His Fake Bride to Claim

Chapter Two: Three Hours

From board meetings that turned into shouting matches to deals that collapsed minutes before signing, Sebastian Calloway-Reyes remained stoic.He had built his entire career by staying calm where everyone else was crashing out. None of that even changed during his father's funeral, two years earlier, when everyone else was breathing down his neck, watching to see if he could hold the company together.Through it all, he'd never let anyone see him break or even his hands shake.But something in him kept saying that this envelope sitting on his desk was about to end that streak."Harold, where did you say you found this, again?""At the reception, sir. There was no postage or return address on it, just your name," Harold said, half-retreating like the thing might explode."They said it was logged in twenty minutes ago but for some reason, nobody remembers seeing who dropped it.""So you mean to tell me someone walked into my building and nobody saw or knew who it was?""Yes… yes, sir." Harold cowered, fidgeting as he fixed his eyes on the floor."That's bullshit. Did you check with security?" he asked, his eyes never leaving the document on the table."Yes. There's a time gap of about forty seconds in the lobby footage, right around when it happened." Harold's voice dropped — this was something he didn't want to be the one saying. "That's a long time for a camera to 'not be working,' sir."Sebastian opened his mouth to speak but stayed silent.Instead, he reached for the letter knife his father had left him, the one with the worn leather handle that he only used for things that mattered because some sentimental part of him believed it brought him luck."You can leave. Tell Warren to fix that security issue by the next time I set eyes on him. Close the door on your way out.""Yes sir!" Harold went, and the door clicked soft behind him.He slit the seal open and poured the contents out.The first thing that caught his eye made his head spin.Engraved into the paper was the Calloway-Reyes trust seal and this one didn't look fabricated. Its raised, pressed mark had existed on only three private documents that only he and his father knew about, two of which were kept in the family vault he alone had the keys to.He picked up the second page with shaky hands and felt the floor tilt a little under him.A wire transfer from eleven years ago, back when he still thought the worst thing that could happen to this family was losing a sailing regatta. The zeros were too many to make sense of at a glance.Below it was an authorization signature —And God! It looked exactly like his, the same loop on the S alongside the impatient s***h through the last name — except he had never seen this document in his life."That's not…" he started, out loud, to the empty room, and stopped himself. The words hung there, hollow, while his blood rushed to his head.He paced to the window, dragging both hands through his hair, and when he turned back for his phone, his elbow sent the coffee mug at the edge of the desk straight to the floor. It shattered against the chair leg, dark liquid spreading fast across the carpet, soaking into the corner of a report he'd signed off on that morning.Beneath the stack was one more sheet, folded deliberately.You have three weeks to withdraw your support for the Calloway-Reyes/Hartwell merger and resign your position as board director before the next vote. Make sure you do this quietly, and none of this reaches the press, the board, or the SEC. But if you refuse, both you and your family's name will not survive what comes next.That was all. No account number for any ransom he could pay to make it disappear.And that was the part that actually scared him. Whoever this was hadn't rushed. They hadn't demanded money or threatened to go to the press… Three weeks was a strange kind of mercy — the kind that only made sense if the person offering it already knew how this ended. They weren't trying to panic him into making a mistake.They were simply waiting for him to arrive at the only conclusion they'd already built for him. Sebastian sat with that thought longer than he wanted to admit, the coffee stain spreading slowly across the carpet, the office gone quiet around him in a way that felt less like relief and more like held breath.His mother's name had been lighting up his phone for the last twenty minutes — three calls in a row, all of which he'd let ring out, because he had no idea yet how to explain something he didn't fully understand himself.He set the letter down, squared the stack of documents into a neat, deliberate pile, and locked them in the drawer beneath his desk — the one reserved for things he trusted no one else with, not even Harold.Three weeks.Whoever had done this wasn't in a hurry.He reached for the phone to finally call the one person who might.Vivian Shaw.She picked on the second ring.“Vivian, please come to my office. Now. Come alone, don’t tell anyone, use the back entrance.”Just as he dropped the phone, it started ringing again, the caller id on the screen showing the name of the one person he'd grown to hate in the business...Graham Whitfield.Sebastian went very still, his thumb hovering over the screen. In four years of quiet, bloodless rivalry between their two families, Whitfield had never once called him directly, not even for the obligatory condolence call after his father's funeral, which had come instead with a flower and a card through an assistant, nothing more.Until now.Three weeks, the letter had promised.It had been less than three hours, and somehow, out of the blues, Graham Whitfield already had his number dialed and waiting.Sebastian's thumb slid across the screen, ending the call before it even began.