Contracted To My Enemy

The Contract

*Roman Pov*

She leaves my office at six-forty. By six-fifty, James is standing in front of my desk.

"Run everything she gave us," I say. "Every account number, every shell company. Quietly. I don't want Eduardo knowing we're looking before we're ready to move."

"And if none of it holds up?"

"Then she wasted five minutes of my time instead of the marriage she's asking for, and I never hear from her again."

"You're actually considering the marriage."

"I'm considering the information. The marriage is just the price of admission." I look past him at the city. "Don't get ahead of me."

He leaves. I stay at the window, running the meeting back in my head. A woman walks into my building with no lawyer, no leverage but her name, and doesn't flinch when I threaten to have her removed. Eduardo doesn't raise people who talk like that. He raises people who ask permission first.

That bothers me more than it should. My phone rings. My mother.

"You met with the Mendoza girl." Dolores never opens with a greeting. "Word reached me an hour ago."

"Word reaches you faster than my own staff does."

"Tell me you sent her away."

"I told her I'd verify what she brought me. I haven't decided anything."

"You gave Eduardo Mendoza's disinherited daughter five minutes of your time and you call that nothing?"

"I call it due diligence." I turn from the window. "If what she gave us is real, it's the first real opening we've had in four years. I'm not going to throw it out because you don't like where it came from."

"And if it's not real? If this is Eduardo's play, using his own daughter as bait?"

"Then James finds that out tonight, and I never see her again." I check the time. "I'll call you when I know more."

"Roman—"

I hang up before she finishes.

James calls back at midnight. "It's real," he says. "All of it. Three shell accounts we've never seen. A supplier contract bleeding cash for two years. And an offshore account tied to Eduardo personally, not the company. If that one holds up under real scrutiny, it's not just bad business. That ends with him in front of a judge."

"You're sure it's not planted. Something designed to look real and lead us somewhere we don't want to go."

"I ran it three ways. If it's a trap, it's the most expensive trap I've ever seen someone set with their own money."

I say nothing for a moment, turning that over.

"Draft the contract," I say finally.

"Which one?"

"The marriage."

Silence on the line. "You're actually doing this."

"She gave me something no one else has managed to get me in four years, and she did it by walking into my building alone and betting everything on five minutes. That's not desperation dressed up as confidence. That's pure confidence."

"Or it's exactly what someone would do if they were sent here to look confident."

"Then we write terms that punish her if that's true." I glance at the folder James left on my desk. "Two-year minimum. No early exit without forfeiting everything negotiated. If she's playing me, she loses more than I do."

"And if she's not?"

"Then I get access to every room Eduardo's spent years keeping me out of. Board dinners. Shipping negotiations. His allies' charity boards. I don't get that access any other way." I close the folder. "Have it ready by nine."

---

She's in my office at nine sharp. No appointment needed this time — I told the desk to send her straight up. She sits without waiting to be asked. Back straight. Hands folded the same way they were yesterday.

"Your information checked out," I say.

"I told you it would."

"You also didn't mention the offshore account tied to your father personally. That wasn't part of yesterday's offer."

"It's part of today's." She doesn't blink. "I wanted to know we were actually doing this before I handed over everything at once."

Smart. I'd have done the same. I slide the contract across the desk. She doesn't reach for it yet. "Terms," I say. "Marriage is legal, public, binding for a minimum of two years, or until we agree the objective's met — my access to your father's company, his public downfall. Neither of us exits early without forfeiting everything negotiated to that point. No affairs on either side during the term. It undermines the leverage we're both building. Everything else is between us."

"Two years." She tests the weight of it out loud.

"You said you wanted a weapon, not an exit. Weapons take time to use properly."

She picks up the contract, reads it fast, the way someone reads when they already know what they're looking for.

"Nothing in here about Alonso Reyes."

"Once this is signed, he's irrelevant. No one breaks a shipping contract they believe secures a Mendoza-Ortez marriage instead."

"And David?"

"Inherits a company that's about to lose every advantage your father promised his partners." I lean back. "That's not something I plan. That's what happens once the accounts you gave me start unraveling on their own."

She sets it down, picks up the pen. Doesn't sign yet.

"If people ask why I'm marrying my father's enemy a week after he disinherited me, what's the story?"

"The truth, mostly. He wronged you. I offered a way out that wasn't Alonso Reyes." I watch her face. "People will assume the rest is romance. Let them. It's better cover than anything we'd invent."

"And if it becomes romance," she says, watching me the same way, "does that break the contract?"

"The contract doesn't care what it becomes. It cares whether either of us tries to walk away before the objective's met."

She holds my eyes a second longer than she needs to, then signs. I sign under her name. Neither of us says anything else about it.

---

The call to my mother that evening does not go well.

"You signed it." Not a question.

"This morning."

"Without telling me first."

"I'm telling you now."

"Roman." Her voice drops into the register she uses when she wants me to remember whose name is also on this company. "You are marrying a woman whose father has been your enemy for four years. Publicly. And you didn't think to discuss it with me before signing your name to it."

"I discussed it with the two people whose job it is to tell me if it's a bad idea," I say. "Neither of them did."

"Because neither of them has to live with the consequences if you're wrong about her."

"Neither do you," I say, and she goes quiet in a way that tells me I've said something she won't forgive quickly. "This is my company, my deal, my risk."

"It's the Ortez name," she says. "That's never only been yours."

"Then trust that I know how to use it."

She hangs up fast. I set the phone down and look at the contract, her signature beside mine, Two years. Or until Eduardo Mendoza has nothing left to protect.

I call James back. "Set up a press statement," I say. "Tomorrow morning, first thing. I want Eduardo Mendoza reading about his daughter's engagement."

"And if he calls, demanding to talk to her?"

"Then he finds out the same way everyone else will," I say. "That he doesn't get to decide what happens to her anymore."