RUIN ME QUIETLY

Chapter 4

Wren said yes two days later, in an office that felt colder than it had the first time she'd stood in it.

There'd been terms, of course — a year, maybe two, long enough to satisfy the board and his grandfather's ultimatum. A generous settlement when it ended. And buried in the fine print, the thing she'd actually wanted: full access to the Ashford Textiles acquisition files, unredacted, hers to keep.

"You understand what you're agreeing to," Callum had said, sliding the contract across his desk the way he slid everything — deliberately, watching for her reaction.

"I understand what I'm getting," she'd answered, and signed before she could think better of it.

She told herself, walking out of that office with a wedding date already circled on a calendar that wasn't hers, that this was still just a transaction. A means to an end. She was very good at telling herself things.

The engagement announcement went out on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, Vance Holdings' stock had ticked up two points, and the society pages had already run three separate photos of Callum from old galas, none of them featuring her, because there hadn't been time to take a photo of her yet — she was still, to the world, a name attached to a headline, not a face.

Priya found her in the break room that afternoon, coffee in hand, studying Wren with an expression somewhere between pity and disbelief.

"You're really doing this."

"I'm really doing this."

"Do you know what you're walking into?"

Wren thought of Seraphine's voice on the phone — tell him the wedding's back on — and the way Callum's face had gone still when he heard it, like a man bracing for weather. "I have a general idea."

Priya didn't push further, which somehow felt worse than if she had.

She found out exactly what she was walking into three nights later.

She'd stayed late — a habit now, one she told herself was about proximity to the files and nothing else — and was gathering her things when she heard voices through the half-open door of Callum's office. Seraphine's, first, low and furious in a way the elevator version of her hadn't hinted at.

"You're actually going through with it."

"You know why."

"I know what your grandfather wants. I'm asking if it's what you want."

A silence stretched long enough that Wren should have walked away. She didn't.

"It doesn't matter what I want," Callum said finally, and something in his voice had gone raw in a way Wren had never heard from him — not the controlled exhaustion of two nights ago, but something closer to breaking. "It hasn't mattered in eleven years. You know that better than anyone."

"Callum—"

"Don't." A chair scraped. Footsteps. "Don't say my name like that when you're about to leave again."

Wren should have left. She told herself that later, lying awake in her apartment with the brick wall for company, turning the memory over and over like a stone she couldn't put down. Instead she stood frozen in the hallway, and through the gap in the door she saw it — Seraphine crossing the distance between them in three steps, Callum's hand coming up to catch her face like he'd done it a thousand times before, like his body remembered the shape of her even when his mouth was busy saying this is a mistake.

The door swung shut the rest of the way a second later — whether by his hand or hers, Wren couldn't tell — and she was left standing in an empty hallway with her heart going hard and strange in her chest, understanding with sudden, unwelcome clarity exactly what Priya had meant.

This was what happened to him. Not volatility in the way she'd imagined — not temper, not cruelty. Just eleven years of wanting something he wasn't allowed to have, worn down into a groove so deep he couldn't climb out of it even when he tried.

She left the building without saying goodbye to anyone. She didn't sleep much that night.

She saw Seraphine leaving his office the next morning, unhurried, perfectly composed, as if the previous night had never touched her. She paused when she saw Wren at the assistant's desk, tilted her head with that same private, assessing smile from the elevator.

"You heard, didn't you." It wasn't a question.

Wren didn't answer.

"Good." Seraphine adjusted the strap of her bag, entirely unbothered. "Then you already understand what you're marrying into. He'll be kind to you. He'll probably even mean it, some days." A pause, almost gentle, almost cruel. "But you should know now, before the wedding, not after — some of us don't leave, no matter how many times we're told to."

She left without waiting for a response.

Wren sat at her desk for a long time after that, staring at a stack of contracts she wasn't reading, feeling something in her chest that she refused, absolutely refused, to call jealousy.

It didn't stop being true just because she refused it.