An unexpected proposal
2147 Words
SOPHIE
My body refuses to move.
I’m still crouched near the back of the van, half-hidden behind a crate, blinking up into the light spilling around the man standing in the open doorway.
This can’t be happening.
Out of everybody in the entire world that could save me, it’s the one person who hates me the most.
I take him in slowly, the way you take in something that doesn’t quite make sense yet.
He is taller than I remember, towering in the frame of the doorway, broad and unforgiving in a way that makes the space around him feel smaller. His suit is pitch black, tailored to perfection, emphasizing the sharp lines of his body. He looks like a man who was built specifically to take up room and has never once apologized for it.
But it’s his face that steals the breath from my lungs.
He is beautiful in the way only monsters are.
His hair is dark, cropped close, revealing the harsh, clean edges of his features with nowhere to hide. A chiseled jaw sharp enough to cut. High cheekbones. A straight patrician nose. Everything about him is perfect.
And his eyes—
God, his eyes.
A shade of blue so dark they nearly appear black, endless and depthless, swallowing all the light around them. They are empty. Void of warmth. And yet they burn with something caged and manic underneath the surface, something that hasn’t found its way out yet and probably never will.
They drink me in slowly, deliberately, taking their time moving over every inch of me the way you’d assess something you weren’t sure yet had value. They don’t flicker with softness. Don’t show regret. Don’t even pretend to care.
They give away nothing.
A smirk pulls at the corner of his lips, slow and amused, like he expected this reaction.
“Still breathing. That’s a good sign,” he says, his voice low and rough, like gravel wrapped in velvet. “You might want to stop gaping, though. It’s not a great look.”
I blink, startled out of my trance. My mouth snaps shut and I force myself to rise shakily to my feet. Every muscle protests but I grit my teeth and stand anyway, because I will not be on my knees in front of Rune West.
He watches me with that same easy smirk, like this is all just mildly entertaining to him.
“What are you doing here?” I manage, though my voice comes out rough and dry. Too small in the space between us.
He c***s his head slightly, like I’ve asked the most obvious question in the world. “Not the best way to thank the very person who just saved your ass. And you’re welcome.”
I open my mouth. Nothing useful comes out. My head is still spinning and I can’t tell if this is another trick, another setup, or something else entirely. Is he with the men who took me? Here to finish the job himself?
His smirk deepens like he heard that thought anyway. Then he steps back from the van and motions lazily over his shoulder.
“My car broke down quite a distance from here, so we’ve got a long journey ahead. Best we get going before someone comes looking.”
He stretches out a hand to help me down.
I stare at it.
I don’t move.
When I don’t take it he chuckles softly under his breath, like I’m amusing, like this is all some kind of game, and then without another word he turns and starts walking.
Just like that. Like he expects me to follow. Like I have a choice.
For a second I stand frozen in the open doorway, still trying to catch up to everything that’s happened. But the van is cold and smells like oil and something sour underneath, and the road outside stretches out empty and unforgiving, and he’s already several steps ahead without looking back.
He’s not coming back for me.
“Damn it,” I mutter, and climb out.
***
We walk for what feels like forever.
The road stretches endlessly ahead, flanked by trees standing like silent sentinels in the fading afternoon light. He stays a few paces ahead, shoulders relaxed, pace easy, like a man on a Sunday stroll rather than one who just pulled someone out of a kidnapper’s van.
He doesn’t speak.
I try.
“Where are we going?”
Nothing.
“How long have you been following me?”
Silence.
“Do you plan on saying anything at all, or is brooding just your personality now?”
He glances at me sideways, raises an eyebrow, looks away again.
I wrap my arms around myself against the cold seeping through my ruined wedding dress and keep walking, because what other choice do I have.
Eventually the trees thicken and the road narrows to a dirt path winding deeper into the woods. The ground is damp underfoot and the air smells like pine and cold earth. My feet ache. My head still throbs. And Rune walks ahead of me like I’m a mild inconvenience he’s decided to tolerate for reasons he hasn’t explained yet.
He stops in a small clearing, crouches near the base of a tree, and starts building a fire with the kind of calm practiced efficiency that tells me this isn’t his first time doing something like this. The flames catch quickly and I move toward the warmth without shame, sighing as the heat reaches my frozen fingers.
He disappears into the trees without a word and returns a few minutes later with a rabbit. He settles across the fire and begins to roast it, when it’s ready, he hands me a portion without asking if I want it.
I take it without asking where it came from.
The moment it touches my tongue I nearly close my eyes. I’m starving and it’s the best thing I’ve tasted in what feels like days, and I hate that it’s him sitting across from me watching me eat with that completely unreadable expression.
I’ve thought about Rune more times than I’d ever admit out loud. Even after everything. Even knowing what I did to him. I followed his career from a distance the way you follow someone you’ve hurt—obsessively, guiltily, convincing yourself that keeping tabs is somehow making up for the damage. He’d built something extraordinary from nothing, his company growing from a startup into something the entire industry paid attention to. Two years ago his name appeared in Forbes 30 Under 30 and I’d stared at his photograph on the page for longer than I should have.
I’d felt proud of him.
I had no right to, but I did.
And then the guilt came, the way it always did when I thought about him.
“You were following the van,” I say, breaking the silence. “Since when?”
He tosses a stick into the fire.
“Since it left the city.”
I stare at him. “You knew I was in there the whole time and you just—waited?”
“I was waiting,” he says, “for things to get more interesting.”
The absolute nerve of this man.
“And while you were waiting,” I say carefully, “they were in the front seat discussing whether to kill me.”
“They weren’t going to kill you.” His voice carries that infuriating certainty, like he looked this up in advance. “You’re worth more to them alive. For now.”
Those last two words sit in the air between us.
“For now,” I repeat. “What does that mean?”
He looks at me across the fire, the flames throwing shadows across his face that make him even less readable than usual.
“It means whoever orchestrated today will try again,” he says. “Bastian’s family believes you’re still owed to them. That the arrangement your father made didn’t die with Bastian—it transferred. And they have both the resources and the motivation to come and collect.”
My stomach turns.
“So what do I do?” The words come out quieter than I intend. “I can’t go home. If they come for me again—”
“You have two options.”
I look at him.
“The first is you do nothing. You go back to your life and you wait for them to find you.” He says it the way you’d read a weather forecast. “And they will find you. That ends one way.”
“And the second option?”
He holds my gaze steadily across the fire.
“You marry me.”
I almost choke.
The food lodges somewhere in my throat and I cough hard, pressing the back of my hand to my mouth, eyes watering. He watches me with that infuriating calm—waiting.
“What?” I manage.
“You heard me.”
“Rune.” I set down what’s left of my food. “I just watched my husband die at our wedding. And you’re sitting here telling me the second option is to marry you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” I search his face for something — humor, madness, anything that would make this make sense. “What do you get out of this?”
Something shifts in his expression, brief and controlled.
“I’m about to take full leadership of my company,” he says. “The board has been resistant. I’m young, I’m single, and to men who’ve spent forty years in boardrooms that combination reads as unstable. A liability.” His jaw tightens slightly. “They want someone settled. Someone with roots they can trust.”
“So you need a wife.”
“I need the appearance of one. For a year. Long enough for the board nominations to be finalized and the transition to be complete.” He pauses. “After that, we divorce. Quietly. Cleanly. And that’s the end of it.”
I stare at him. “And you chose me.”
“I didn’t choose you.” His voice is flat. “You fell into my lap. Quite literally.”
“There’s no one else you could—”
“I don’t trust people,” he says. “I especially don’t trust women who want something from me, and right now every woman in my orbit wants something from me. Money. Status. Access.” He looks at me directly across the flames. “But you — you’ve already proven exactly who you are. You care about yourself first. That’s not an insult. It’s a quality I can work with. I know exactly what to expect from you.”
The words land with quiet precision.
I should be offended. Part of me is. But underneath that I feel the truth in them, because he isn’t wrong, and we both know it.
“The terms,” he continues, like this is a boardroom and not a clearing in the woods with a fire between us and my ruined wedding dress pooling in the dirt. “I clear your father’s debt entirely. During the marriage, one hundred thousand deposited to you monthly in an account only you can access. Upon divorce, a final payment of five million.”
The number lands slowly, then all at once.
Five million.
Enough to go anywhere. Do anything. Never answer to anyone — not my father, not a husband, not anyone — ever again.
“This is an arrangement,” he says. “Nothing more. Whatever existed between us before is not relevant to this conversation and it won’t be relevant to this marriage. We are not friends. We are not reconnecting.” He holds my gaze steadily across the fire. “I will never love you, Sophie. Not now. Not a year from now. Not ever. I need you to understand that clearly before you agree to anything.”
Something tightens in my chest at the words. Something I have absolutely no business feeling and refuse to examine.
“But,” he continues, “while you carry my name I’ll treat you accordingly. You’ll have my respect and every courtesy that comes with being my wife. Publicly and privately.” He pauses. “I’m not a cruel man.”
The fire crackles between us.
I think about the options I have, and even though I hate to admit it, he’s right.
There’s only one choice I can make right now.
To marry a man who’ll never love me
“Okay,” I say.
He waits, needing me to say the words.
With a small sigh, I brace myself as I utter the words that are about to change my life for the next year. “I’ll marry you.”
- Writer
