Forced Into His Arms

CHAPTER 3 — Terms and Conditions

The lawyers talked for forty minutes.

Valentina listened. She was good at listening — it was one of the skills you developed when you were poor and the world was full of people who only wanted to hear themselves. You learned to take everything in, sort it quickly, and find the part that mattered.

What mattered, as far as she could determine, was this:

One: She was unambiguously the heir to the Reyes-Dominguez fortune. The documentation was overwhelming. The blood tests that Paredes had arranged three weeks ago had confirmed her lineage. There was no dispute about who she was.

Two: The contractual marriage clause was binding, ancient, and apparently the work of legal craftsmen who had specifically anticipated people trying to get out of it. Every avenue her own hastily acquired legal advisor — a sharp-tongued woman named Abogada Fuentes-Mora, no relation to the other Fuentes, as it would turn out — had explored led to the same wall.

Three: The marriage had to last a minimum of twelve months to satisfy the inheritance requirement. Twelve months to the day from the date of the official ceremony. After which, the inheritance transferred fully and irrevocably to Valentina, and both parties were free to pursue legal dissolution.

Four: The marriage had to be legitimate. There was a cohabitation requirement — they had to share a primary residence. There were public appearance requirements. The contract was, she was beginning to understand, very specifically engineered against people who might try to fulfill the letter of it while destroying the spirit.

Old Ernesto Reyes-Dominguez, she thought, you were a paranoid man.

Through all of this, Alejandro Montoya Vega sat at the head of the table with the perfect stillness of a man who had already processed all of this and moved on to the next five problems. He didn't look at his phone. He didn't interrupt the lawyers. Occasionally he turned a pen end over end in his fingers — once, twice, three times — and then stopped, as if catching himself.

That was the only thing that told Valentina he was not entirely unaffected.

When the lawyers finally paused, he spoke.

"I have some conditions of my own to add to the arrangement," he said. He was looking at her now, directly, no softening. "Beyond what the contract requires."

"Of course you do," Valentina said.

The lawyer beside him made a small, suppressed sound. Alejandro's gaze didn't waver.

"One," he said, as if she hadn't spoken. "You will reside in my penthouse in Mexico City. The contract requires cohabitation, and I have no intention of maintaining two residences. I have had a suite of rooms prepared for you on the opposite wing."

"How generous," she said. "To house me in your own home. Like a very expensive guest."

"Two," he continued. "Your public behavior will reflect appropriately on the Montoya name. You will attend events when required, present yourself accordingly, and refrain from doing or saying anything that would attract negative attention."

Valentina thought of her stained apron. She thought of her borrowed blazer. She kept her face perfectly still.

"Three," he said, and here he paused for the first time, something flickering briefly across his expression. "This arrangement is contractual. Nothing more. I want that to be absolutely clear between us. There will be no... expectations. On either side. We will be polite. We will be, when necessary, convincing. And when the twelve months are over, we will part without drama."

The room was very quiet.

Valentina let the silence sit for a moment. She watched him watching her, waiting for her reaction — waiting, she suspected, for tears, or fury, or desperate negotiation.

She folded her hands on the table.

"Are you finished?" she said.

He blinked. Once. "Yes."

"Good. My turn." She sat forward. "One. The opposite wing is fine. I will need access to the main kitchen because I cook. If that's a problem, tell me now."

He said nothing.

"Two. I will attend your events and I will dress appropriately, because I am not an i***t and I understand what's at stake. But I will not be told what to say or how to say it. I represent myself, not Montoya Corp."

A muscle moved in his jaw.

"Three." She met his gaze steadily. "I agree that this is contractual. I also want it to be clear that I did not arrange this, I did not choose this, and I am not under any illusions about what it is. But I need you to understand something, Señor Montoya." She paused. "I have spent twenty-four years surviving difficult situations. I am very good at it. If you decide to make this twelve months unpleasant, I promise you I am significantly harder to break than you are expecting."

Across the table, something moved in his dark eyes that she couldn't quite read.

"And four," she said. "I want a clause in the agreement guaranteeing me access to legal counsel of my own choosing throughout the twelve-month period, with all associated fees covered by Montoya Corp."

Her own lawyer, Abogada Fuentes-Mora, pressed her lips together to suppress what was clearly a smile.

Alejandro Montoya Vega looked at Valentina Reyes for a long moment. The pen in his fingers had gone still.

"Agreed," he said. All four points. No negotiation.

She had not expected that.

She did not show it.

"Then I believe we have a deal," she said, and extended her hand across the table.

He looked at it for one breath. Two. Then he reached across the absurd length of the boardroom table, and his hand closed around hers — warm, firm, deliberate — and they shook on it like two people sealing a war rather than a marriage.

His grip was strong. Hers was stronger than he expected. She saw him register it.

Good.

The ceremony was set for three weeks later. Small, private, nothing more than was legally required: a civil registrar, the required witnesses, a signature on a document. Don Rodrigo insisted on a dinner afterward, which meant a restaurant that required a reservation six months in advance and a menu Valentina couldn't fully pronounce.

She spent the three weeks in Guadalajara, tying up what there was of her life to tie up. She gave notice at the restaurant. Doña Petra cried. Valentina held it together until she was outside, and then she sat on the curb on Calle Insurgentes and cried quietly for about seven minutes, and then she washed her face in the restaurant sink and went back to work the remainder of her shift.

She told the children at the community center that she was moving, that another tutor would come. A little girl named Sofía, seven years old, with the kind of serious face that belongs to children who have already understood that the world is unreliable, took Valentina's hand and said: "Will you be okay?"

Valentina had squeezed her hand and said yes. She was fairly sure it was true.

Camila helped her pack. There was not much: clothes, books, a box of Rosa's things that Paredes had retrieved from storage — journals, photographs, a small wooden jewelry box. Valentina went through Rosa's journals the night before she was supposed to leave, sitting on the floor of her apartment with a mug of tea that went cold, reading her grandmother's words from twenty years ago, thirty years ago, and slowly, slowly, piecing together the shape of a life that had been lived entirely around protecting her.

At two in the morning, she found a photograph she had never seen before.

Two men, young — perhaps in their early thirties — standing in front of a building, laughing at something off-camera. One she recognized: a younger version of the face she had seen in Paredes's files, unmistakably Ernesto Reyes-Dominguez, her grandfather.

The other man was laughing with his whole body, his head thrown back, his hand on Ernesto's shoulder in the easy way of very old friends.

On the back of the photograph, in Rosa's handwriting: Ernesto y Rodrigo, 1978.

Rodrigo Montoya.

Valentina sat with the photograph for a long time. Two old men, laughing. Two families, bound together before their grandchildren existed. Two lives that had somehow produced her, and produced him, and produced this contract and this impossible situation.

She wondered if they had known what they were doing.

She wondered if it had seemed, to them, like an act of care.

She went to bed at three. She did not sleep particularly well. In the morning, she packed the photograph in Rosa's box, and then she packed the box in the back of Camila's car, and then — at the age of twenty-four, with one suitcase and a box of inherited secrets — Valentina Reyes left the only life she had ever known and drove toward the one that was waiting for her.

The penthouse was on the eighty-fifth floor of a building in Polanco that had its own name, like a small country.

Alejandro Montoya had not been there when she arrived. The housekeeper, a warm-faced woman named Señora Dolores who immediately and without explanation offered Valentina a tamale, showed her to the opposite wing. The suite of rooms was larger than Valentina's entire apartment in Guadalajara, with windows from floor to ceiling and a view of the city that made her breath catch despite herself.

She stood at the window for a long time.

Below, the city pulsed with its millions of lives — all of them, she imagined, slightly less complicated than hers at this particular moment.

"It's too much, isn't it?" said a voice from the doorway.

She turned. The woman in the doorway was perhaps twenty-seven, dark-haired, wearing scrubs under a leather jacket, with Alejandro's cheekbones and an entirely different energy — open, warm, the kind of person who smiles first and thinks about whether it was a good idea second.

"I'm Luciana," she said. "His sister. Please don't hold it against me — I have very little in common with him, personality-wise. I've been trying to meet you for weeks but my brother is extremely good at preventing things he's uncomfortable with." She came in without being invited, in the way of people who know they are welcome before they're told. "Are you all right?"

Valentina looked at her for a moment. Then she said: "I had a good cry on a curb three weeks ago. I'm planning to be fine from here."

Luciana smiled — a real one, all the way to her eyes. "Oh," she said, "I think I'm going to like you enormously."

Valentina almost smiled back. Almost.

And from somewhere else in the penthouse, she heard the distant sound of a door closing — Alejandro returning, she would learn his sounds over the coming weeks, the specific weight of his footstep, the precise silence he produced when he was thinking — and she straightened, and reset her expression, and reminded herself that this was not a home.

It was a contract.

Twelve months. She could survive twelve months.

Couldn't she?