Bound By The Wicked Billionaire’s Contract

The Plaza's ballroom smells like money and bad intentions. I know that's not fair. Flowers, actually peonies and white roses arranged in towers at every table, expensive enough to feed my mother for a month. The carpet is so thick I barely hear my own heels. Chandeliers throw light at angles that make everyone look like they're already famous. It's beautiful. I've been here four minutes and I already hate it, which probably says more about me than the Plaza. The dress I'm wearing belongs to my roommate Diamond. She's four inches taller and twenty pounds lighter and the fact that it fits me at all is either a miracle or a warning sign. I've got the waist safety-pinned in two places and I haven't sat down yet because I'm not sure what happens if I do. The champagne in my hand is for appearances. I've taken exactly one sip. I shouldn't be here. I know that. But the Donovan Foundation Scholarship Gala is technically mandatory attendance for current recipients, and I am… or rather was technically a current recipient. Was. Am. The uncertainty is new and I'm ignoring it the way I ignore most things that I can't solve in the next ten minutes. I find my name card at a table near the back, which tells me everything I need to know about where scholarship students rank in the Foundation's social hierarchy. There are eight seats. Four are already occupied by people who look like they were born at galas. I sit next to a woman who barely glances up from her phone and a man who's having a whispered argument with someone who isn't there. The room fills fast. I watch the door because I always watch the door. He walks in at 7:14 and the room does this thing this collective breath-holding that I've only ever seen happen in one other place, which is when my professor walks into a two-hundred-person lecture hall and the whole room gets quieter just because she's there. But this is different. This is involuntary. Like barometric pressure shifting before a storm. Jace Stone is and I'm being purely clinical about this, a problem. 6'2" at minimum. Shoulders that fill a suit jacket the way suits are theoretically supposed to be filled but almost never are. He's dark-haired and pale-eyed some shade of amber or gold that I'm too far away to accurately assess with the kind of contained stillness that reads as either extreme confidence or profound danger, and I've learned that those two things overlap more often than people admit. He's maybe twenty-seven. He moves like he's never been surprised by anything and has no intention of starting now. He takes a position near the bar. People arrange themselves around him immediately, not because he asked them to. Just because proximity to power is its own kind of gravity. I look away. The evening runs the way these evenings always run. Speeches about community investment. Soft music. Waitstaff circulating with things I can't afford. I'm scheduled to give a three-minute thank-you on behalf of the scholarship recipients at 8:30 I have it memorized, slightly personal, not sentimental, appropriately grateful without being pathetic. I've been practicing it for two weeks. At 8:15, one of the Foundation's PR representatives takes the stage. I don't immediately register that something is wrong. He's got the practiced cadence of a man who gives bad news for a living smooth and efficient, like he's reading from a teleprompter none of us can see. He thanks us for our attendance. Acknowledges the Foundation's thirty-year history. Notes, with practiced regret, that the founder passed away six months ago and left the organization in his grandson's hands. Then he says: effective immediately, all active Donovan Foundation scholarships are terminated. Resources have been redirected to reflect the new CEO's strategic priorities. Students enrolled under current agreements will receive a formal notification by end of business tomorrow. There's a beat of absolute silence. Then every head in the room turns toward my table. I'm the only active scholarship recipient here. I know this. They know this. The woman beside me with the phone stops texting. The man having the invisible argument goes quiet. Eight people at my table look at me with the particular brand of sympathy that people offer when they know they're watching a disaster happen and there's nothing to be done about it. I'm still holding my champagne glass. I make myself not set it down. The PR rep is still at the mic, concluding his remarks, when the screen behind the podium flickers. It's a slide. Prepared, professional, clearly not an accident. It shows a photograph of Jace Stone and the Stone Media headquarters and the words SCHOLARSHIPS TERMINATED alongside some corporate language about resource optimization that I can't read because my vision has gone briefly blurry around the edges. I look across the ballroom. He's already looking at me. No sympathy in those gold eyes. No acknowledgment that I exist as a person rather than a logistical variable in a decision he made last week. He holds my gaze for maybe four seconds long enough to confirm he knows exactly what he's done and has no interest in apologizing for it and then he looks away. Returns to his conversation. Lifts his drink. Gone. That's what stays with me. Not the announcement. Not the room turning toward me. Not the months of work I just watched evaporate. What stays with me is the way he looked at me like I was something he'd already accounted for and dismissed. A rounding error. A minor inconvenience he'd handled. I set down the champagne. I pick up my bag. I smile at the woman beside me small and polite, nothing in it and I make my way to the coat check and out the front entrance, and I do all of this without my spine moving even a single degree from vertical. The cold hits me outside the Plaza and I let it. I pull out my phone. Three texts from Diamond she heard somehow, she's already on it, she's already angry on my behalf. A missed call from Yale Financial Aid. A voicemail from New Hope Hospital that I cannot make myself listen to yet. My mother is on the third floor of that hospital. She's been there for eleven weeks. The Donovan scholarship wasn't just tuition it covered my housing stipend, which covered her co-pays, which covered the difference between the treatment she's getting and the treatment she'd get without it. I've been supplementing with two part-time jobs and selling plasma twice a month and telling myself it's temporary, it's temporary, this is a bridge, I'm almost at the other side. There is no other side now. I walk to the subway. I do the math in my head because I always do the math it's reflexive, it's compulsive, it's the only thing that makes me feel like I have any agency in any of this. The numbers don't work. I've run them fourteen different ways and they don't work and I'm out of permutations. I have two options. I can accept defeat and figure out how to tell my mother that everything we've been holding together with rubber bands and desperation is about to come apart. Or I can make Jace Stone acknowledge that I exist. By the time I get to the hospital, I know what I'm going to do. I sit beside my mother's bed until she wakes up briefly, barely and I hold her hand and I do not tell her any of it. I tell her I came from a party. I tell her she looks better. I tell her Diamond says hi. Gwen Hills has been beautiful her whole life in the way that some women just are, the kind that doesn't require effort. Right now she's thin in a way that isn't beautiful and I've learned to look at her face instead of her hands because her hands tell me more truth than I can take some nights. Her eyes when they open are still hers dark and clear and too perceptive by half. She looks at me for a long moment. "Something happened," she says. "I'm handling it," I say. She squeezes my hand once just once, just three fingers, the grip she has left and then closes her eyes again. I stay until she's sleeping. In the elevator going down I open my phone and I call three journalists and a local news producer and I say the same thing to all of them: I have a story. I'm a scholarship student whose education was just eliminated overnight by a billionaire who didn't bother to notify me himself. My mother is dying on the third floor of this hospital. Do you want it or not. By midnight, three of the four have said yes. By morning, my phone is ringing with a number I don't recognize. I answer it. "Miss Hills." The voice is professional, female, efficient. "My name is Cara. I'm Mr. Stone's executive assistant. He'd like to meet with you. Tomorrow, nine a.m., Stone Media headquarters. Are you available?" I stare at the ceiling of my apartment for a moment. "Tell him I'll be there," I say. I hang up before she can ask anything else. I don't sleep. What I do is make a list of every single thing I'm willing to sacrifice to keep my mother alive. It's a long list. I am surprised, by the end of it, by how long.