CAUGHT HIM CHEATING, ENGAGED TO HIS ENEMY

Chapter 2: Unfinished Business

For a second, none of us move.

Brian's eyes go from me, to the ring on my hand, to Michael standing beside me like this is a completely normal Tuesday morning, and something ugly flickers across his face before he manages to smooth it back into the calm, camera-ready expression I used to think was charm.

"Emma." He says my name like he has any right to sound surprised by anything I do anymore. "What are you doing here?"

I almost laugh. Almost. "Funny. I was about to ask you the same thing."

Two years ago, that question would've come with a knot of anxiety in my chest — the old habit of needing Brian to explain himself, needing him to choose me out loud, over and over, because some small, orphanage-shaped part of me never fully believed anyone would stay without being asked to. I don't feel that anymore. What I feel now is closer to nausea.

He opens his mouth, and Michael speaks before he gets the chance.

"Brian." Just the name, flat, no greeting attached to it. "You're early."

Early. Not what are you doing in my penthouse the morning after my accidental engagement. Early — like this is scheduled. Like Brian Chen showing up here, in yesterday's shirt, wasn't a surprise to Michael at all.

"We had a nine o'clock," Brian says, recovering fast, sliding back into the version of himself that closes deals for a living. "Reid Group and Chen Foundation. The distribution rights meeting. You didn't cancel."

"I didn't forget," Michael says. "I moved it. My assistant should have called you."

"She didn't."

"Then I'll speak to her."

It's the most boring exchange in the world and somehow it's making the hair on my arms stand up, because underneath the words there's something else happening — two men measuring each other the way boxers do before either one throws a punch. I remember, distantly, my brother James mentioning the name Reid at a family dinner once, the way you'd mention a storm system moving in. Chen Foundation's been trying to poach Reid Group's shipping contracts for years, he'd said. Won't work. Reid doesn't lose.

I hadn't been paying attention then. I'm paying attention now.

"You two know each other," I say, because someone has to say the obvious thing out loud.

Brian's jaw tightens. "We're business rivals."

"We're not rivals," Michael says, and for the first time since I woke up in his bed, something colder slides into his voice, something I get the sense he doesn't let many people hear. "Rivals implies we're playing the same game. I'm just better at his."

Brian's smile doesn't reach his eyes. "Careful. You're about to be family."

The word lands in the room like a dropped glass.

Family. I almost forgot, in the noise of the last ten minutes, that if Brian is engaged to Anastasia, and I am apparently engaged to Michael, that makes us — what. In-laws. Bound to sit across from each other at holidays I've never once been invited to, for the rest of whatever this is going to be.

I press my fingers against my temple. My head is still pounding, and none of this is helping.

"I need to sit down," I say, to no one in particular, and I do, right there on the arm of the nearest chair, because my legs have apparently decided they're done cooperating.

Brian takes a step toward me — old habit, I think, the way you'd reach for something that used to be yours — and Michael shifts, just slightly, just enough to put himself between us without making it look like that's what he's doing.

"You should go," Michael tells him. "We'll reschedule."

"I'm not finished talking to Emma."

"You are," Michael says, "for today."

Brian looks at me one more time — searching, I think, for some sign that I'm going to override this, that I'm going to ask him to stay, the way I used to when we were together and he'd disappear for weeks on "business" I never questioned closely enough. I don't give him one.

He leaves. The door clicks shut behind him with more force than necessary.

The silence afterward is almost worse than the noise.

"You didn't tell me you knew him," I say finally.

"You didn't ask."

"I'm asking now."

Michael studies me for a moment, and I get the feeling he's deciding how much of the truth I'm allowed to have this early. It's not a comfortable feeling, being weighed like that. I've had enough of it from my own family to last a lifetime — the sense that everyone around me already knows something about my own life that I don't.

"Chen Foundation and Reid Group have history," he says eventually. "Older than you. Older than this morning. I'll tell you more when there's a reason to."

"I think waking up engaged to you is a pretty good reason."

Something almost like amusement crosses his face. "Fair point."

Before he can say anything else, his phone buzzes on the counter, and whatever softness had started creeping into the room disappears when he checks it. His expression doesn't change much — it rarely seems to — but something in his posture goes very still.

"What," I say.

He turns the screen toward me instead of answering.

It's a text from a number saved simply as Building Security.

Sir — the Lin family has arrived in the lobby. They're requesting to see Ms. Lin immediately. They're not asking politely.

My stomach drops for the second time this morning.

"My family doesn't 'request' anything," I say quietly. "They send James to make demands and call it a conversation."

Michael sets the phone down, and for a second I think he's going to tell me to stay up here, to let him handle it, the way people with more money than sense think they can handle everything.

Instead he says, "Then let's go find out what they want."

"You don't have to come."

"I'm your fiancé," he says, and there's something in the way he says the word — testing it, almost, like he's trying it on for the first time in daylight — that makes my chest do something complicated. "Apparently. As of last night. I don't intend to let you walk into that lobby alone."

I want to tell him I've walked into worse rooms alone. I've done it my entire life.

But the elevator doors are already opening, and I can hear, even from here, the unmistakable sound of my mother's voice rising two floors below us, sharp and furious and asking where her daughter is being kept.