The Billionaire's Binding

Schedule B

The document arrived at 11:47 PM.

Not by email. Not through the company portal she'd been given access to three hours after leaving Harton Tower, the one with the clean sans-serif interface and the Harton Group logo in slate grey at the top corner. Not through any of the official channels she'd been expecting.

It arrived as a physical envelope, slid under her apartment door sometime between when she fell asleep on the couch with her laptop open and when she woke up at midnight with a crick in her neck and the screen gone dark.

Dwi stared at it from across the room for a full ten seconds before she moved.

The envelope was cream-colored, heavy stock, the kind that came from stationery that cost more per sheet than most people spent on lunch. Her name on the front in clean black type not handwritten, not printed from a home printer. Typeset. Like it had been prepared by someone who printed things this way as a matter of course.

Miss Dwi. Personal and Confidential.

She picked it up. Turned it over. No return address. No Harton Group logo. No postage, because it hadn't been mailed. It had been hand-delivered by someone who knew which floor she was on, which door was hers, and how to enter a secured building without buzzing up.

She opened it anyway, because what was the alternative.

Schedule B was four pages, single-spaced, and started with a sentence that made her read it twice to make sure she'd understood it correctly.

The contracted party agrees to act, for the duration of this agreement, as the sole and primary companion of the primary party in all social, professional, and private capacities as required.

Dwi sat down on the floor, which was not where she'd intended to sit, but her legs made the decision before she did.

Companion. The word sat in the middle of the sentence like something that had been chosen very carefully to mean exactly as much as it needed to and nothing more. Not assistant. Not employee. Not any of the words that would have appeared in the job description she'd applied for three weeks ago, the one that said Executive Operations Analyst, Harton Group Singapore, which was the position she'd interviewed for twice and been told she'd been shortlisted for and then heard nothing about until Lay's assistant called her directly last week.

She kept reading.

The contracted party agrees to attend all events, functions, and engagements as directed by the primary party, presenting as his designated companion for the purposes of public and private representation.

She flipped to page two.

The contracted party agrees to reside in accommodation provided by Harton Group for the duration of the contract, effective from the start date of employment.

She stopped.

She read that sentence three more times.

Reside in accommodation provided.

She looked up at her apartment the water stain on the ceiling above the kitchen that had been there since she moved in, the stack of books beside the couch because she'd never gotten around to buying a proper shelf, the small plant on the windowsill that was somehow still alive despite everything, the life she had assembled here piece by piece in eighteen months that was, technically, about to become irrelevant.

Her phone was in her hand before she'd finished the thought, Lay's contact pulled up from the number his assistant had given her.

It rang twice.

"You read it," he said, instead of hello.

"It's midnight," Dwi said.

"You called."

"The document says I have to live somewhere you provide."

"The accommodation is on Nassim Road. You'll have your own floor."

"That's not the point."

"The point," Lay said, and his voice had the same quality it had in the office controlled, unhurried, the voice of someone who had anticipated this conversation and had already decided how it ended, "is that the role requires availability that a standard commute doesn't allow for. The residence is a logistical solution."

"The role," Dwi said. "Which is what, exactly? Because the word companion appears in Schedule B four times and not once in the original contract."

A pause. Shorter than she expected.

"Executive companion," he said. "It's a recognized position in high-level corporate environments. You would accompany me to."

"I know what the word means." She stood up and walked to the window, because she needed to move. Outside, the Singapore night was orange and humid and ongoing, indifferent to the particular mess she was standing in. "I applied for an analyst position."

"You were offered this one."

"Without knowing what it was."

"You signed before asking."

That landed harder than she wanted it to. She pressed her free hand flat against the glass and felt the warmth of it the city heat bleeding through, constant, like a low-grade fever the place had learned to live with.

"The clause about Schedule B being sent after signing," she said. "You knew I wouldn't sign if I'd read this first."

"I knew some people wouldn't."

"But you wanted to see if I would."

Silence.

"The woman in your office today," Dwi said. "Is she also a companion?"

Another pause, and in the pause was the answer, and the answer made something in her chest go tight and specific.

"The compensation for this role," Lay said, "is six times the market rate. Not three. The figure in the original contract was the base. Schedule B carries its own separate."

"Stop." She turned from the window. "Stop trying to solve this with numbers."

"Everything has a number."

"Not everything."

"Miss Dwi."

"I want out of the contract," she said. "Tonight. I'll sign whatever release you need."

The silence this time was different. It had a texture to it, something she couldn't name not surprise, exactly. More like the sensation of a calculation running in real time, the brief quiet of a machine processing an unexpected input.

"Review clause twelve," Lay said.

She looked down at the papers still in her hand. Flipped back to the original contract, the one she'd signed in his office, the one she'd read three times and thought she understood.

Clause twelve was half a paragraph she'd skimmed because it seemed standard early termination penalties, she'd assumed. The usual language.

She read it now.

In the event of termination initiated by the contracted party within the first ninety days, the contracted party agrees to repay all onboarding costs, preparation fees, and associated expenses as determined by Harton Group legal, which may include but are not limited to accommodation preparation, security clearance processing, and contracted party vetting costs, estimated at a minimum of SGD 85,000.

Eighty-five thousand Singapore dollars.

Dwi sat back down on the floor.

"You're joking," she said.

"I don't joke about contracts."

She believed him. She believed him completely.

"That number is designed to make it impossible for me to leave," she said.

"It's designed to ensure commitment." A pause. "There's a difference."

"From where I'm sitting there isn't."

"From where you're sitting," Lay said, "you're on the floor of an apartment you're three months behind on, holding a contract that offers you a way out of a situation you've been in since March. I reviewed your file, Miss Dwi. I know what the restructuring did to your position. I know what you've been living on."

The anger that moved through her then was clean and hot and clarifying, the way her emotions always were when they arrived sudden, total, taking up all the available space.

"You reviewed my file," she said.

"I review the files of everyone who enters into agreement with me."

"Before or after you designed the contract to trap them?"

The word trap fell into the silence and stayed there.

"The contract is binding," Lay said, finally. "But it is not a trap. You will be compensated fairly, housed well, and treated with complete."

"And the other women? The companion before me? The ones who signed?"

Nothing.

"You said three of four were fine with it," Dwi said. "What happened to the fourth?"

"She left," he said.

"How?"

A pause that told her there was more to it than that, and that she was not going to find out tonight.

"Read the rest of Schedule B," he said. "All of it. If you have questions in the morning, call my assistant before nine and she'll arrange a meeting."

"And if I have questions now?"

"Then you have my number." A beat. "Goodnight, Miss Dwi."

He ended the call.

Dwi stayed on the floor. The apartment was quiet the way apartments were quiet after midnight not peaceful, just the absence of other people's noise. She could hear the city outside. She could hear the refrigerator. She could hear herself breathing, which she was doing slightly faster than usual.

She looked at Schedule B, pages spread across her lap.

She turned to page three and kept reading.

Halfway down, between a clause about travel requirements and one about non-disclosure, there was a small paragraph she almost missed. Seven lines, standard font, formatted identically to everything around it so that the eye moved past it the way the eye moved past things it had been trained not to see.

She read it twice.

Then she took a photo of it with her phone.

Then she sat very still for a long time, thinking about what it meant and what it didn't mean and what kind of person put a clause like that in a contract and thought it was reasonable.

And somewhere in the thinking, without deciding to, she started making a plan.

She was still on the floor when dawn came through the window, orange and certain and already too warm, and she had four pages of notes in her phone and a specific feeling in her chest that she recognized from the last time things had gotten bad not fear, exactly. Something sharper.

The feeling that she had nothing left to lose.

She picked up the phone and called a number that wasn't Lay's assistant. The call connected on the second ring, groggy and confused.

"Dwi? It's six in the morning."

"I need a lawyer," she said. "Today. Someone who handles contract disputes with people who have more money than God."

A pause.

"What did you do?"

"Something impulsive," she said. "Come for coffee and I'll explain."

She hung up and looked at the photo she'd taken of page three. The seven lines. The clause she wasn't supposed to notice.

In the event the contracted party discovers information pertaining to Harton Group operations, personnel, or strategies classified above clearance level three, the contracted party agrees to immediate transfer to

The sentence ended there. Mid-clause. Cut off at the page break, and page four she checked, and checked again was missing.

Someone had sent her an incomplete Schedule B.

And she didn't know yet whether that was a mistake.

Or a warning.