MARRIED TO MY ENEMIES SON

RULES OF THE HOUSE

The wedding itself took eleven minutes and a single photograph for the press release.

Fallon wore ivory because the lawyer said pale colors photographed as "sympathetic," and she stood in a courthouse hallway that smelled like floor wax while a photographer from Marcus's PR team arranged them at an angle that suggested affection without actually requiring any. Marcus's hand rested at the small of her back for exactly as long as the flash required and not one second longer.

"You can let go now," she murmured through her smile, once the photographer lowered his camera.

"Force of habit," he said, and did.

They didn't touch again for three weeks.

The house he moved her into was not what she expected. She'd braced herself for something cold — glass and steel, a monument to money with no fingerprints on it. Instead she found a townhouse with actual books on the shelves, spines cracked from reading rather than arranged by a decorator, and a kitchen that had clearly been used by someone who cooked alone and didn't care if anyone saw the mess of it.

"Rules," Marcus said, the first night, setting her suitcase down in a guest room with its own lock on the inside of the door — his idea, not her request, which she noted and didn't know what to do with. "We're cordial in public. Affectionate, if the situation calls for it. In private, you owe me nothing but the truth if I ask you something directly, and I'll extend you the same. I won't come into your room. I won't ask about your past relationships, and I don't expect you to ask about mine. This is a job, Fallon. Nothing more."

"You say that like it's supposed to be a comfort."

"It's supposed to be honest." He studied her for a moment in the doorway, and there was something almost apologetic in it, though he'd never have called it that. "I know what my name did to your family. I'm not asking you to forgive it. I'm asking you to let me make the next two years bearable, since I can't make the last four years disappear."

It was the most human thing he'd said to her since the porch.

---

The first crack in the arrangement came four months in, on a Tuesday, over something as small as a fever.

Her youngest brother, Teo, had come down with something that turned into pneumonia faster than anyone expected, and Fallon spent two nights at the children's hospital in a chair that did nothing for her spine, drinking vending machine coffee and lying to her mother about how not-worried she was. She hadn't told Marcus. There was no clause in the contract that required her to; sickness in her family was hers to carry, the same as it always had been.

He showed up anyway, at eleven at night, still in his work clothes, carrying a bag from the pharmacy down the street and a second coffee that was actually drinkable.

"How did you know I was here?"

"Your mother called the house line looking for you. She sounded frightened, and I didn't like leaving her frightened, so I told her I'd handle it." He set the coffee in front of her, along with a phone charger, a granola bar, and — absurdly, precisely — a pillow, the good kind, not the flat hospital-issue one. "The doctor here is competent but overworked. I had my assistant find out who runs pediatric pulmonology at Sinai. He's coming by in the morning as a courtesy consult."

"You didn't have to do that."

"I know." He sat down in the chair beside her, the plastic one, wincing slightly at how it did not accommodate a six-foot-two man built for boardrooms rather than hospital corridors. "I did it anyway."

She looked at him for a long moment — really looked, the way she hadn't let herself since the porch, because looking too closely at Marcus Lindqvist felt dangerously close to admitting he wasn't the villain she'd built him into. He looked tired. He looked like a man who hadn't planned on caring about any of this and was visibly unsettled to find that he did.

"Why are you being kind to me," she said. It wasn't really a question. It was an accusation dressed as one.

"Because you're exhausted, and your brother's sick, and there's no version of this contract where I let that happen in front of me and do nothing." His jaw tightened. "Whatever else is true about my family, Fallon — I'm not going to be the reason another Reyes suffers. Not while I have the ability to stop it."

*Another Reyes.* The words sat strangely between them, heavier than the sentence should have carried. She filed the phrasing away without understanding yet why it snagged, too tired to chase the thought to wherever it led.

Teo's fever broke by morning. The pediatric specialist confirmed it was manageable, caught early enough. Fallon fell asleep in the terrible chair somewhere around four a.m., and when she woke at six, someone had draped Marcus's suit jacket over her shoulders, and the good pillow was tucked behind her neck, and he was gone — back to the office, back to whatever version of himself he wore during daylight hours.

She sat with the jacket still warm from his body heat, and for the first time since the porch, she let herself wonder if she had married the wrong Lindqvist to hate.