Chapter Three: His Problem
1096 Words
ARIA
I didn't sleep.
I lay in the spare room at Nadia's flat. she hadn't even asked, just stripped the bed fresh and told me the Wi-Fi password, and I stared at the ceiling and ran the numbers in my head until they blurred.
Weston Holdings. Forty-two percent held by my father, the rest distributed across a board of old wolves who'd known our family for decades. For three years, everyone had understood that I was being groomed to take over. I'd been in the strategy meetings, I'd restructured the eastern division, I'd done the work. But without the He family connection, without the social weight of being Marcus's chosen mate, my father would find a reason to sideline me. He'd been looking for one for years. I'd always been too useful to cut loose entirely.
Lena, apparently, had changed the calculation.
I turned onto my side. The curtains weren't quite closed, and a strip of amber streetlight lay across the floor.
I thought about what Nadia had said. Glass doesn't scare me. I'd meant it. What I hadn't expected was for Rhys Calloway to be the same man who'd caught me in an airport lounge three hours before I'd tried to propose a business marriage to him. What I hadn't expected was for him to agree in ninety seconds flat, or to touch my face like he was confirming something he'd already decided.
He doesn't know me. I'd said it out loud and he'd looked at me like it was a strange thing to say.
I pushed it out of my mind. It didn't matter. The arrangement was sensible, the terms were clear, and in the morning I'd sign my name next to his and begin dismantling everything my family had built against me.
It was just business.
I told myself that until I fell asleep.
The car arrived at half eight exactly.
Black, silent, immaculately clean. The driver held the door without making eye contact. I got in with my documents in a folder on my lap and my coffee thermos in my hand and my heart beating at a perfectly normal rate, because this was a transaction, and transactions did not require elevated heart rates.
Rhys was already in the back seat.
I hadn't expected that.
"You said you'd send a car," I said, because I needed to say something.
"I did," he said. "I'm in it."
I sat down. The door closed. The car pulled into traffic and I looked straight ahead and was extremely aware of the six inches of leather seat between us.
"You didn't sleep," he said.
I turned to look at him. "I'm sorry?"
"Your eyes." He said it like a simple observation, no judgment in it at all. "You didn't sleep."
"I slept fine," I said, which was a lie, and from the slight tilt of his head I suspected he knew it.
He didn't push it. He looked back out the window, and we rode in silence for a while. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence, which was the uncomfortable part. I'd expected tension or awkwardness or the particular strain of being in a small space with someone you barely know. Instead it was just… quiet. Like sitting next to a lake.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"Yes."
"Why did you agree? Yesterday. The actual reason." I turned in my seat to face him properly. "You don't know me, and you agreed in under two minutes. I've been trying to work out what you get out of this that's worth more than the disruption."
He looked at me. Long enough that I resisted the urge to look away.
"The elders have been selecting candidates," he said. "My grandfather presented me with three names last month. Women I've never met. He's planning to make it a formal matter at his birthday dinner, a public announcement that I've agreed to begin the selection process." He paused. "I hadn't agreed. He assumed."
"So you need someone already chosen before he can choose for you."
"Yes."
"And the timing , you know, running into me yesterday —"
"Convenient," he said simply.
I studied him. "Nadia thinks you don't touch people. She said your own pack keeps their distance."
He was quiet for a moment. "That's accurate."
"Then why did you —" I stopped. I hadn't meant to ask that. I hadn't meant to go anywhere near that.
"Why did I catch you?"
"You held on," I said, before I could stop myself. "After I had my footing. You held on."
He looked at me for a long moment. The morning light came through the window and made it impossible to read him.
"You didn't panic," he said at last.
"What?"
"When you realised I was holding you. You didn't panic. You didn't pull away immediately or make a sound." Something in his expression shifted almost imperceptibly. "Most people do. It makes it worse."
I absorbed that.
I thought about the glass Nadia had mentioned. The distance he kept. The way he'd reached out and touched my face last night not with tenderness but with something more clinical, like a man testing to see if something was real.
Oh, I thought.
Oh, this wasn't about the elders at all.
I didn't say that. I turned back to face the window and filed it away in the part of my mind that would take it out later, in private, and look at it properly.
"Here," he said.
The car had stopped. Through the glass, I could see the stone facade of the Civil Affairs Bureau, its heavy doors already open, morning light falling clean across the steps.
I looked down at the folder in my lap. Birth certificate, residency record, the form I'd printed at six in the morning when I'd given up on sleep.
This was real. This was actually happening.
"Second thoughts?" he asked.
I looked at him. At the dark eyes and the unreadable face and whatever it was that lived behind the glass.
"No," I said. "You?"
He opened the door.
"I don't have second thoughts," he said. "I don't make decisions I'm not sure of."
He stepped out and waited, and after one breath… one single, steadying breath, I followed.
The doors of the Bureau were very heavy. He held mine open without being asked, and I walked through, and behind us the morning closed in like a curtain falling on everything that came before.
Whatever came next, I had chosen it.
I just hadn't worked out yet whether he had chosen me first.
- Writer
