Married to the Monster

Untitled Episode CHAPTER TWO

I did not sleep that night.

I lay on my back in my studio apartment staring at the ceiling with the contract on my chest like a stone and his single word still working its way through me the way a splinter works through skin, too small to grab and too sharp to ignore.

Yours.

It was not a name. I had known that in the elevator, in the half a second before the doors were sealed, when I saw his face in the narrowing gap and understood that whatever he had said was not an answer. It was something else entirely. A warning, maybe. Or a confession. I was not yet fluent enough in Caius Voss to tell the difference.

I got up at five and made coffee and read the contract again from the first clause to the last. It was seventeen pages, drafted in language precise enough to be airtight and vague enough to give him room. Twelve months of public appearances as his fiancée. No cohabitation required. No physical intimacy clause, which I noticed was not phrased as a prohibition but as an absence, a distinction between a rule and a silence. Compensation was not money but debt discharge, the full four point seven million, verified by a third party escrow agent upon contract completion.

My signature was already on the top page. So was his.

I drank my coffee and thought about the way he had looked at me when I walked into that office, the quality of attention in it, the way his eyes had moved across my face not with the casualness of someone meeting a stranger but with something that felt like recognition. I had dismissed it at the moment because I had a speech to give about payment plans and I needed to focus. Now, at five in the morning, with the city still dark outside my window, I let myself sit about what I had felt in that room.

I had felt seen. Not in the way that makes you warm. In the way, that made you want to check what you were wearing and whether any of it was something you needed to hide.

At seven my phone rang. The number was not in my contacts, but I recognized the prefix, the same one as the letter.

I answered on the second ring.

"Good morning, Ms. Cole."

His voice at seven in the morning sounded exactly like it did at nine. Low and unhurried and calibrated to a frequency that bypassed the ear and went straight to the center of the chest. I hated that I noticed this.

"Mr. Voss."

"My assistant will send you the schedule for the first public appearance. Friday evening, a dinner at Chambord. Car at seven. I need you to wear something that reads engaged, not employed."

I looked at the blazer I was wearing, the one with the repaired seam. I said: understood.

"One more thing."

I waited.

"The woman I mentioned yesterday. In the office. You asked her name."

My grip tightened on the phone. You said yours, I told him.

"I know what I said." A pause so brief it barely existed. "Her name is Elena Marchetti. I am telling you because you will see her at the Hartwell Gala in six weeks and I would rather you know the name before you encounter the person."

I processed this. He was giving me information because it was tactically useful. This was how he communicated. Strategically, efficiently, without warmth and without coldness either, just the clean transfer of what was necessary.

"And what exactly am I supposed to know about Elena Marchetti before I encounter her?" I asked.

The kind that told you the person on the other end was choosing between two different true things.

"That she is observant," he said finally. "And that she will be looking for evidence that this arrangement is not what it appears to be."

"And what does it appear to be?"

“A love story,” he said, and hung up.

His assistant sent me the schedule at seven forty-three. Friday dinner at Chambord with a table of four including a hedge fund partner named Robert Ashby and his wife. Background on both attached as a PDF. Dress code: formal. The car arrived at seven.

At the bottom of the email, one separate line:

Mr. Voss requests that you review the attached profile of Elena Marchetti prior to the Hartwell Gala. For your preparation.

I opened the attachment.

Four pages. Photographs at the top, society column images. Elena Marchetti was the kind of beauty that came from architecture rather than effort, bone structure doing most of the work before any other consideration. Dark hair. Pale skin. A poise that read on camera as composure and in person, I imagined, as an entirely different thing.

The text was a professional summary. Hotel dynasty. Charity board memberships. A degree from Sciences Po in Paris. Three years on the Manhattan social circuit, during which she had been photographed at events alongside Caius Voss, always at the distance of two people who were not publicly anything but close enough that the photographs asked the question.

The final page was blank except for one line in a different font, added manually, not by Claire:

She will try to speak to you alone. Do not let her.

I read it twice. Then I put my phone down and looked at the wall of my apartment and asked myself, for the first time since I had signed that contract, whether I had understood what I had actually agreed to.

I had thought I was signing a transaction. Clean, temporary, survivable.

I was beginning to understand I had signed myself into the middle of a story that had started long before I walked into that office, one with more characters and more history than seventeen pages could contain.

My phone buzzed. A text from a number I now recognize.

Friday. Seven o'clock. And Vivienne.

I stared at my name. He had used my first name. The contract called me Ms. Cole throughout its seventeen pages. And now, in a text meant to be efficient, he had written Vivienne.

I told myself it meant nothing.

I told myself that for three more days, right up until the moment the car arrived Friday, I stepped outside my building and found not the driver I had expected but Caius Voss himself, standing on the sidewalk in a black suit, looking at me like he had been waiting not just for seven o'clock but for considerably longer than that.

"You came yourself," I said.

"I wanted to see where you lived," he said.

And I understood, standing on my own sidewalk in the dress I had borrowed from Petra and the heels that were starting to pinch, that this man had spent the last three days learning things about me that had nothing to do with the contract.

The question was how long he had been learning them before I ever walked into his office.