CHAPTER 1
2152 Words
(Seraphina's POV)
The letter in my hand was shaking, or maybe it was my hand. I could not tell anymore.
“Five days,” the doctor said. “Maybe less if her heart keeps weakening like this.”
I looked at my mother through the glass window of the ICU. She looked smaller than I remembered. Smaller than the woman who used to carry two grocery bags in each hand and still had energy to sing while cooking dinner.
"There has to be another way,” I said. “A payment plan. Anything.”
The doctor shook his head. “Miss Cole, the hospital has already extended your bill twice. Without the new treatment plan paid in full, we cannot continue her care here.”
I walked out of that hospital with my chest caving in. The cold New York air hit my face but I barely felt it. I had three thousand dollars in my savings account. The treatment needed two hundred thousand dollars.
My phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number.
Come to Blackstone Tower. Suite 4400. Today. It concerns your mother.
I almost laughed. Almost. Because the last time someone from that family contacted me, it was a lawyer telling us we had thirty days to vacate our home.
I should have deleted the message. I should have blocked the number. Instead, I found myself standing in front of the tallest building in the financial district two hours later, my heart pounding for reasons I did not want to admit.
The elevator ride to the fortieth floor felt longer than it should. When the doors opened, a woman in a sharp black suit was already waiting.
“Miss Cole. He is expecting you.”
She led me down a hallway lined with glass walls. Through one of them, I could see a man standing with his back to the door, looking out over the city like he owned every building in it. He probably did.
“Mr Voss, Miss Cole is here.” The woman said.
He turned around.
I had spent three years building a wall around the memory of that face. The wall crumbled in less than two seconds. It was him.
The same grey eyes from that night at the gala. The same eyes that belonged to a stranger named K, whom I had never expected to see again, let alone learn his real name was Kael Voss, the man who destroyed my father’s company and indirectly put my father in an early grave.
“You,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
“Sit down, Seraphina.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I know a lot of things about you.” He gestured to the chair across from his desk. “Sit.”
I did not sit. My legs felt too unsteady to trust myself near a chair right now. “What do you want from me?”
He slid a folder across the desk. I did not move to open it.
“Your mother’s hospital is mine,” he said. “I acquired it eight months ago. Her current treatment plan is set to be discontinued next week, along with several others, as part of a restructuring.”
My stomach dropped. “You did this. You are the reason she is losing her care.”
“I am also the reason she can keep it, If you agree to my proposal.” he said, his voice flat, businesslike, like we were discussing stock prices and not my mother’s life.
I felt the room tilt. “What proposal?”
“Marry me.”
I actually laughed. A short, ugly sound. “You destroyed my family. You think I would marry you for anything.”
“I am not asking you to love me, I am asking for one year. A contract marriage. Public appearances, my last name, nothing more. In exchange, your mother gets the best cardiac team in the state and full coverage for as long as she needs it.” he said.
I stared at him, searching his face for some kind of joke, some kind of trap I was not seeing yet. There was none. Just those same grey eyes, colder now than I remembered them being that night three years ago.
“Why me, out of every woman in this city, why would you choose the daughter of the man you ruined?” I said.
Something flickered behind his eyes for half a second. Then it was gone.
“Because it works for what I need,” he said simply.
I wanted to walk out. Every part of me screamed to walk out and never look back. But then I thought of my mother’s face through that glass window, smaller every day, running out of time.
“I need an answer in forty-eight hours, If you say no, I move on to the next candidate, and your mother’s treatment ends as scheduled.” he said.
I grabbed the folder off his desk, my hands no longer shaking from fear but from rage.
“You are disgusting,” I said.
“Probably,” he agreed, unbothered. “Forty-eight hours, Seraphina.”
I turned to leave, but stopped at the door. There was one thing I needed to know, one thing that had been eating at me since the moment he turned around.
“Did you know,” I said without turning back. “That night at the gala. Did you know who I was?”
Silence.
I turned around and his jaw was tight, his eyes unreadable.
“Yes,” he said.
The folder slipped from my hands and papers scattered across the marble floor.
He had known the entire time.
I stood frozen in the doorway, the scattered papers forgotten at my feet, my mind racing back to that night three years ago. The gala. The dim lighting. A stranger who introduced himself only as K, who bought me a drink I never finished because I could not stop laughing at something he said.
I had left before sunrise, before exchanging numbers, before anything that could have tied two strangers together beyond a single reckless night. I had told myself it meant nothing. A memory to box away and forget.
“You knew my last name,” I said slowly, the realization crawling up my spine like ice water. “That night. You knew I was a Cole, and you still let me believe you were just some stranger.”
He did not answer right away, and the silence told me everything his mouth refused to.
“Did you plan it,” I asked, my voice shaking now for an entirely different reason. “Was that night ever real, or was I just another move in whatever game you have been playing against my family?”
“It was not planned,” he said finally, his voice low. “I did not know who you were until after.”
“After what?”
His jaw tightened, and for the first time, I saw something behind those grey eyes that almost looked like hesitation.
“After I saw the photograph on your father’s desk,” he said. “The week before everything fell apart.”
The floor seemed to tilt beneath me.
“What photograph,” I whispered, even though some part of me already understood, with a cold and sinking certainty, that this story had started long before either of us realized it, and neither of us had been telling the whole truth since the very beginning.
- Writer
