The Billionaire's Cursed Heir

Chapter 3: The Ultimatum

DAMIAN

My father doesn't knock. He never has. The door to my office swings open like he still owns the company, like I'm still the boy he raised to obey first and think second.

"You look tired," Nathaniel says, settling into the chair across from my desk without being asked. "Bad sign, this early in the morning, especially with the deadline as close as it is."

"I have a company to run." I don't look up from the reports in front of me, though the words have stopped making sense in the last ten minutes. "What do you want?"

"Straight to business. Good. I taught you well." He crosses one leg over the other, unhurried, the way he does everything, like time itself answers to him. "I want to talk about your birthday."

My hand goes still on the page. "It's four months away."

"Thirty five years old." He says it slowly, savoring each word like it tastes of something bitter. "You know what that means in this family."

I know exactly what it means. Every Blackwood man before me has heard the same countdown, and every one of them ran out of time before they found a way to stop it.

"The curse is a story you tell to keep me in line," I say. "It's not real."

"Tell that to my brother. Tell that to your grandfather." His voice sharpens, all pretense of casual conversation gone. "Every firstborn heir who reached thirty five without securing the next generation has died within the year. Every single one. You think that's coincidence?"

"I think it's a pattern you've spent my whole life making sure I believe in." The words come out harder than I mean them to, but I don't take them back.

Nathaniel's jaw tightens. For a moment, something almost human flickers behind his eyes, and then it's gone, replaced by the cold calculation I grew up learning to read like weather before a storm.

"Believe in it or don't," he says. "But the board believes in it. The investors believe in it. Every time a Blackwood man dies young, this company loses a quarter of its value overnight. Fear runs this business as much as profit does, and you know it."

"So what are you asking me to do?"

"An heir, Damian. A son, ideally, though I'll accept whatever God gives you at this point. Conceived and confirmed before your thirty fifth birthday. If you don't have one, the board will vote to move control to your cousin's branch of the family. Everything my father built, everything I built, goes to a man who's never worked a single day for it."

The number floats in my head, cold and precise. Four months.

"I don't have a wife," I say. "I don't have anyone I'm even seeing."

"Then find someone." He says it like he's suggesting I switch vendors for office supplies. "You don't need love, Damian. You need results. Marry someone suitable, or don't marry at all and simply produce the child. The world doesn't care how it happens. It only cares that it happens."

I stand, because sitting still while he talks about my life like a spreadsheet line item makes something in my chest twist tight enough to hurt.

"You want me to trap a woman into having my child on a deadline."

"I want you to survive." For the first time, his voice loses its edge, and what's left underneath sounds almost like fear. "I have buried too many Blackwood men, Damian. My brother. My own father. I am not burying my son."

"Then maybe you should have taught me how to actually build a relationship instead of spreadsheets and quarterly targets."

"Relationships don't save companies." He stands too, and for a moment we're just two men staring at each other across a desk that suddenly feels too small for the room. "Love is a weakness this family cannot afford. It never has been. Every Blackwood man who let himself get soft, who let himself need someone, ended up buried early or watching everything he loved get taken from him anyway. I am trying to save your life. Don't mistake that for cruelty."

"It feels exactly like cruelty from where I'm standing."

"Then feel however you need to feel." He straightens his jacket, already moving toward the door, already done with a conversation that's rearranged the next four months of my life. "But find someone, Damian. Someone discreet. Someone who won't ask questions, won't want a real marriage, won't complicate what needs to stay simple. Someone who needs something from you badly enough to keep quiet about the rest."

Something cold settles low in my stomach, an idea I don't want to have and can't stop myself from having anyway.

"And if I refuse?"

"Then in four months, you'll be another name on the family wall, and the board will hand this company to a man who wouldn't know how to run it if his life depended on it. Which, incidentally, it will." He pauses at the door, doesn't turn around. "I'd rather bury my pride forcing you into this than bury my son because you were too proud to listen."

"There's something you're not telling me. There always is."

He goes still, just for a moment, just long enough that I notice. "I've told you everything you need to know."

"That's not the same as everything true."

He doesn't answer that. He just walks out, and the door closes behind him, leaving me alone with the weight of a deadline I never agreed to and can't argue my way out of, and a suspicion I can't explain that he flinched at exactly the wrong question.

I sit back down, but I can't focus on the reports anymore. My mind keeps circling back to one person, one face, one problem that might solve another problem entirely.

Charlotte Rivers, drowning in bills she can't pay, desperate enough to consider anything, discreet enough by nature that she'd never risk her job by talking.

I hate myself a little for the direction my thoughts are taking. I hate my father more for putting me here in the first place, and for whatever it was he just refused to say.

But four months is four months, and I am done pretending I have any other options left.

I pick up my phone and call down to have her sent up first thing tomorrow morning.

Whatever happens next, there's no version of this where I come out of it as the same man I am right now, and no version where my father's silence stays buried forever.