Contracted To My Rival

A challenge.

ARIA.

I don't sleep.

I sit at the kitchen island with the contract open in front of me and I read it four more times. I'm looking for the exit, the clause that makes this dissoluble, the legal thread I can pull that unravels the whole thing before morning. There isn't one. Helena's lawyers were thorough. Of course they were. Helena has never in her life built something she didn't intend to hold.

At quarter to four I pour a glass of water and stand at the window. The city below has that particular 4 a.m. quality, sparse, unperformed, the street lights reflecting in wet pavement. I like the city at this hour. No one's watching. Nothing's required.

At four exactly I pick up my phone.

I'm calling to confirm he knows nothing. That's what I tell myself. I need to establish the other party's awareness before I speak to the lawyers. This is procedural. This is me being thorough.

He picks up on the second ring.

"Roth."

Not hello. Just my name, and he doesn't sound like someone dragged from sleep, he sounds alert. Present. Like he's been awake.

Like he's been waiting.

"My grandmother is dying," I say. "And apparently she arranged a marriage contract between us ten years ago. I'm calling to confirm you know nothing about it."

Silence. The kind with weight in it.

"I know," he says.

I go very still. "What?"

"I know about the contract. My mother told me before she died." A pause. Measured. "I've been waiting to see if you'd come to me."

I hang up.

I set the phone face-down on the counter and put both palms flat on the marble and breathe. He knew. He's known. For how long? Months? Years?

This entire time we've been across tables from each other, this whole seven years of fighting over the same clients and headlines and boardrooms — he's known. Every time I thought we were competing on level ground.

My phone lights up. His name. I don't answer.

It lights up again. I turn it over. I go to my room and lie flat on my back in the dark and stare at the ceiling and do not sleep for the rest of the night.

…

He's outside my building at seven.

I know before Adams tells me because Adams has a specific tone for situations without an existing protocol. Careful. Almost apologetic. He uses it when he knocks on my office door at 7:03 and says "Mr. Vale is in the lobby. He doesn't have an appointment."

"I know he doesn't." I say, looking down at the document in front of me.

"He says he'll wait." Adams says, his lips in a thin line, hands behind his back.

"Let him."

Adams hesitates. "He brought coffee,” he says. "Two cups. He said to tell you it's the kind you actually drink, not the kind you order to seem less high-maintenance."

I stop typing. High-maintenance. The specificity of that. The fact that he knows I order the wrong thing in meetings for appearances and that I've apparently been obvious enough about it for him to notice.

"Send him up."

He walks in like he's been here before. He hasn't. He looks around once, just once, enough to map it, and then sets one of the cups on my desk and sits down without being invited to.

Dark suit, no tie, top button open. Light brown eyes that don't miss anything. He looks like a man with nowhere else to be, which I know for a fact isn't true, which means this is deliberate.

"You hung up on me,” he says. "Twice."

"The second call was unnecessary." I say.

"I disagree." He picks up his coffee. He looks at me over the rim of it and doesn't say anything for a moment, just looks, in that way he has, like he's reading something he's already memorized and is checking it for changes.

"I'm sorry about your grandmother,” he says.

I'd prepared for tactics. For the opening moves of whatever this was going to be. Not that. The simplicity of it catches me somewhere unguarded and I have to reassemble for a second before I answer.

"Thank you,” I say.

He nods. Puts the cup down.

"How long did you know?" I ask, curious.

"My mother told me the year before she died. Six years ago."

Six years. We've been rivals for seven, which means for six of those seven years, every negotiation, every competing pitch, every time he looked at me across a table with that careful, unhurried attention, he was holding this. He sat with it for six years and never once said anything.

"And you waited,” I say.

"It wasn't mine to say. The contract only activates on specific conditions." He says with a thin smile.

"Helena's death." It wasn’t a question, I already knew the answer to it.

"Yes."

I look at him. He looks back. The coffee on my desk is getting cold and neither of us moves.

"This doesn't work for me,” I say.

"I know."

"Don't say I know." I was angered by his simple words.

"Then say something I don't already know,” he says. Not unkindly. Just directly.

I stand up. I think better on my feet and also I need to move, need some distance from the way he's just sitting there being completely unbothered by all of this.

"If I don't marry you within one month I lose my inheritance and my seat at Roth Consolidated. My father takes control. Everything Helena built gets dismantled from the inside and called restructuring."

He's quiet.

"And if you do marry me,” he says carefully, "you keep all of it."

"On paper." I countered immediately.

"The law operates on paper." He says back, in a soft tone, leaning back on his chair.

"This isn't funny." I felt mocked, even though his tone wasn’t mocking.

"I'm not laughing."

He's not. He's watching me with something I can't read, which is the thing about Kael Vale that has always, quietly, driven me out of my mind, I can read everyone. I've been reading people since I was a child, since I understood that the survival of my position in this family depended on understanding exactly who wanted what. He's the only person who has ever been opaque to me.

"What do you want out of this?" I ask. "You don't do anything without something in it for you. So what is it?"

He's quiet for long enough that I think he might not answer. Then:

"A seat at a table that doesn't exist yet. Roth Consolidated and V.A.L.E. working in the same direction instead of against each other." He pauses. "And I keep my word. My mother asked Helena for this. I intend to honor it."

The room is very quiet after that.

"We'd need our own contract,” I say finally. "Separate from Helena's."

"I expected nothing less." He agrees.

"Separate bedrooms." I say, leaning into my chair and watching him.

"Fine." He says, without a single thought.

"Separate lives where possible. Public appearances only." This was my attempt of making him back down, but I doubt he will.

"Reasonable." He agreed again, just as I thought.

"One year. Then we divorce and walk away clean." My voice was sharp as I stated it, we could both feel the tension rising in the room.

He nods. Picks up his coffee. Then, like an afterthought that isn't: "And if something changes before the year is up?"

"Nothing will change,” I say.

He looks at me with those careful, opaque eyes, and the corner of his mouth does something small.

"Of course,” he says.

I don't know why it feels like a challenge.