Fell for my fake bride

Ethan Margo

"What happened?"

Daniel's expression was answer enough before he spoke. "Boss — I think you need to take this."

Ethan set his glass down. "It's my father again?"

"No, sir."

The silence between them stretched a beat too long.

"It's the hospital."

Ethan went still. "The hospital. What happened?"

Daniel couldn't hold his eyes. "Your father collapsed."

Ethan was on his feet before the sentence finished. "Then why are we still standing here?" He grabbed his jacket. "Let's go."

Daniel didn't move.

That was the first moment real fear touched him that night — not the news itself, but the stillness in the one person who should have already been walking toward the door.

"Daniel." His voice dropped. "What aren't you telling me?"

Daniel took a breath. "I'm sorry, sir."

Four words undid everything after that.

"The doctors couldn't save him."

The club noise fell away — the music, the laughter, all of it going distant and unreal. The glass slipped out of Ethan's hand and broke against the floor. He didn't react to that either.

One thought looped through his mind, over and over, louder than anything else in the room.

Three chances to hear his father's voice one last time.

He'd ignored every one of them.

Ethan closed his eyes as the guilt settled into his chest like something with weight. The man he had spent his whole life fighting was gone.

*************

Three days after Margo Margo's funeral, the estate still hadn't remembered how to breathe. Once it had echoed with power footsteps, secret meetings, his father's voice cutting through every room he entered. Now it sat in a silence that felt less like peace and more like held breath. Black cars still came and went past the gates, dropping off men and women Ethan barely recognized, all of them arriving to offer condolences to a family that had spent decades being feared rather than loved.

Ethan stood alone in the living room in a black suit that did nothing to hide how little he'd slept. The arrogant striker who'd lifted a trophy days earlier was nowhere in the room. His hair was messy in a way that had nothing to do with style, and the easy confidence he usually wore like armor had been replaced by something colder and emptier.

He was looking at the portrait of his father — the one hung at the center of the room like an altar. Margo Margo stared back at him the way he'd stared at everyone in life: unyielding, certain, a man who looked like he could run the world on the strength of one glance.

"You really had to make your final lesson this painful, didn't you," Ethan said quietly, hands in his pockets.

Guilt turned over in his chest like a blade. Their last real conversation had been an argument. Those were the last words they'd ever exchange, and there would be no fixing it now — no version of the future where he got to try again.

"You should have answered."

The voice came from behind him, and Ethan didn't need to turn around to know who it belonged to. Only one person would walk straight into his grief and open with something that blunt.

Victor Margo stood near the entrance in a dark grey suit, a leather document case under his arm, his face as unreadable as ever.

"Not today, Uncle." Ethan didn't turn. "I'm not in the mood for your lectures."

"Today is exactly the day we need this conversation." Victor's shoes were quiet against the marble. "Your father knew this moment would come. He left instructions that can't be ignored."

Ethan laughed, without any humor in it, and glanced over his shoulder. "Of course he did. Even dead, Margo Margo finds a way to control my life."

Something crossed Victor's face and vanished just as fast. "Be careful how you speak about him."

Ethan crossed the room until they were face to face. The height difference between them barely mattered; the tension in the air did all the work.

"Why?" His voice had gone cold. "Because he was a great man? Is that the line everyone wants from me?"

Years of unresolved anger burned behind his eyes.

"He was feared by the entire world, Uncle. His enemies feared him, his allies obeyed him, and his own son spent his whole life trying not to become him."

Victor said nothing for a moment. He opened the case instead, pulling out a thick document.

"Your father's will has been read by the legal team," he said. "As his brother and his lawyer, it falls to me to carry out his wishes."

Ethan folded his arms, arrogance sliding back over his face like a mask he knew how to wear. "Then let's finish this quickly. I have a career waiting, a season to prepare for, and a life that doesn't involve sitting around discussing an old man's regrets."

Victor held his gaze. "Your father left you everything."

"Obviously."

"The estates. The companies. The investments. Every property he owned."

"Like I said." Ethan shrugged. "Obviously."

Victor took his time with what came next. "But there's a condition."

The confidence slipped, just slightly, off Ethan's face. "What condition?"

"You have to get married."

For a few seconds, nobody spoke. Then Ethan started laughing — the real kind, the kind that comes from hearing something so absurd it has to be a joke.

"That's hilarious." He wiped the corner of his eye. "Seriously, Uncle, for a second there I almost believed you."

Victor didn't laugh.

Ethan's smile faded. "You're serious."

"I am."

"This is insane." Ethan started pacing. "My father spent his whole life telling me what to do, and now he wants to decide whether I have a wife, too?"

"He's not choosing your wife," Victor said. "That part is entirely yours."

Ethan stopped moving. "Then what's the problem?"

"You have thirty days."

The words landed like something physical.

Ethan stared at him, waiting for the punchline that never came.

"Thirty days?"

Victor nodded. "If you fail to marry within thirty days, everything Margo Margo built transfers to me. Legally. Completely."

For the first time since his father died, Ethan felt something stronger than grief.

Pressure — the real kind. The kind his fame couldn't talk his way out of, his money couldn't buy off, his charm couldn't charm away. The one woman he might have actually considered marrying was somewhere overseas at that exact moment, living her own life without him, and if he was honest with himself, he wasn't even sure he loved her enough to make it work.

He turned back to the portrait, narrowing his eyes at it like he expected an answer.

A slow, dangerous smile crept across his face.

"Fine," he said quietly.

"Fine?" Victor repeated.

Ethan turned, arrogance fully back in place now, though something more desperate moved underneath it.

"You wanted a wife, Father?" he murmured at the portrait. "Then I'll give you one."

He picked up his keys from the table and headed for the door.

"Where are you going?" Victor called after him.

Ethan didn't stop walking. "To find a woman willing to become Mrs. Ethan Margo."

The smile on his face carried a confidence that would not survive the next twenty-four hours.