Married to a Scandal

~CHAPTER VII~

Selene's POV

Selene had been married for eleven days when her husband made the front page.

MIA: have you seen it

MIA: ok you've seen it. call me.

She had seen it. Everyone had seen it. A photograph of Luca leaving a downtown hotel at one in the morning with a woman who was, according to the caption, "an unnamed companion," though it had taken the internet roughly forty minutes to identify her as the daughter of a hedge fund manager with whom Luca had no obvious business relationship.

The photo itself was almost artful in its damage: his tie loose, his collar undone, his expression the specific, practised carelessness of a man who'd been photographed exactly this way a hundred times before and had simply stopped bothering to look ashamed about it.

Eleven days. They had been married for eleven days.

Selene called Mia back from the back seat of the car, already pulling up three separate drafts of a statement she had no intention of using yet. "Tell me it's not as bad as the headline."

"It's exactly as bad as the headline, and it's already been picked up by four outlets. Also—" Mia's voice dropped into the register she used exclusively for the news Selene wasn't going to enjoy. "Calloway called. Twice."

Selene closed her eyes briefly. Calloway Consumer Group was Apex's largest retainer, a fifteen-million-dollar account she'd spent two years cultivating, currently in the middle of the most sensitive product recall of the decade. The kind of client who needed to believe, absolutely, that the woman managing their crisis had no crises of her own.

"What did he say?"

"He said, and I'm paraphrasing only slightly, that he's not sure he wants the face of his company's recovery to be married to page-six's favourite disaster."

"He signed the contract before the wedding."

"He signed the contract before your husband made international headlines for what may or may not have been a one-night stand eleven days into your marriage. People renegotiate."

Selene said nothing for a moment, watching Manhattan blur past the window, running the numbers the way she always did when the actual feeling underneath them was too inconvenient to examine directly.

Fifteen million dollars. Six years of building a reputation that meant something specific: Kang Selene fixes problems. Kang Selene does not have problems. And now, eleven days into a marriage she hadn't wanted, she had become, very publicly, exactly the kind of problem she'd spent her entire career making disappear for other people.

"I'll call him myself," she said. "He should know that my professional record speaks for itself and my marriage isn't part of the retainer."

"You sure that's the play?"

"It's the only one I have right now." She hung up before Mia could hear whatever was underneath her voice.

By the time she reached the penthouse, she looked considerably calmer than she felt.

Luca was in the study, tie already gone, looking like a man entirely unbothered by the fact that he was trending. He glanced up when she entered, and something in his expression made the anger that she had been carefully managing since the car ride slip faster than she wanted it to.

"I assume you've seen it," he said.

"I assume you don't care that you've cost me a fifteen-million-dollar client."

That landed somewhere. His easy expression shifted, briefly, into something more careful. "That wasn't the intention."

"I don't imagine humiliating your wife eleven days into a marriage was ever the intention. I imagine it was simply an acceptable cost of doing whatever you actually do at one in the morning in hotels." She heard her own voice rising and hated it, hated that he'd gotten this far under her composure this quickly, hated more that some old, familiar part of her recognised the shape of this exact feeling which was being an inconvenience to someone else's plans, again, still, always. "Calloway is questioning the entire retainer. Do you understand what that firm represents to me?"

"I understand it's important to you."

"It's not important. It's everything. It's six years of proof that I don't need anyone's name to survive in this city." She stopped herself before the sentence finished the thought it was reaching for—least of all yours—because some version of that argument belonged to her father, not to him, and she refused to let the two men blur together in the same breath.

Luca was quiet for a moment, studying her with an expression she couldn't immediately place, not defensive, as she had expected, but something closer to genuine attention, as if he were actually listening rather than waiting for his turn to deflect.

"I'll call Calloway myself," he said finally. "Tell him whatever version of events makes this easiest for you."

"That's not the point. I don’t need you calling my clients for me."

"Then tell me what the point is, because apparently I’m missing it."

She didn't have an immediate answer, which irritated her more than the headline had. She pulled her tablet from her bag instead, opening the timeline she'd already started building on the drive home out of pure professional habit: every outlet that had run the story, every angle the photo had been taken from, the precise minute the first post had gone live.

Something in the numbers caught her attention.

The photo had been taken at 1:14 a.m. The story had gone live at 1:19. Five minutes. It was not impossible, if a photographer had been tipped off in advance and had a draft already written, but the writeup itself contained the specific hotel room number that no outlet should have had access to that quickly unless someone inside had handed it to them before Luca had even left the building.

She looked up. Luca was watching her, and for exactly one second, something in his face went very still.

"Is everything alright?" he asked.

"I’m fine," she said, and didn't tell him what she'd found.

She wasn't entirely sure yet what it meant. But she had built an entire career on the specific, uncomfortable talent for noticing when something didn't add up, and every instinct she had told her that tonight's disaster hadn't happened by accident. Someone wanted it to happen.