MARRIED TO MY GREATEST ENEMY.

Chapter Two: The Devil's Office

I wore armor to war.

Black blazer, tailored. Hair up. The heels I saved for board meetings where men needed reminding that I wasn't decoration.

I stood in front of my bathroom mirror for exactly four minutes, which was three minutes and fifty seconds longer than I normally allowed myself, and gave myself the kind of talk that sounded confident and felt like lying.

You've walked into harder rooms than this.

Had I, though?

Knight Enterprises occupied the top four floors of a building that seemed architecturally designed to make visitors feel small.

All glass and steel and vertical aggression, the kind of building that announced its owner had won before you even got to the elevator.

The lobby alone was larger than my entire office floor.

I gave my name to the receptionist.

She smiled the careful smile of someone paid to be pleasant to people about to have difficult meetings and told me Mr. Knight's assistant would be right down.

I sat.

I did not check my phone. Checking my phone would look like nerves.

I folded my hands in my lap and watched the elevator and thought about my father's handwriting on the balance sheets I'd inherited: small, precise, optimistic in a way that balance sheets had no business being.

Hold the line, Soph. We're Calloways. We hold the line.

Fifteen minutes passed.

Then twenty.

At twenty-three minutes, a woman appeared early thirties, sleek dark ponytail, the expression of someone who'd been asked to deliver an insult professionally. "Ms. Calloway? I'm Rachel, Mr. Knight's executive assistant. I apologize for the wait. Mr. Knight is finishing a call. I can take you up."

I smiled like twenty-three minutes meant nothing.

In the elevator, Rachel said nothing. The floors climbed. My pulse stayed even through sheer stubbornness.

The executive floor was quieter than I expected. No open-plan bustle, no ringing phones. Just deep carpet and the particular hush of serious money, and at the far end of a corridor, a set of double doors that Rachel opened without knocking.

"He'll be with you shortly," she said. "Can I get you anything?"

"I'm fine. Thank you."

She left.

I was alone in Adrian Knight's office.

I'd expected glass and steel up here too. A dominance display city views, imposing desk, the visual vocabulary of a man who needed you to feel outranked the moment you entered.

Instead it was

Warm. That was the wrong word but it was the honest one. Dark wood bookshelves on two walls, actual books with actual cracked spines. A desk that was large but not theatrical.

A single painting abstract, predominantly deep blue that looked like it had been chosen because someone loved it, not because it cost a number worth mentioning. Floor-to-ceiling windows, yes, but the city outside felt like context rather than conquest.

I hated that I'd expected one thing and found another.

I didn't touch anything. I stood in the center of the room and kept my face neutral and waited.

The door behind me opened at the thirty-one minute mark.

I turned around.

Five years changes a person. I knew that. I'd changed entirely, hollowed out and rebuilt by grief and pressure and four years of running a company on caffeine and stubbornness.

Adrian Knight had changed in the opposite direction.

Whatever softness might once have lived in his face and I was honestly struggling to remember if it had been gone.

He was leaner than I remembered. Darker around the eyes in the way of men who slept four hours a night by choice and considered it efficient.

He wore a charcoal suit with the ease of someone who'd stopped noticing clothes because they'd long since stopped mattering to his sense of self.

He was, objectively and irritatingly, more commanding than he'd been at twenty-seven.

He looked at me the way you looked at something you'd already solved.

"Ms. Calloway." He moved to his desk without offering his hand. "Sit down."

Please do not modify it. Now it's good to see you. Not even the performative warmth that people deployed to establish dominance through false warmth.

Just: sit down.

I sat. Because I needed something from him and humility was part of the price and I'd known that walking in.

He sat across from me, opened a folder of my company's financials, I realized, with a cold slide of shock and didn't look up immediately.

He took his time. A full minute, maybe more, reviewing numbers he'd clearly already reviewed.

It was a power move so clean it was almost elegant.

"Your Meridian partnership dissolved in August," he said, finally.

"Before that, the Hartwell contract. Before that, two smaller distribution deals that shouldn't have fallen through given your product quality."

He closed the folder. His eyes met mine for the first time since he'd entered. They were darker than I remembered. Harder. "Someone's been working against you for about eighteen months. You know that."

It wasn't a question.

"Victor Hale," I said.

Something moved across his face. "You're certain."

"Aren't you?"

A pause. "What do you want, Ms. Calloway?"

The directness of it almost made me flinch. Almost. "I want to save my company."

"From Hale."

"Yes."

"And you've come to me because"

"Because you're the only person in this industry with the capital and the reach to block his acquisition." I kept my voice level. "And because Knight Enterprises has been quietly acquiring fashion-tech infrastructure for three years and Calloway's software would complete your portfolio."

I let that sit. I needed him to know I wasn't here in desperation alone, I was here because there was something in it for him. "This isn't charity. It's a strategic investment."

He looked at me for a long moment. The city moved behind him, indifferent.

"You humiliated me," he said.

The words landed without heat, which made them land harder. A man who said things like that with anger was defending himself. A man who said it like a fact had already decided what came next.

"I know," I said.

"In front of two hundred people."

"I know."

"And you never apologized."

My jaw tightened. "No."

"Why not?"

Because by the time I found out I was wrong, my father was dead and I was drowning and survival didn't leave room for retrospective grace.

Because pride was the only thing I had that felt like armor. Because I told myself it didn't matter, which was a lie I'd been comfortable with until this exact moment.

"I'm apologizing now," I said.

He considered that. His expression gave me nothing.

Then he reached into his desk drawer and placed a document on the surface between us. Thick. Bound. Professionally prepared.

My eyes dropped to it.

Knight-Calloway Partnership Agreement.

"I had this drawn up three weeks ago," he said.

Three weeks ago. Before I'd called. Before I'd walked in here.

My head came up slowly.

His face was still unreadable, but his eyes held something now. Something that looked almost like patience. Like a man who'd been waiting for a very specific moment and had finally arrived at it.

"Turn to page twelve," he said.

I turned to page twelve.

I read the clause once. Then again.

The words didn't rearrange themselves into something more reasonable the second time.

The partnership requires, as a condition of full activation, that both principals enter into a legal marriage for a minimum term of twelve months, during which time

I looked up.

"You're not serious," I said.

Adrian Knight looked back at me with the calm of a man holding every card in the deck.

"I've never been more serious about anything," he said. "And I think, Ms. Calloway, that you already know you're going to say yes."

He'd prepared this three weeks ago.

Which meant this wasn't a reaction to my desperation.

It was a plan.

The only question that mattered now, the one that made the floor feel unsteady beneath me, was what, exactly, Adrian Knight had been planning for.