand exactly what she'd gotten herself into, and then she would make a rational decision like a rational adult. She stood up and smoothed her skirt and walked to the elevator. She pressed the lobby button and waited. The doors were just closing when she heard it low, on the other side of the wall, Lay's voice and then another voice, a man's, and she caught three words before the elevator sealed shut and the city dropped away beneath her. "She signed it." And then: "Good. Begin Phase Two."