Chapter 1: The Contract With My Name On It.
The envelope on my bed was cream-colored and heavy. My name — _Cory Lisa_ — was written in my father’s sharp, unforgiving handwriting.
I knew before I opened it.
In the Anderson mansion, cream envelopes only meant three things: death, debt, or a deal. And since nobody had died this morning, and we were too rich for debt, that left only one option.
My fingers trembled as I tore it open. The paper inside was thick, embossed with the Anderson family crest: a lion with a crown, jaws open. It looked hungry.
*MARRIAGE CONTRACT*
The words blurred. Then sharpened. Then burned.
_Party A: ANDERSON HARRY PHILLIP_
_Party B: CORY LISA PEARL _
I stopped breathing. The air in my room — the same room they gave me when I was eight, the smallest one at the end of the servant’s wing — suddenly smelled like dust and betrayal.
Third-year Law student. Top of my class at OXFORD UNIVERSITY, LONDON. Eighteen hours ago I was arguing about the Constitutional Law at Oxford in Lecture Hall 3. Now my adoptive father,ANDERSON HILLARY , had just sold me like one of his oil blocks in the North Sea.
_“Terms: Effective immediately upon signing, Party B shall assume the role of legal wife to Party A for a period of no less than two years...”_
My knees gave out. I sank onto the edge of my bed, the contract shaking in my hands. Two years. Two years of being legally bound to _him_.
ANDERSON HARRY PHILLIP.
Campus devil. Heir to the ANDERSON empire. The boy who made my first year at OXFORD a living hell because I dared to embarrass him during the Law Faculty Welcome Dinner. I’d caught him cheating at cards, betting with first-year girls’ school fees. I called him out. In front of his friends. In front of the Dean.
He never forgave me.
“Charity case,” he’d sneered the next day, loud enough for the whole of St. Cross Building to hear. “Some people forget who feeds them.”
I hadn’t forgotten. How could I? Every meal in this house was a reminder that I was _adopted_. Rescued. Pitied. The orphan MR ANDERSON HILLARY took in after a “tragic car accident” killed my parents when I was six. The girl they dressed in hand-me-downs while their real sons wore Tom Ford.
My phone buzzed on the mattress beside me, screen lighting up with an unknown number.
I stared at it. My heart was beating so loud I thought the walls could hear it.
With a shaking thumb, I opened the message.
_Be at the ANDERSON main mansion by 6pm. Don’t be late. Pack for two years. — H_
H.
Just H. Like I was one of his campus girls he summoned with a text. Like my name was too much effort to type.
Rage, hot and sudden, sliced through the panic. I’d spent ten years in this house learning to be quiet. To be grateful. To be invisible. I was done.
I should run. I should scream. I should march into Mr. Anderson’s office and tear this contract into a hundred pieces and tell him I’d rather sleep on the streets than marry his son.
A knock. Soft. Hesitant.
“Lisa?” My sister Betty’s voice. Not by blood — by circumstance. Mr Anderson’s youngest daughter, the only one who ever snuck me extra meat at dinner. “Daddy says... the car is waiting downstairs. And Mama says you should wear the red dress. The one from Paris.”
The red dress. The one I’d never been allowed to touch. The one Mama kept for “important occasions.”
So this was important. My auction.
I closed my eyes. Law school taught me one thing: every contract has a loophole. Every prison has a key. Even this one. Even him.
I would sign. I would go. But I would not break.
---
The Anderson main mansion wasn’t a house. It was a statement.
Twelve-foot gates, guards with earpieces, a driveway longer than my entire community street in London. The car — a black Mercedes I’d only seen in music videos — glided to a stop under a portico that could fit my adoptive home inside it.
I stepped out in the red dress. It was too big. It swallowed me. I looked like a child playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. Maybe that was the point.
The double doors opened before I could knock.
And there he was.
Anderson Harry didn’t look up from his phone immediately. He leaned against the marble staircase, one ankle crossed over the other, wearing a black shirt with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. His skin was dark, smooth, like he’d been carved from the same night that killed my parents. A silver chain glinted at his throat. He looked like money. Like sin. Like every warning my late mother would have given me if she’d lived.
When he finally lifted his eyes, they were cold. Empty. Familiar.
“Took you long enough, charity case.” His voice was deeper than I remembered. It had lost the boyish edge from first year. Now it was all man, all heir, all danger. “Did you get lost finding your way from the servants’ quarters?”
The words hit like slaps. Ten years of training kept my face blank. Law students don’t flinch.
“Mr Anderson said 6pm,” I said quietly. “It’s 5:58.”
His eyebrow twitched. Just a fraction. He pushed off the staircase and walked toward me, slow, deliberate. Like a lion that had already decided I was dinner.
He stopped when we were a breath apart. He was so tall I had to tilt my head back to keep eye contact. He smelled like spice and something expensive I couldn’t name. Cologne that probably cost more than my school fees for a year.
“Let’s get something straight, Lisa.” My name in his mouth was a weapon. He said it like he was spitting out a seed. “This?” He plucked the contract from my trembling fingers. I hadn’t realized I was still holding it. “This is business. My father wants a merger with the EDWARDS Group. Their CEO is old-school. He won’t sign with a bachelor heir who sleeps with a different girl every week. He wants _family_. _Stability_.”
He leaned in. His breath touched my ear.
“So congratulations. You’re the stability. You’re the family dog we dress up and show off at galas. You’ll smile. You’ll sign what I tell you. You’ll share my name and my bed if I say so. But don’t think for one second this makes you my wife.”
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. His presence was suffocating, like the room had shrunk.
He pulled back, his eyes dragging over my red dress, my face, my hands clenched at my sides. Something flickered in his expression. Disgust? Amusement? I couldn’t tell.
“You’re just business, Lisa.”
The words were meant to kill. To put me in my place. The adopted girl. The nobody.
What he didn’t know — what none of them knew — was that I’d stopped being nobody the night I found my mother’s diary hidden in the floorboards of my old room. The night I learned the “car accident” was a lie. That the Anderson’s didn’t _rescue_ me.
They stole me.
Because I wasn’t a charity case. I was the last surviving daughter of the Cory family. The real royal family of England. The family Mr Anderson betrayed and murdered to claim their throne.
Harry didn’t know he’d just signed a contract with the queen of the empire he was born to inherit.
He didn’t know that every time he called me “charity case,” he was spitting on his own crown.
And he definitely didn’t know that I’d been studying Law for three years for one reason only: to learn how to burn his family’s empire to the ground.
Legally.
I lifted my chin. Met his cold, beautiful, hateful eyes. And I smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. It was the smile I practiced in the mirror after I read the last page of my mother’s diary.
“Of course,” I whispered. “Just business, _Your Highness_.”
His whole body went still. That title — _Your Highness_ — wasn’t used anymore. Not since the old monarchies were dissolved. Not unless you were...
His eyes narrowed. “What did you call me?”
But I was already walking past him, my too-big red dress swishing, my head high. I could feel his stare burning into my back.
Let him wonder. Let him doubt.
I had two years to make him fall in love with me.
And then I would destroy him.
The contract was signed in ink.
But my revenge would be signed in blood.
---
