"You Rejected Me, Now Beg"

The Files

I don't wait for Damian to confront his uncle. I decide before I even finish my coffee that I'm not going to sit around hoping the men in this family choose honesty on their own timeline.

I've spent my life watching my father's business from the edges, close enough to learn things nobody thought a daughter needed to know. Contracts. Shell accounts. The particular language men use when they're hiding a debt inside a favor. If Lucian built this marriage on a lie, there will be paperwork somewhere proving it, because men like him never trust a lie enough to leave it unwritten.

The estate's private study is technically off limits to me, some rule about family business staying with family, except I'm apparently family now whether anyone likes it or not.

I wait until the house empties out for the morning, until Damian leaves for his meeting and Raya disappears wherever she disappears to, and then I let myself into the study like I have every right to be there. Which, legally, as of last night, I do.

The desk is locked. The filing cabinet isn't.

It takes me twenty minutes of careful, patient searching before I find what I'm looking for, a folder labeled with nothing more suspicious than a date, tucked behind years of unrelated correspondence like someone wanted it close but not obvious.

Inside is a debt agreement between the Marchetti and Cross families, exactly as I was told existed. Except the numbers don't match what I grew up hearing my father owe. They're smaller. Much smaller. Small enough that a simple loan repayment, not a marriage, would have settled it years ago.

Underneath that agreement is a second document, and this one isn't about my family at all.

It's a ledger, older, water stained at the corners, listing payments made to a name I don't recognize immediately, not until I read further and realize it belongs to a man connected to the kind of business the Cross family works very hard to keep separate from Cross Holdings' public face. The kind of business that doesn't forgive debts. The kind that collects in other ways when money runs out.

The dates on that ledger stop abruptly two years before my wedding was arranged.

I sit with that for a long moment, feeling something cold settle into my chest.

Lucian didn't need my family's debt settled. He needed a different debt buried, one owed to people far more dangerous than my father, and a fated mate marriage between two heirs from powerful families was the perfect distraction. A wedding everyone would talk about for the right reasons instead of asking questions about the wrong ones.

I hear footsteps in the hallway outside and shove the folder back into place, heart hammering, barely closing the cabinet before the study door opens.

It's not Damian.

It's Lucian.

He stops in the doorway, taking in the room, taking in me standing near his filing cabinet with an expression I'm certain isn't as composed as I want it to be.

"Selene." His voice is warm, easy, the same voice I heard smoothing over the wedding reception like nothing happened. "I didn't realize you were an early riser."

"I couldn't sleep." I keep my tone light, testing whether he actually saw anything or is simply making conversation. "This house is very quiet in the mornings."

"It is." He studies me a moment longer than is comfortable. "You should be careful in here. Business documents, contracts, all very boring, I promise. Nothing a new bride needs to concern herself with."

"Of course." I move toward the door, unhurried, refusing to let him see anything resembling guilt. "I was actually looking for Damian. We had a conversation this morning that I'd like to finish."

Something flickers behind Lucian's eyes at that, quick and calculating, gone before I can name it properly.

"He's occupied for most of the day," he says smoothly. "Perhaps this evening."

"Perhaps." I pause at the threshold, looking back at him with a small, deliberate smile. "You know, it's strange. I always assumed the debt between our families was about money. Something simple. Something that could be paid off and forgotten."

His expression doesn't change, but something behind it goes very still.

"Debts are rarely that simple," he says.

"No," I agree. "I'm learning that."

I leave before he can ask me anything else, walking through the hallway with my pulse loud in my ears, my mind already three steps ahead, already building the shape of what I'm going to do with what I just found.

Lucian Cross built a marriage to bury a debt he never wanted his nephew to know about.

He has no idea I just found the paper trail that proves it, and he has even less idea what I intend to do once I understand exactly who that ledger belongs to.

Whatever danger that name represents, I am no longer someone who runs from finding out.