The Billionaire's Binding

The Second Agreement

Sari's lawyer cousin was named Felix and he looked exactly like someone who had gone to law school because the family expected it and stayed because he turned out to be good at it mid-thirties, wire-rimmed glasses, the slightly rumpled quality of a man who thought carefully about everything except his shirt.

He arrived at a coffee shop three blocks from Nassim Road at eight thirty with a leather satchel and the expression of someone who had read the documents Dwi photographed and sent him at six forty-five and had thoughts about them that he was organizing into the correct order before speaking.

He ordered an Americano. He opened his satchel. He put on his glasses.

"Right," he said.

"Right," Dwi said.

"So." He laid two printed pages on the table her photographs of Schedule B, page four, the version that had appeared on her keyboard. "The custody clause."

"The custody clause."

"Which is and I want to be precise here not standard." He pushed his glasses up. "Not remotely standard. This language does not appear in any employment contract I have seen in twelve years of practice. It appears in agreements between states and individuals, in certain categories of classified information handling in government contexts, and in" he paused, "one other category I'll come back to."

"Come back to it now," Dwi said.

Felix looked at her over his glasses. "It appears in agreements that are not employment contracts at all but are structured to look like them. Agreements that are actually about something else, where the employment is the" he searched for the word, "the container. The visible part."

Dwi looked at her coffee. "What's in the container?"

"That's what I can't tell you from the documents alone." He turned the page over and tapped the bottom third. "What I can tell you is this. Clause twelve the exit penalty. SGD 85,000."

"I know."

"The calculation method is in subsection twelve-B, which I suspect you didn't read because it's a subsection and subsections are designed to be skipped." He turned to his second printed page, which had three lines highlighted in yellow. "Twelve-B says the penalty amount is calculated based on onboarding costs as defined in" he read carefully, "the Primary and Secondary Agreements, jointly."

Dwi went still.

"Secondary Agreement," she said.

"Secondary Agreement." Felix took his glasses off and cleaned them in the way people cleaned glasses when they needed a moment. "Which is referenced four times in Schedule B's boilerplate and never defined, explained, or most importantly presented to you for signature."

"I never signed a Secondary Agreement."

"No." He put his glasses back on. "You didn't. Which means one of three things." He held up a finger. "One: it doesn't exist and the reference is an error, which would be extraordinary given the quality of the legal drafting on everything else in this contract." Second finger. "Two: it exists and was deliberately withheld from you, in which case the contract may be challengeable on the basis of incomplete disclosure." Third finger. "Three: it exists, was withheld, and the withholding was itself part of the plan."

"The plan."

"Someone's plan." He folded his hands on the table. "Dwi. I need to ask you something and I need you to answer it honestly."

"When am I not honest?"

"You told Sari you were fine when you called her at six fifteen. You were not fine."

She conceded the point with a tilt of her head.

"Do you know what the Secondary Agreement is about?" he asked.

"No."

"Do you know who drafted it?"

She thought about Ms. Park and the leather portfolio and the specific stillness and the org chart line that read reporting to: Board of Directors. She thought about Lay's jaw tightening when she said the name in the kitchen.

"I have a name," she said. "I don't know if it's the drafter or the signatory or both."

"Give me the name."

"Ms. Jiyeon Park. Senior legal counsel, Harton Group. But she reports to the board, not to Lay."

Felix wrote it down. He was quiet for a moment, the quality of quiet that meant he was running something through.

"The board," he said.

"There's a board member named Tan Wei Liang. He runs the TWL Group."

Felix's pen stopped moving.

She noticed this. "What?"

He looked at his notepad. Then at her. Then back at his notepad.

"Felix."

"TWL Group," he said carefully, "has been under observation by the Monetary Authority for eighteen months. Not investigation observation. The distinction matters legally." He set his pen down. "They operate in shipping and logistics, officially. Less officially, they have been connected not proven, connected to the movement of funds through holding structures in Dubai and Cayman."

Dubai.

The word arrived in the room and stayed there.

"The meeting last night," Felix continued, "that Wei Liang requested you attend. Did he ask you anything personal? Your background, where you'd been"

"He asked if I'd ever been to Dubai," Dwi said. "I told him not yet."

Felix was quiet for three full seconds. "And had you? Before coming to Singapore?"

"No. Felix, I was in Jakarta until two years ago. I have a very boring personal history."

"Yes." He picked up his pen again. "But someone with your name might not."

The coffee shop hummed around them the machine steaming milk, a couple at the next table, the ordinary evening noise of a city that didn't know it was background music to something that was starting to feel significantly larger than an employment contract.

"Someone with my name," Dwi said.

"It's not uncommon. Dwi is"

"I know it's not uncommon." She leaned forward. "Say what you're saying."

Felix looked at her for a moment. Then he reached into his satchel and pulled out a third page not a photograph she had sent him, something he had printed himself, something he had found in the time between six forty-five and eight thirty.

He put it on the table.

It was a page from what looked like a company registry. She could see columns, a date, a jurisdiction header at the top that read DIFC Dubai International Financial Centre. She scanned down to the highlighted section.

A company name she didn't recognize. A registration date three years ago. A list of directors, three names, two redacted.

The third was not redacted.

Director: Dwi Santoso.

She looked at it. Then at Felix. Then at it again.

"That's not me," she said.

"I know," he said. "The date of birth on the registration is 1987. You'd have been"

"Fourteen." Her voice was very level. She was aware of making it level. "I'd have been fourteen years old."

"Yes." Felix folded his hands. "Someone used a version of your name and identity to register a company in Dubai in 2021. That company's activity" he tapped the page, "intersects with at least two of the holding structures the MAS has been observing in connection with TWL Group."

The room was very quiet in the way rooms were quiet when the noise was still there but you'd stopped hearing it.

"Wei Liang didn't ask about Dubai because of me," Dwi said.

"No."

"He asked because someone who used my name is connected to him. And he wanted to know if I knew."

"Or," Felix said carefully, "he wanted to know if you were the same person. Whether the Dwi in the contract and the Dwi on the company registry were connected." He paused. "Which would mean someone put you in this contract deliberately. Not Lay recruiting a capable analyst. Someone placing you specifically."

She thought about the call she hadn't been meant to hear, the elevator doors closing, three words through the wall. She signed it. Good. Begin Phase Two.

She had assumed Phase Two was Lay's plan. Something he'd set in motion.

She looked at the registry page. At the name that was hers and wasn't hers. At the date of a company formed three years ago in Dubai by a woman who had used her identity.

"If it wasn't Lay who placed me," she said slowly, "then someone else put me in front of him. Someone who knew he needed an analyst. Someone who knew he'd run a file check and find a name that looked clean because the real Dwi had never been to Dubai." She looked at Felix. "And now I'm in his house, under his contract, with a custody clause and a Secondary Agreement I never signed. And Wei Liang is on his board."

"Yes," Felix said.

"So I'm either bait," she said, "or I'm leverage."

Felix said nothing, which was its own answer.

She picked up her coffee and drank and thought about all of it the dress that arrived in her wardrobe, the page four left on her keyboard, the name Ms. Park appearing in two different contexts in one day, Lay going up in the elevator without answering.

"Can you get me out of the contract?" she asked.

"Possibly. The Secondary Agreement issue creates grounds for challenge." He hesitated. "But Dwi if someone placed you here deliberately, leaving might be more dangerous than staying."

She looked at him.

"If you're leverage," he said, "you're only useful to them inside the contract. If you leave or try to you become a liability instead."

She set the coffee down.

"Then I need to find out who placed me before I do anything else," she said.

"Yes."

"And I need to do it from inside the contract, without letting Lay know what I'm looking for, and without Wei Liang knowing I've connected the names."

"Yes."

She thought about Mira, who had gone quiet at exactly the wrong moment. About Reina, who had arrived at Thursday's meeting without being invited. About Chloe, who had said Thursday will be different and not explained.

Three women who had been in this system longer than her. Three women who had signed the same contract, with the same Secondary Agreement reference, and had all stayed.

She needed to know why.

She stood up. Put money on the table for both coffees.

"One more question," she said.

Felix looked up.

"The company in Dubai. The other two directors. The redacted ones." She looked at the registry page. "Can you find out who they are?"

He picked up his pen. "I can try."

"Don't try," she said. "Do it."

She walked out into the Singapore night, which was warm and dense and completely indifferent, and stood on the pavement outside the coffee shop and looked at the street for a moment.

Then she took out her phone and opened the Harton Group portal and navigated to the employee directory and typed a name she hadn't searched before.

Reina.

Four results. She clicked the first.

Reina Lim. Executive Relations Manager. Harton Group Singapore. Appointed: 2023.

Executive Relations. Not companion. Not contract staff. Manager.

Eight months in, and Reina had a title.

Dwi closed the portal and started walking back to Nassim Road with her hands in her pockets and her mind running three steps ahead of her feet, the way it always ran when something had stopped being complicated and started being dangerous.

She had been placed in this contract by someone who was not Lay.

She was connected to a Dubai company she had never heard of.

She was living in the house of a man who did not know she knew any of this.

And somewhere on the fourth floor, above the biometric door, Lay was doing what Lay did calculating, controlling, managing and he had no idea that the variable he'd underestimated had just become something else entirely.