Chapter Two
292 Words
Julian Blackwood did not believe in fate.
He believed in contracts,leverage,and the precise application of pressure at the right moment. He believed in data and discipline and the uncomfortable truth that most problems,properly examined, had solutions. He didn’t believe in love, which he considered a marketing term, or romance,which he considered a hobby for people with too much time, or marriage which he considered a legal instrument what happened to involve cake.
He was getting married today because the Mendez Group had something he wanted—a controlling interest in a South American logistics network that would complete the final piece of his international infrastructure—and because Gabriel Mendez has proposed, eighteen months ago, and their companies unite through their children. Julian had agreed. He had met Isabel Mendez once, on a video call , and she had seemed pleasant and composed and entirely uninterested in him, which suited him perfectly.
He stood at the altar now and watched the doors at the back of the cathedral open, and the organ swell, and the woman in white begin her walk. Something was different.
He didn’t know what. He hadn’t seen Isabel Mendez in person before, so the wrongness was not a matter of recognition. It was something else— a quality of movement,perhaps. The way she walked, Isabel had seemed careful and deliberate on the screen. This woman walked like she was solving a problem with every step, like she was choosing to be here in real time, second by second.
She reached the altar.
He lifted the veil, gray eyes looked back at him not Isabel’s dark brown. Gray, like winter, sharp and full of something he couldn’t name.
She held his gaze and did not flinch.
He married her.
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