The Covenant Wife

"Don't touch the phone." The voice came from the doorway, low and steady, and my hand froze an inch above the receiver I hadn't even meant to pick up. It was just before midnight on the forty-first floor of Voss Meridian, and I was standing behind the desk of a man I had never spoken to, with a stolen badge in my coat pocket and a plan that had exactly one chance of working. I turned around slowly. Alexander Voss stood in the open doorway with his jacket over one arm and his tie pulled loose, and he did not look like a man who had just caught a thief, he looked like a man who had been expecting one. "I'm not here to steal anything," I said, and I was proud that my voice held. "That is what thieves usually say," he replied, letting the door fall shut behind him with a click that sounded much louder than it should have. He told me the lift had logged a contractor's badge on his floor a few minutes earlier, and that the contractor happened to be out of state. My fingers closed around the badge, which I had lifted from a lanyard on a cleaning cart that evening while telling myself it was only borrowing. "Then why didn't you call security?" I asked. "Because security would have called the police, and I wanted to see what kind of person breaks into an office and then sits in the visitor's chair instead of mine." I had chosen that chair on purpose, and it was the only decision I had made all night that I was completely sure about. What I could not tell him was why I was really there. Five years ago his company had bought the assets of a pension fund that my father was blamed for emptying, my father had died with that blame still attached to his name, and the only proof that he had never touched the money was locked somewhere inside this building, behind a vault that opened for no one except the man now standing in front of me. I had spent years working my way into this company's Compliance department for that single reason, I had been walked out of it one spring morning, and he was the last door I had left. "Please sit down, Mr. Voss," I said, "because I need you to read something before you decide what to do with me." He did not sit, he took the single page I slid across the desk and read it standing, and I watched his eyes travel down the paper until they stopped exactly where I knew they would. *Article Nine, Section Four.* "Where did you get this?" he asked, and his voice was no longer curious. "I processed that filing three years ago, when I still worked in Compliance," I said, pressing my palms flat against my knees so he would not see them tremble. "You inherit controlling interest in this company only if you are married before your birthday, which is three weeks away, and after the wedding you and your wife have to hand your grandfather's trustee one sealed truth every month for a year." "Nobody outside this building and Osei Bellamy's office knows that clause exists." "Graham Pryce knows," I answered, "because he put it on next month's board agenda under a heading nobody would read twice." "If you miss the deadline, your shares pass to the chairman, which means Graham Pryce owns the company your grandfather built, and he is already telling people you will fail, because no one has seen you with anyone in two years." He folded the page once and set it on the desk as if it were something fragile. "Amelia Rowan," he said slowly, as if reading my name off a file, "compliance analyst, let go in the spring." I flinched before I could stop myself. "The board was told you leaked merger data to a competitor," he continued, and his eyes never left my face, "so is that why you are here, because you want revenge on the company that fired you?" "I didn't leak anything." "Everyone says that." "Then you will have to decide whether I'm everyone," I said, and it came out harder than I intended, so I softened my voice before going on. "I am not asking you to like me, I am asking you to marry me, for one year, with a contract your lawyer writes and I sign." He laughed, one short breath of disbelief with no humor in it. "You broke into my office to propose to me." "I have nothing left to lose and I know exactly what that clause requires, and it is the best offer you will get before Graham finds you a wife of his own." He walked around the desk and stopped a few feet from my chair. "Why would a woman this company destroyed want to be my wife?" he asked. I had prepared an answer for that question too, and I gave him the safest piece of it. "Because people who have lost everything can't be bought," I said, "and you need someone Graham Pryce can't buy." Something shifted in his expression, too fast for me to read, and for the first time he seemed to be weighing something other than whether to call the police. "What do you want out of this, money?" "One thing, and I will tell you what it is after you say yes." "That is not a negotiation, Miss Rowan, that is a trap." "It's a risk," I said, "and you have been taking those since the day you took over this company." Then Alexander reached for his phone, and my breath stopped, because I had planned for everything except watching him decide. He looked at the screen. Then he looked back at me, and slowly, deliberately, he set the phone down without dialing. "Do you know what Graham Pryce told me last Thursday?" he asked. "No." "He sat in that chair, exactly where you are sitting now, and said that someone would come to this office before the month was over," he said quietly. "A woman with a very good reason and a very good story, and he told me to be careful." I felt the blood leave my face. "What he did not tell me," Alexander said, "was that she would be right about the clause." He rested one hand on the arm of my chair and leaned close enough that I could see the exhaustion in his eyes, and behind it something sharper and far more dangerous. "So which one are you, Miss Rowan?" he asked softly. "The reason, or the story?"