His Secret Luna

Chapter3

I read the contract four times.

Once at his office before I left, sitting in the lobby with my bag on my knees while I waited for the elevator, skimming fast just to get the shape of it. Once on the bus home, slowly, reading every line twice. Once at the kitchen table with a pen in my hand even though I was not ready to sign anything yet, just making small marks in the margin next to parts I wanted to understand better. And once at one in the morning lying in bed with my phone torch because I had turned the light off and then started thinking and could not stop.

It was thorough. Whoever his lawyers were, they were very good at their jobs. Everything was in there. The living arrangement. The public appearance requirements. The non disclosure agreement that made my stomach pull tight when I read it. The separate bedrooms clause that I read three times. The exit terms. The payment structure. Even a section on what happened if one of us broke the rules, which was written in the kind of careful legal language that basically meant neither of us would enjoy the consequences.

Two hundred thousand dollars.

Mia's treatment, covered. The debt, gone. Not reduced. Gone.

I put the contract face down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling.

The thing about being desperate is that it does not announce itself. It creeps up slowly over months of bad math and unpaid notices and watching someone you love get smaller, and then one day you are lying in bed at one in the morning seriously considering marrying a stranger and the wildest part is it does not even feel that wild anymore. It just feels like the next thing.

Mia found me at the kitchen table, the contract spread out in front of me.

She stood in the doorway in a big shirt, hair loose, and looked at all the papers, and then at me, and did not say anything for a moment.

'How bad is it,' she said finally.

'Go back to bed.'

'Sera.'

She sat down across from me the way she always had, like my instructions were just suggestions she was free to ignore. She had been doing it since she was six years old. Some things the treatment had not touched.

She reached over and turned the cover page around so she could read it.

I watched her face.

'Sebastian Hale,' she said quietly.

'You know who he is.'

'Everyone knows who he is.' She looked at me. Her eyes were clearer tonight than they had been in a while, which happened sometimes. 'Sera, what is this.'

So I told her. I kept it simple. The contract, the terms, what he was offering, why he said he needed it. I left out the part about the parking garage because I did not know how to explain that part without it sounding like something it was not.

Mia was quiet for a long time when I finished. She had her hands flat on the table and she was looking at them.

'You'd be doing this for me,' she said.

'I'd be doing it for us.'

'That is the same thing.'

'Mia.'

'No.' Her voice was gentle but firm. She looked at me. 'You cannot marry a stranger because of my hospital bills. That is not okay. That is not something you have to do.'

'It's not a real marriage. It's a contract. One year and then it's done and we're free.'

'And in that year you live with a man you don't know.'

'A man with a separate bedrooms clause,' I said. 'It's in writing.'

She did not laugh. I had hoped she might but she did not.

'He scares me,' she said quietly. 'And I haven't even met him.'

I thought about the parking garage. The way he had turned around slowly at the sound of my voice. The look in his eyes when I told him most people just called roadside assistance.

'He's intense,' I said. 'But I don't think he's dangerous.'

She looked at me for a long time. My little sister who was smarter than me and had always known it and had never once used it as a weapon.

'Promise me something,' she said.

'Mia.'

'Promise me that if it gets bad. If anything feels wrong. You walk away. You leave the money and the contract and everything and you just come home.'

I looked at her. At the shadows under her eyes and the way her collar bone pressed against the neck of her shirt and the hands that were always cold now no matter the weather.

'I promise,' I said.

We both knew I meant it. We both also knew I was going to sign.

* * *

Diana Marsh collected the signed contract from me the next morning at a coffee shop near my apartment. She handed me an envelope in return. Inside was my copy of the agreement, a key card with a small black H on it, and a note.

The handwriting was dark and exact, like everything about him.

It said: Seven pm. Pack your belongings. A car will come.

No hello. No welcome. No acknowledgment that he was asking a person to rearrange her entire life in about eleven hours.

I packed a bag. I kissed Mia on the forehead while she slept. I sat on the edge of my bed for a while doing nothing, and then the car came and I got in .

The penthouse was on the top floor of Hale Tower. The elevator opened straight into it, no lobby, no hallway, just the elevator and then suddenly that.

I stepped out and stood still for a moment.

It was enormous and quiet and almost entirely made of glass on three sides, the whole city glittering below. The furniture was dark and clean and looked like it had never been sat in by anyone who was tired or worried or wearing a jacket with a small stain on the left cuff that they had been meaning to take to the dry cleaner for three months.

A woman named Clara introduced herself as the house keeper and showed me around with the calm efficiency of someone who had done this before. My room was down the hall, past a study with closed doors and a kitchen bigger than my apartment. The room had a bed I could get sunked in and windows that overlooked the city and a bathroom with thick white towels.

I put my bag down on the floor and stood in the middle of the room and breathed.

Sebastian was not home.

I unpacked slowly. Hung up my blazer. Put my charger on the nightstand. Arranged my things on one small section of the bathroom counter like a person trying not to take up too much space in someone else's life, which was exactly what I was doing.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed still in my shoes when I heard the elevator.

His footsteps were quiet. I heard him move through the apartment, heard a door open somewhere further down, and then nothing. No knock on my door. No greeting. No version of hello, you are now living in my home and perhaps we should acknowledge that.

Just silence.

I sat there for a while. Then I took my shoes off and got under the covers and looked at the city through the glass and thought about how strange it was to be here, in this bed, in this life that did not belong to me.

I told myself it was just a year.

I told myself I could do anything for a year.

Down the hall, Sebastian stood at his bedroom window with a glass of water he had not touched and looked out at the same city.

He was not sure what he had expected. He had thought through this arrangement carefully, the way he thought through everything, had considered every angle and possible complication.

He had not considered this. This particular feeling. This awareness of another person in his space that was not irritation and not inconvenience and was not anything he had a name for.

He had met a lot of women. More than he could count. Women who were beautiful and sharp and interesting. His wolf had never stirred for any of them. He had started to think perhaps it never would.

He set the water down and pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose.

It was just an arrangement. She was here because he needed her here. That was all.

He was almost sure he believed that.

Almost.