TRAPPED WITH THE COLD BILLIONAIRE

The fluorescent lights hummed above me, throwing a hard, clinical light over the pile of unfinished reports on my desk. My fingers ached from hours of typing, but the spreadsheets stubbornly refused to add up the way my tired brain needed them to. Another overtime shift. Another night I’d go home too late, too tired, too empty. I was exhausted—exhausted from trying, from being the person everyone relied on, from carrying responsibilities that felt heavier every day. My phone buzzed against the blotter. The hospital again—my father’s doctor, probably. I didn’t need to answer to know what the call meant: either my father’s voice, hoarse and small, or the clipped, professional warning that he’d missed his dialysis for three days. I turned the phone face down and swallowed the lump in my throat. Crying here wouldn’t change anything. The bills still needed paying, and I didn’t have the money. I’d have to pick up extra shifts, stretch every naira until the week’s end. “Sophia Williams,” a crisp voice cut through the office hum, jerking me from my thoughts. I looked up and nearly jumped. Standing at the entrance to the open-plan floor was the man every corridor whispered about—Mr. Johnson. CEO. Johnson Group. The suit was tailored to every angle of his body; the white shirt was impossibly white; the silver cufflinks flashed like small threats when he moved. He took up the doorway the way a storm takes up the sky—silently, inevitably. “Y-yes, sir?” I managed, rising as if pulled by an invisible string. He studied me for a beat that stretched too long. “My office. Now.” Walking into his office felt like stepping into a different world. Black leather chairs; books with gilt edges; a desk that reflected the city lights like a calm, dangerous pond; a floor-to-ceiling window framing the skyline and all its indifferent glitter. He didn’t sit. He stood, hand in pocket, watching me with an intensity that made my pulse trip. “Sophia,” he said, slow. There was an unfamiliar softness in the sound of my name, and it tightened something inside me. “Yes, sir?” “I need a wife.” The words landed like a physical blow. For a second I thought I’d misheard. “Excuse me?” He reached for a slim black folder and slid it across the desk. A contract lay inside, neat and impersonally final. “Marry me. For one year. In exchange, I’ll pay off all your debts—including your father’s medical expenses.” My mouth went dry. “You… want me to marry you?” “You’re smart enough to read, I presume.” His voice was cool, almost bored. “This is not romance. It’s business. You will appear as my wife in public for twelve months. You will keep up appearances. I will take care of everything.” The sentence that followed tasted like contempt made audible. “And the best part? I don’t like you. You’re off my type.” Heat rose to my cheeks. The thought that he’d noticed, that he’d weaponized indifference—of all things—was worse than any compliment. Useful, he’d said. Useful. “That’s… insane,” I said, stepping back. “You can’t just—buy a marriage like it was a contract on a desk.” A small, humorless curve tugged at the corner of his mouth. “You think I’m joking?” No. His tone dissolved any remaining hope that this was a cruel joke. He was deadly serious. “Why me?” The question escaped in a whisper. “You could have anyone.” “Exactly.” He leaned on the edge of his desk as if the truth weighed nothing. “Anyone I don’t want. They’re all after my money, my name, my power. I don’t trust them. You”—his gaze cut across me, clinical, measuring—“you don’t worship me. You don’t flatter me. That makes you inconvenient—therefore useful.” Useful. The word lodged in my chest. I remembered too vividly the mornings I’d avoided his office door, the way coworkers dropped their voices to gossip when he passed, the petty worship that made my skin crawl. Useful. It was a different kind of humiliation. “I can’t,” I said, though inside my head my father’s face hovered—thin, pale, the way the hospital light turned his skin translucent. He’d worked his hands raw to send me to school; he’d smiled with cracked teeth while I bit back the shame of our barely-past poverty. He had been my world when the rest of the world had an indifferent tilt to it. He had given up so much for me. “You walk away, and your father’s bills bury you before the month ends,” he said, calm as ever. “You sign, and he gets the treatment he needs. The choice is yours.” I wanted to hurl the contract at him. I wanted to tell him where to place his money and his terms. I wanted to scream about dignity and desperation until I had no breath left. Instead, I pictured my father coughing in the night, the rationed medicines, the borrowed promises from men who had mouths full of sympathy and pockets full of excuses. “I won’t be part of this… this transaction,” I said. “Find someone else.” I reached for the door with trembling hands. Halfway there, his voice stopped me—low, relentless. “You’ll come back, Sophia. When desperation wins.” I paused with my hand on the handle. The corridor hummed beyond, indifferent and fluorescent. I wanted to run from the room, from the decision already bruising my chest. I wanted to pretend this moment would dissolve into nothing. But the folder on his desk looked like a bridge and a trap all at once—paper and ink that could buy life or cost me something I hadn’t yet named. Outside, the city flashed on—the same city that had taught me how to survive on the margins. Inside, a man I barely knew had just offered me a life I never imagined needing to consider. I closed the door behind me, but not before I heard him, quiet as a verdict: “We don’t beg here.”