Married to a Scandal

~CHAPTER IX~

Selene's POV

For the first time in three weeks, Selene had a truly normal Tuesday. She planned to enjoy every quiet moment.

"Calloway signed the renewal," Mia announced, dropping into the chair across from Selene's desk with the satisfaction of someone delivering good news she'd personally fought to make true. "A full retainer. No reduction, no probationary clause, nothing at all. I told him you'd never let the recall reflect badly on his brand, and I believe my exact words were, whatever her husband does at one in the morning has absolutely nothing to do with whether she's the best in this city at her job."

"You said that."

"I said something very close to that. I may have used slightly more colourful language about your husband specifically." Mia flipped open her tablet, entirely unbothered. "He thanked me for my candour. I think he meant it as a compliment."

Selene let out a small, private breath of relief. For a moment, she felt sure she would make it: fifteen million dollars, still safe, still hers, still proof of what she had built Apex to show. Relief lingered at the edge of her anxiety, a fragile balance.

"I can try, but I make no promises." Mia scrolled through her tablet. "Although, speaking purely professionally, I'm a little worried, and I think you should be too."

Selene didn't look up from the report in front of her, though she was no longer reading it. "About the hotel story."

"About the fact that it happened at all, eleven days into a marriage everyone's already watching, and about what happens the next time it does." Mia set the tablet down. "Because there will be a next time. You know his history better than I do. This year alone, the Bugatti, the senator's daughter and every other woman he’s been seen with, the nightclub roof incident, whatever that actually was. That's not a man who occasionally makes headlines. That's a man whose entire brand, before you married him, was being a PR nightmare. Professionally speaking, that's the scariest client profile there is."

"He's not a client."

"He's attached to your name now, which makes him functionally worse than a client, because you can't fire a husband the way you can fire an account." Mia leaned back, arms crossed. "Calloway nearly walked over one incident. One. If it happens again, and given his track record, it will, I don't know how many other clients will stay quiet about their concerns next time. Word travels fast in this industry. Kang Selene is brilliant, but her husband might cost you your brand is not a sentence I want going around."

Selene set her pen down, turning over Mia’s words with more care than she wanted to admit. It was a reasonable, entirely professional worry. She would have raised the same concern herself, about any client with a track record like his.

"I'm aware of the risk," she said. "I married into it with my eyes open."

"Did you, though?" Mia tilted her head. "Because from where I'm sitting, you married into it because your father signed a contract without asking you, and now you're the one left managing the fallout every time your husband decides a hotel looks interesting at midnight." She softened slightly, some of the teasing edge dropping out of her voice. "Honestly, sometimes I wonder if your father knew exactly what he was doing. A scandal-prone son-in-law is a convenient thing to have around, if you're the kind of man who benefits from your daughter looking a little less untouchable than she used to.”

"That's a theory."

"It's a theory. I'll admit it's probably wrong. Occam's razor says he's simply an extremely well-timed i***t, and your father got lucky." Mia shrugged, already reaching for her tablet again, the moment passing the way these moments usually did between them —raised, considered, set back down. "I just don't want you blindsided the next time it happens. That's all."

Selene said nothing for a moment, though something in the observation snagged and refused to let go the way she wanted it to. Not the father theory; she had long since stopped being surprised by what her father might benefit from at her expense. It was the other part. An extremely well-timed i***t.

She had used almost the same phrase herself once, in a conference room, watching a man negotiate every term of their marriage contract with an ease that hadn't matched the folder her father's assistant had assembled on him.

"Noted," Selene said finally. "I'll keep an eye on it."

"Good." Mia stood, tucking her tablet under her arm, already halfway back toward the door. "For what it's worth, I don't actually think you need my advice on crisis management. I just worry about you, on the personal side of things. The professional side, you've always got handled."

"I appreciate that."

"You're welcome. Now go back to pretending you're not thinking about him." Mia left with a small, knowing smile, and Selene did not, in fact, go back to pretending anything at all.

She sat for a long time after Mia had gone, the report still open and still unread in front of her, forcing herself to sift through what she truly knew of her husband's history, not the tabloid contortions, but the real facts.

Three major incidents before the wedding, each spaced with unsettling precision over the course of a year. One after. Different women, different venues, always a different flavour of manufactured chaos. But as she traced the pattern, it became impossible to ignore the deliberate rhythm in the timing. It wasn’t the details that mattered. It was the way each event landed, almost as if someone had set a beat only she could hear. The realisation sharpened: these incidents weren’t random. They were signals, and she was finally starting to understand what he meant by them.

She opened a blank document instead of the report, and began, almost without deciding to, typing a date.