The price of a name
The contract sits on the table between us like a living thing.
Twelve pages. My name waiting at the bottom like a grave I dug myself.
I’ve read every clause. Memorized every condition. I know this document better than I know my own heartbeat.
I keep my hands flat on my thighs so he can’t see them shaking.
Kade Remington hasn’t looked away from me once since I sat down. There’s a weight to his gaze that feels less like being watched and more like being measured. Most people would look away.
I don’t.
I didn’t come this far to blink first.
“You’ve read it.” His voice is low. Unhurried. The kind of voice that has never once needed to raise itself to be obeyed.
“Three times,” I say.
Something moves across his face. Gone before I can name it. Then he’s back to being a wall expensive suit, hard jaw, eyes that give nothing and take everything.
I pick up the pen.
Six months I spent preparing for this moment. Six months of signing my name to blank paper at two in the morning until my hand stopped shaking. Until I could write Aria Calloway without flinching.
My mother’s face moves through my mind. Not the way she looked in photographs laughing, alive, hair loose around her shoulders. The way she looked at the end. Small. Pale. Like something essential had been quietly taken from her.
I press pen to paper.
I sign my name.
Done.
I set the pen down and look up. He’s still watching me with that expression I don’t have a word for. Like I’m a problem he’s already decided to solve.
It bothers me more than anything else in this room.
I came in here with a complete picture of Kade Remington. Cold. Ruthless. Transactional. A man who built his empire on pack alliances and old blood money and never lost sleep over what it cost other people.
I did not plan for him to look at me like I’m something worth figuring out.
“One year,” I say. “The terms don’t change.”
“The terms don’t change,” he agrees.
“I have access to the east wing.”
“Every wing except my study.” A pause. “And my bedroom. Unless that changes.”
He says it like a weather report. Completely neutral. No heat behind it.
But I feel it land somewhere in my chest and I hate myself for that.
“It won’t change,” I say.
He stands. The room shifts the way rooms always do around men like him the air pressure changing, everything quietly orienting in his direction. He is taller than the photographs suggested. Broader. There is something about his presence that no photograph ever captured.
I stand too. I will not sit while he towers over me.
Something old and instinctive pulls at the base of my skull. I have been near powerful Alphas before. This is different. This makes something buried deep inside me want to lower my eyes.
I look directly at him instead.
“Dinner is at seven,” he says. “I don’t expect company. But I expect punctuality.”
He turns and walks out like the conversation is already filed away. Like I’m already filed away.
I wait until the door clicks shut.
Then I release the breath I’ve been holding for twenty three minutes.
I look down at the contract. My name beside his. Twelve pages that have just made me the wife of the man I came here to destroy.
One year, I remind myself.
One year to find what Victor needs. One year to reach the evidence buried inside this empire. One year to finally learn what really happened in the weeks before my mother died the weeks she spent meeting secretly with a man named Remington.
I pick up my bag.
I don’t know yet that I won’t leave this house the same woman who walked in. I don’t know that somewhere in this estate, locked away in a room I’m forbidden to enter, there is a photograph of my mother laughing, bright, more alive than I ever saw her at the end.
And written on the back in handwriting I’ve never seen before:
Keep her safe. Whatever it costs. — E.
I don’t know any of that yet.
I just follow Mrs. Park down a hallway that smells like cedar and old money.
And I begin.
