Ruthless Vows

The fixer

Callum Ashworth had learned, at eleven years old, that his father's smile meant something was about to go wrong.

He was thirty now, and the smile still worked on him like a trigger. Marcus Ashworth stood at the window of the Ashworth Holdings penthouse office with that exact smile in place — warm, easy, the smile of a man who had never once in his life paid for his own mistakes — and Callum felt his stomach drop before his father said a single word.

"Sit down, son."

"I've been standing all day. I'll stand."

Marcus's smile didn't waver. He crossed to the sideboard, poured two glasses of scotch neither of them needed, and set one within Callum's reach without looking at him. "The Whitlow deal fell through."

"The Whitlow deal fell through eight months ago. I restructured around it. We're fine."

"There's more to it than the Whitlow deal."

Callum went very still. In thirty years he had learned to read exactly two things about his father with total accuracy: when he was lying, and when he was about to ask for something enormous while pretending it was small. This was the second kind of quiet.

"How much," Callum said. Not a question. Just a number he already knew he wasn't going to like.

"Forty-one million." Marcus said it the way other men mentioned the weather. "Leveraged against three properties you don't know about yet, collateralized through a shell in the Caymans that will unwind in ninety days if we don't refinance."

Callum set his untouched scotch down so carefully the glass didn't make a sound, which was somehow worse than if he'd thrown it. "Ninety days."

"There's a solution."

"There's always a solution with you. That's never once meant it was a good one."

Marcus finally turned to face him fully, and for the first time in the conversation, something underneath the smile cracked — something that looked, almost, like fear. "Reginald Cross called me an hour ago."

Callum's whole body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the scotch. "Cross Hospitality."

"His daughter's engagement just ended. Tonight, apparently — some scandal with the Vale boy. Reginald's looking to secure the Meridian corridor beyond any legal challenge, and he's decided the cleanest way to do that is family. A merger. Through marriage."

"You're joking."

"I have never joked about forty-one million dollars in my life."

Callum laughed — one short, disbelieving sound, nothing like humor in it. "You want me to marry a stranger to bail out a debt you built without telling me existed."

"I want you to save the company your grandfather built," Marcus said, and there it was — the old weapon, the one that had worked on Callum since he was a boy desperate to be the son who fixed things instead of the son who broke them. "Delphine Cross isn't a stranger. She's Ashford City royalty. Cold, by every account. Controlled. You'd hardly have to pretend to feel anything for her at all — which, frankly, has always been your strongest skill."

Callum said nothing. He looked out at the skyline his family had built two generations of leverage on top of, at the city lit up gold and merciless below, and thought — not for the first time — that being the fixer meant you never got to choose what needed fixing.

"Dinner's Thursday," Marcus said, already turning back to his scotch, already certain of the answer. "Wear the navy suit. She's supposed to be exceptionally difficult to impress."

"I don't want to impress her," Callum said quietly. "I want to know exactly what I'm agreeing to before I agree to it."

For once, his father didn't argue. He just smiled the smile that meant something was about to go wrong, and said, "That's my boy."