FIFTEEN BILLIONAIRES AFTER ME

Chapter Ten — Marcus Reyes Doesn't Knock

The first Amara knew of Marcus Reyes was a wall of cameras outside her apartment building at seven in the morning, and a text from Bryant that read only: He announced it himself. I'm sorry. I didn't see this coming.

By the time she'd made it three steps past the lobby doors, a dozen phones were already up, a dozen voices already shouting variations of the same question — is it true, Ms. Voss, is it true you're the woman Marcus Reyes says he's going to marry — and there, at the center of it, unbothered by the chaos he'd clearly engineered, stood a broad-shouldered man in a suit that cost more than her first apartment, grinning at her like she was the best headline he'd ever bought.

"Ms. Voss." Marcus Reyes's voice carried, effortlessly, over the noise, pitched for the cameras as much as for her. "I know this isn't how the others are doing it. I know you probably wanted quiet, careful, some candlelit dinner where a man tells you his intentions in a whisper. That's not me. I built four billion dollars out of nothing by telling the whole world what I wanted before I had it, and then making it true out of sheer stubbornness. I'm not going to court you quietly, because quiet never got me anything I actually wanted, and I want this year to end with you choosing me, publicly, the way I'm choosing you right now."

Amara stood very still, feeling thirty strangers' cameras drink in every flicker of her expression, and understood in the space of one breath exactly what this was — not a declaration, but a trap dressed as one, a public claim designed to make refusal look like cruelty and hesitation look like consent.

"Mr. Reyes." She kept her voice level, cold, pitched only for him, though she knew every microphone in the crowd would catch it regardless. "You don't know me. You've turned my life into a headline before we've exchanged a single private word, and you're calling that courtship. I call it a hostile takeover with better lighting."

Something flickered in his grin — not quite offense, more the recalibration of a man used to charm succeeding where words hadn't. "Fair," he said, louder than necessary, still playing to the cameras even as he answered her. "Then let me say the quiet part where everyone can hear it, since apparently that's the only version of honesty you'll trust from a man like me. I'm on this list because Hale's trust holds paper on three of my developments, financing I never questioned closely enough because it was cheap and I was hungry and twelve years ago I didn't ask where cheap capital that generous actually came from. I found out four days ago exactly what that capital was tied to, and I decided the fastest way to survive this year wasn't strategy or subtlety — it was making sure the whole world already believed I'd won before anyone else got a real shot at proving me wrong."

"That's not courtship," Amara said. "That's cornering me into a story you control."

"Maybe." Reyes's grin didn't waver, but something behind it did — a flicker of the same fear she'd seen in every one of the other men so far, dressed up differently each time. "Or maybe it's the only kind of protection I know how to offer. You think the fourteen men who haven't shown up yet are all going to be as forthcoming as Cross or as gentle as whatever Lindqvist's doing? Some of them are going to come at you the way real threats come at people, Ms. Voss — quietly, privately, in rooms with no cameras and no witnesses. I just made it very, very expensive for anyone to hurt you without the entire world watching them try."

Amara felt the ground of her anger shift, unwillingly, toward something more complicated. It was, she realized, exactly the kind of tactic she might have respected in a boardroom — brutal, self-interested, and not actually wrong about the danger.

"Get the cameras out of my building's lobby," she said, quiet enough that only he could hear it now, "and I'll consider believing a single word of that."

Reyes studied her for a long moment, and then, to her genuine surprise, turned and raised both hands to the crowd. "Show's over," he called out, easy, commanding, the practiced voice of a man who owned rooms for a living. "The lady says no comment. Anyone still filming in ninety seconds is trespassing on private property, and I own the firm that holds the lease on this building, so I'd take that seriously." The cameras, grumbling, began to disperse.

He turned back to her once the lobby had cleared, and for the first time the performance dropped entirely, leaving something rawer underneath. "I'm sorry," he said, quiet now, only for her. "That was clumsy and it was selfish and I did it anyway because I panicked and panic, for me, has only ever looked like noise. I'll do better. I don't know how yet. But I will."

He left before she could answer, and Amara stood alone in her own lobby, pulse still elevated, and thought — not for the first time in four days — that the hardest part of this year wasn't going to be sorting the dangerous men from the safe ones.

It was going to be the ones who were both.