Married to the wrong billionaire

CHAPTER FOUR

AVA

The car finally slowed outside a tower of black glass so tall I had to lean forward against my seatbelt to see the top of it.

Ethan hadn't said anything else since the photo. I hadn't either. We rode the rest of the way in a silence that felt less like peace and more like both of us waiting to see who would break first.

He didn't.

A doorman opened the car door before I could reach for the handle myself, greeting Ethan by name and me not at all, which told me everything about how long it would take the staff here to learn who I was. We crossed a marble lobby that echoed with our footsteps, into a private elevator that required Ethan to press his thumb against a small panel instead of a button.

"Biometric," he said, when he noticed me staring. "Only two people in the building have access to this floor."

"And now three, apparently."

Something almost like amusement crossed his face. He didn't confirm it out loud.

The doors opened directly into the penthouse, no hallway, no transition — just an entire floor of glass and pale stone unfolding in front of me like something out of a magazine I would never have been able to afford to appear in. Floor-to-ceiling windows lined every wall, the city spread out below in a haze of grey light, and every surface I could see was some shade of black or white or the kind of grey that costs more than color.

It didn't feel like a home. It felt like a very expensive, very quiet warning.

"It's a lot," I said, because someone had to say something.

"You'll get used to it."

I doubted that, but I didn't say so.

He walked me through it without slowing down enough for it to feel like a tour — the kitchen, all steel and stone, spotless in a way that told me no one actually cooked in it; a living room with a couch so pale I was afraid to look at it wrong; a hallway lined with closed doors that all looked exactly the same.

At the end of the hallway, he stopped and opened one of them.

"This is yours," he said.

The room was large enough to fit my entire childhood apartment inside it twice. A bed, a wall of windows, a bathroom through a door I hadn't been shown yet.

"And yours?" I asked.

"Other end of the floor."

"So we're not—"

"No," he said, before I could finish the sentence I hadn't wanted to finish out loud anyway. "Separate bedrooms. That's rule one."

"There are rules."

"There are rules." He said it like it should have been obvious. Maybe it should have been. "Separate bedrooms. No personal questions unless they're relevant to what we need each other to know. Affection in public only, and only when it's required."

"Required by who?"

"By the cameras. By the board. By anyone whose opinion currently affects Van Doren stock or your family's mortgage."

I crossed my arms. "That's a long list of people I apparently answer to now."

"Welcome to marrying into money," he said, and I couldn't tell if it was meant as a joke, because nothing in his face changed when he said it.

He held out a black card between two fingers. "For anything you need. Clothes, incidentals, whatever this requires of you going forward."

I looked at it and didn't take it.

"I don't need your money."

"You'll need something to wear tomorrow that isn't a wedding dress."

"I have money of my own."

"Not enough to keep up appearances at the level this marriage requires, and we both know it." He said it flatly, without cruelty, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd meant to be unkind. "Take the card, Ava. It isn't charity. It's a uniform."

I took it, because he was right and I hated that he was right, and I set it down on the nearest surface like it might do something to me if I held onto it too long.

"There's a car service on call," he added, still walking, not looking back. "You don't take public transportation anymore. Not for your own sake — for the story's sake. If a photographer catches Mrs. Van Doren waiting for a bus, it undoes everything we accomplished this afternoon."

"I've taken the bus my whole life."

"Not anymore."

"You say that like it's a small thing."

He stopped, finally, and turned to look at me properly for the first time since we'd stepped off the elevator. "None of this is small. That's the point. Every piece of it is being watched, which means every piece of it matters, which means the sooner you stop treating it like an inconvenience, the easier this is going to be for both of us."

I didn't have an answer for that, mostly because some part of me suspected he was right, and I resented him for it more than I would have resented him for being wrong.

He set a keycard down next to it — plain, black, unmarked except for a small chip embedded in the corner.

"Building access. Elevator won't recognize you without it."

I picked it up. It was lighter than I expected, and colder, in the specific way that everything in this apartment seemed to run a few degrees below room temperature.

"Is that everything?" I asked. "The rules."

"That's everything," he said, and turned to leave, already reaching for his phone, already halfway back into whatever version of himself lived behind a desk instead of in a room like this one.

I stood there for a long time after the sound of his footsteps disappeared down the hall, looking at the windows, at the city spread out below like something behind glass in a museum — visible, untouchable, not mine. I tried to find something in the room that looked like it belonged to a person instead of a hotel brochure, and found nothing. Not a photograph. Not a book left open on a nightstand. Nothing that suggested anyone had ever actually lived here, least of all him.

I thought about calling Chloe. I thought about calling my mother, telling her I was fine, that the room was beautiful, that everything was going to be okay now that the wedding was behind us — all the things she needed to hear so she could stop worrying about me for one night.

I didn't call anyone. I sat on the edge of a bed that smelled like nothing at all, in a room built for someone who didn't exist yet, and I let myself feel, for exactly one minute, exactly how alone I was.

Then I got up, unpinned my hair enough to breathe, and went looking for a bathroom I hadn't been shown.

It wasn't until much later, lying in that too-large bed, staring at a ceiling I didn't recognize, that I realized what he hadn't said.

He'd told me the rules about touching. About questions. About money and appearances and everything the outside world was allowed to see.

He hadn't said a single word about what happened when no one was watching at all.