Married to the wrong billionaire

CHAPTER SIX

AVA

He had looked at someone he recognized. That thought followed me through the rest of the morning like something I couldn't put down, no matter how many times I told myself it didn't matter what Arthur Van Doren thought he saw in me.

I was still turning it over when Marcus found me an hour later, holding a printed schedule like it was a legal document.

"Mrs. Van Doren." He said it carefully, the way you'd address something you weren't sure how to categorize yet. "Mr. Van Doren asked me to give you this. Your calendar for the week."

I took it. Photo shoot, Thursday, ten a.m. Charity gala, Friday, black tie. A sit-down interview, Saturday, pre-approved questions only. Every hour of my week had already been decided by someone who hadn't thought to ask if any of it worked for me.

"He built my entire schedule without asking me."

"He builds everyone's schedule. It's efficient."

"I'm not one of his board members, Marcus."

Something flickered across his face — not quite amusement, not quite warning. "No," he agreed. "You're not."

I found Ethan in his office, door open, phone against his ear, finishing a sentence about quarterly projections before he noticed me standing there. He held up one finger, the universal signal for wait, and I felt something in me go rigid at being told to wait in my own home for a conversation I hadn't asked to have in the first place.

He hung up. "Ava."

"You scheduled my entire week."

"I scheduled the events that require your presence. That's different."

"It's not different if I wasn't asked."

He leaned back in his chair, unbothered in a way that made me want to throw the schedule at him. "You agreed to this marriage knowing it came with obligations."

"I agreed to obligations. I didn't agree to have every hour of my life decided for me by a man I met yesterday."

"This is how it works, Ava. There isn't time to consult you on every—"

"Make time."

The words came out sharper than I meant them, and for one second something shifted in his expression — not anger, something closer to surprise, like he genuinely hadn't expected the words to leave my mouth at all.

"You don't get to just move me around like a piece on your board," I said. "I have a life. I have a family business I'm trying to save, which is the entire reason I'm standing in this apartment in the first place. If you need my presence somewhere, ask me. Don't hand me a printout through your head of security like I'm a line item you forgot to sign off on."

He didn't answer right away. I watched something work behind his eyes — recalibration, maybe, the look of a man encountering a variable his spreadsheet hadn't accounted for.

"Fine," he said finally. "I'll ask."

"Thank you."

"But you say yes to the events that matter."

"I'll say yes to the events you actually explain to me. Not before."

"That's not how business works, Ava."

"Then it's a good thing I'm not a business," I said. "I'm your wife. Even if it's the fake kind."

Something in his jaw shifted at that word — fake — like I'd handed him a fact he already knew and disliked hearing said out loud.

"You know what I mean," he said.

"I know exactly what you mean. I'm asking you to remember it too." I held up the printed schedule. "This isn't a marriage. It's a calendar with my name on it. If that's all this is going to be, at least have the decency to ask before you fill it in."

He studied me for a long moment, the same unreadable weighing look his father had given me that morning, except where Arthur's had made my skin go cold, Ethan's made something else entirely happen in my chest, something I didn't have a name for and didn't want to look at too closely.

"Understood," he said.

I left before either of us could say anything else, because I didn't trust what would come out of my mouth if I stayed in that room a second longer — and because some small, humiliating part of me had enjoyed watching him recalibrate, had enjoyed being the variable he hadn't planned for.

I was halfway down the hall toward my room when I heard his voice again, lower now, meant for someone else. Marcus, judging by the second voice answering him. I should have kept walking. I told myself that later, several times, and never quite believed it.

Instead I stopped just outside the doorway, out of sight, close enough to hear.

"—handled it better than I expected," Marcus was saying.

"She's not what I expected," Ethan said. Quiet. Not performed. Not the voice he used at galas or in front of cameras or even the voice he'd used with me five minutes ago. Just a man saying something true to the one person he trusted enough to say it to.

"What did you expect?"

A pause. Long enough that I held my breath without meaning to.

"I don't know," Ethan said. "Someone easier to manage."

I didn't wait to hear the rest. I walked back to my room on legs that felt less steady than they had a moment ago, and I sat on the edge of the bed, and I told myself it didn't matter what he'd said, that it changed nothing about who he was or what this marriage actually was.

I didn't believe that either.

Someone easier to manage. I turned the phrase over in my head until it lost the shape of an insult and started to sound like something closer to an admission — that I had surprised him, that some part of the plan he'd built so carefully at the altar hadn't accounted for a woman who'd say no to a printed schedule, who'd push back instead of simply falling into line the way everyone else in his life seemed to.

I didn't know what to do with that. I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

I sat there until the light outside my window shifted from afternoon into something dimmer, and somewhere down the hall, I could hear him still on the phone, still running an empire that had no room in it for anything as inconvenient as feeling something for the woman he'd married by accident.