Married to the wrong billionaire

CHAPTER EIGHT

AVA

Twice now you've defended me like you meant it. I never got an answer to that, and by the next morning I'd almost convinced myself I didn't want one.

I found Ethan in the living room instead of his office, which was unusual enough that I noticed it before I noticed Marcus standing across from him, a tablet in one hand and an expression I couldn't quite place.

"—confirmed. No demand has come through any channel. Nothing to the company, nothing to the family accounts, nothing to Lucas's known contacts."

"No ransom," Ethan said, more to himself than to Marcus.

"None."

I stopped in the doorway, uninvited but unwilling to pretend I hadn't heard. "You're talking about Lucas."

Neither of them answered right away, which told me everything about how long they'd both been avoiding this exact conversation happening in front of me.

"There's no update worth sharing," Ethan said.

"You just said there's no ransom demand. That's an update."

Marcus's eyes flicked to Ethan, some silent question passing between them that I wasn't included in. Ethan's jaw tightened.

"It means someone took him without wanting anything for it," Ethan said. "Which raises more questions than it answers."

"Or it means no one took him at all," I said.

The room went very still.

"What are you implying?" Ethan asked.

"I'm not implying anything. I'm asking a question a kidnapper usually wants something. Money, leverage, a story to tell later. If there's genuinely nothing — no note, no demand, no contact of any kind — that's not what a k********g typically looks like. That's what someone leaving on purpose looks like."

I'd spent years reading crisis situations for a living, and something about the shape of this one had felt wrong since the moment Marcus said the word confirmed. I watched Marcus's expression shift, almost imperceptibly, into something that looked less like disagreement and more like a man being told something he'd already privately suspected and hadn't wanted to say out loud first.

"That's not what happened," Ethan said, too quickly.

"How do you know?"

"Because I know my brother."

"Do you?" I asked, and I watched something flicker behind his eyes that told me the question had landed somewhere he didn't want it to.

"This isn't your concern, Ava."

"He's my husband's brother. He was supposed to be my husband. I'd say that makes it exactly my concern."

"It makes you a bystander to a family matter," Ethan said, and his voice had gone flat and final in a way I hadn't heard from him before — not cold in the performative way he used at galas, but cold like a door closing. "Marcus is handling the investigation. You don't need to be involved in it."

"I could help. This is what I do. I read situations for a living, Ethan, I—"

"I said this isn't your concern." He turned fully toward me now, and for the first time since the wedding I saw something in his face that looked less like control and more like the fear underneath it, though I didn't understand that yet, not really, not for a long time after this conversation. "I need you to trust that I'm handling it."

"You could let me help you handle it."

"I don't need help."

"Everyone needs help sometimes, Ethan. Even you." I said it quietly, not as an accusation, more like something I genuinely believed and wanted him to hear. "You don't have to carry all of this alone just because you're used to it."

Something crossed his face — too fast to name, gone before I could ask about it. Whatever it was, he pushed it down and buried it under the same composure he wore for everything else.

"I appreciate the sentiment," he said, in a voice that suggested he didn't, not really, or didn't know how to. "But this stays with Marcus and me."

The finality in his voice landed harder than I expected it to. I stood there for a second, feeling something small and stubborn in my chest curl up and refuse to back down, and then I made myself leave the room instead of pushing further, because some old, tired part of me recognized the shape of a fight I wasn't going to win that day.

Marcus caught my eye on my way out. He didn't say anything. But something in his expression — a kind of quiet apology, or maybe recognition of his own — told me he agreed with me more than he was allowed to say in front of Ethan.

I didn't go far. I stopped just past the doorway, in the same spot I'd stood two days earlier when I'd overheard something I wasn't supposed to hear, and some reckless part of me decided that if Ethan wanted to keep me out of this, he could at least do it where I couldn't overhear the rest.

"—the trail's too clean, Marcus," Ethan was saying, quieter now. "A man who's been taken leaves traces. Struggle. Panic. Something. This is nothing. It's like he simply stopped existing the day of the wedding."

"I know," Marcus said.

"Then why does it feel like you're not telling me something?"

A long pause.

"Because I'm not sure yet," Marcus said. "And I'd rather be sure before I say it out loud."

I stood there in the hallway a moment longer, my hand pressed flat against the cool wall, turning over everything I'd just heard. No ransom. No contact. A trail too clean to belong to a man who'd been taken against his will.

Somewhere in that stillness, a small, unwelcome thought took root and refused to leave: what if no one had taken Lucas at all?

What if he'd simply walked away?

I thought about the man I was supposed to marry — the one I'd never met in person, only through a handful of stiff, polite phone calls arranged by our families like a merger between two struggling companies. I'd built an entire version of him in my head over the months of planning: charming, if the photographs were any indication, a little too aware of his own smile. I'd told myself he was probably just as trapped by this arrangement as I was.

Now I wasn't so sure trapped was the right word for a man whose disappearance left no trace of struggle at all.

I went back to my room and sat by the window, watching the city do whatever it did below, and I understood, for the first time since I'd walked into that dressing room two days ago, that this marriage was not going to be the simple, contained transaction Ethan kept insisting it was. There was something underneath all of it — Lucas, Arthur's unreadable stare, the too-clean silence where a ransom demand should have been — and none of it added up to the story I'd been told.

I didn't know yet how deep it went. I only knew that Ethan was determined to keep me from finding out.