CHAPTER FOUR: THE WILL
1181 Words
I don’t get far.
The hallway outside Damien’s study is long and quiet, lined with paintings of people I don’t know. Probably his family. People who look like they never once had to run away from a room just to breathe. I stop halfway down it and lean my back against the wall, because my legs have decided they are done holding me up.
My phone is still in my hand. I check it again, hoping for something new. There is nothing. Just Amelia’s two words, still sitting there, still unanswered.
I’m sorry, Ava.
“Sorry for what,” I whisper at the screen, like it might finally answer me.
Footsteps come down the hall. I expect my mother. Instead it’s Damien.
He stops a few feet away, hands in his pockets, and looks at me the way someone looks at a problem they already have three solutions for.
“You didn’t let me finish,” he says.
“I said no. That was the end of the sentence.”
“No wasn’t an answer. It was a reaction.” His voice stays flat, almost bored. “There’s a difference.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard one part of a very complicated situation and decided you already understood all of it.” He tilts his head slightly. “That’s not a decision, Ava. That’s panic wearing a decision’s clothes.”
I feel my face go hot. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you ran out of a room instead of asking a single question.” He says it plainly, like he’s reading a weather report. “If you actually wanted answers, you would have stayed.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to stand there and be told to marry a stranger like it was a business update.”
“It is a business update,” he says. “I’m simply not going to pretend otherwise to make you feel better about it.”
I stare at him, and for a second I genuinely can’t tell if I want to scream or laugh. “Do you talk to everyone like this?”
“I talk to people the way their attention span requires.” His eyes flick briefly to my phone, still gripped in my hand. “You clearly have the attention span to hear the rest, or you wouldn’t still be standing here.”
I hate that he’s right.
“Fine,” I say through my teeth. “Talk.”
“My grandfather built this company from nothing,” he says. “When he died, he left a will. Most of it was ordinary. Money, property, shares split how you’d expect. One part wasn’t ordinary at all.”
“What part.”
“A clause. I have to be married by my thirty-second birthday, or I lose control of Blackwood Holdings completely. Not slowly. Immediately. Everything transfers to the board that same day.”
“When is your birthday.”
“Today.” He says it without any weight at all, like it’s a mildly annoying detail rather than the center of everything happening around us.
“He did that on purpose,” I say slowly. “Why would anyone do that to their own grandson.”
“Because he thought I’d waste my life in an office if nothing forced my hand.” Something flickers across his face, gone before I can name it. “He wasn’t wrong to worry. He was wrong about the solution.”
“That’s not love. That’s control.”
“Careful,” he says, almost amused. “You’re starting to sound like someone with opinions about my family, and you’ve known us for an hour.”
“You’re the one telling me about it.”
“I’m informing you. There’s a difference between that and inviting your judgment.” His tone doesn’t change, doesn’t sharpen, and somehow that makes it worse. “But go on. I’m sure your take is very insightful.”
I want to throw something at him. I settle for crossing my arms instead. “So if I say no, you lose everything. And my family loses the deal too.”
“Correct.”
“And if Amelia is found tonight? Do you just marry her instead, and I disappear back to my normal life like none of this happened?”
“If she’s found before midnight, yes. The marriage was always meant to be her and me.” A pause, brief, almost clinical. “This isn’t the outcome anyone planned for. Least of all me. I don’t enjoy improvising.”
“Then stop looking at me like I’m the backup plan you’re annoyed to be using.”
“I’m not annoyed,” he says. “Annoyed would require me caring about this more than I do. I’m simply being efficient with the time I have left before midnight.”
“Efficient,” I repeat flatly. “That’s the word you’re using. For your own wedding.”
“What word would you prefer?” His eyes hold mine, steady, unreadable. “Romantic? You’d know I was lying, and I’d rather not waste either of our time pretending.”
My mother reaches us then, her face pale before she even says a word.
“Ava, please,” she says. “Your father is talking to the lawyers again. There might be a way to delay things, just until we know more about Amelia. But we need time, and this is the only way to buy it.”
I look between her and Damien, who hasn’t moved, hasn’t softened, hasn’t offered me anything close to comfort this entire conversation.
“So I’m not actually marrying him,” I say slowly. “I’m buying time.”
“That’s one way to see it,” Damien says.
“What’s the other way.”
“The other way is that you’re the only reasonable option left in a very short window, and you’re currently spending that window arguing with me instead of deciding.” He glances at his watch, unhurried, like none of this touches him at all. “But take your time. I hear panic makes for excellent decision making.”
My mother squeezes my hand. Her fingers are cold.
“Nobody is asking you to love him,” she says quietly. “We’re asking you to help us buy time to find your sister. That’s all this is.”
I look down the hallway, toward the room where the lawyers are still waiting with their folders and their countdown to midnight. I think about Amelia’s message. I think about the locked door, the blank paper, the ring sitting cold in my mother’s palm.
Then I look at Damien one more time. He isn’t pleading. He isn’t even really asking. He’s simply waiting, the way you wait for a machine to finish a calculation you already know the answer to.
“I need air,” I say, and this time nobody follows me.
- Writer
