The Devil's Bargain

Chapter Three: The Ring

The ring arrived on a Tuesday, delivered by a security guard in an unmarked briefcase like it was evidence in a trial, which, Maren supposed, in a sense it was.

"I need you to pick one," Alexander said, setting the case on the kitchen island where she'd been eating cereal in his, their, she supposed now enormous, aggressively minimalist kitchen. "Preferably before Friday. We have the Whitfield Gala and my PR team wants photos of you wearing it beforehand so the story doesn't look rushed."

"The story is rushed."

"The story needs to look inevitable. There's a difference." He opened the case. Six rings sat nestled in black velvet, each one a small geological event. "Pick whichever one doesn't make you feel insane."

Maren looked at them the way she might look at a row of loaded weapons. "They all make me feel insane."

"That's the diamond industry working as intended." He nudged the case an inch closer. "For what it's worth, and I recognize this is a strange thing to have an opinion about, I think you'd hate the big one. The emerald cut, second from the left. Too showy for you. You'd spend every gala apologizing to people for how much it cost."

Maren looked up at him, surprised. He'd said it lightly, the way he said most things, but there was something underneath it, an actual observation, made about an actual person, not a role he'd hired her to play. In three weeks, he'd learned that about her. She hadn't told him. He'd just noticed.

"You've been paying attention," she said.

"It's a job requirement. Grandmother has spies everywhere; if I don't know you well enough to answer basic questions about your preferences, we're finished before we start." He said it briskly, business-first, but he didn't quite meet her eyes when he said it, and Maren filed that away in the same growing folder where she'd started keeping every small, contradictory thing about Alexander Voss, the man who ran nine thousand employees like a machine and apparently couldn't lie convincingly about why he'd noticed she took her coffee the same way his grandmother did.

She picked the third ring, a simple oval solitaire, old-fashioned, the kind of thing that looked like it had a history instead of a price tag — and slid it onto her finger before she could second-guess herself.

It fit. Of course it fit. She didn't ask how he'd known her size.

The Whitfield Gala was Maren's first real test, and she knew it the second the town car pulled up to the curb and a wall of flashbulbs went off like weather.

"Chin up, hand in mine, and whatever you do," Alexander murmured against her ear as they stepped out, his hand warm and steady at the small of her back, "don't look like you're bracing for impact. You look terrified, they'll smell it in the photos for years."

"I am terrified."

"I know. You're doing beautifully." His mouth brushed her temple, for the cameras, she told herself, just for the cameras, and something low in her stomach lit up anyway, traitorous and warm. "Smile like I just said something charming."

"You did just say something charming."

"Did I?" He looked down at her, and for one unguarded second, the practiced ease dropped away and there was something raw and startled underneath it, gone as fast as it came. "Careful, Ms. Cole. Keep that up and I'll start believing my own cover story."

They made it through the receiving line, through forty minutes of small talk with men whose net worth exceeded the GDP of small nations, through a photographer who asked them to kiss for the cameras and got a chaste, camera-ready press of lips that left Maren's pulse hammering far more than the occasion warranted, and then, in the lull between the cocktail hour and dinner, a woman in red silk detached herself from a cluster of socialites and glided toward them with the unmistakable gait of someone who'd been waiting all night for this exact moment.

"Alexander." The woman's smile was a blade with lipstick on it. "And this must be the fiancée. Delphine Marchetti." She extended a hand toward Maren, rings clicking. "I'm surprised. I'd heard you were dating someone from — what was it — Poughkeepsie?"

"I'm from Albany, actually," Maren said pleasantly, "but I did work in Poughkeepsie. Small hotel. It's not a crime, Delphine, it's a zip code."

Something flickered behind Delphine's eyes — irritation at being corrected so smoothly, in front of an audience that had gone very quiet and very interested. "Of course. How refreshing. Alexander usually prefers women who understand how this world works." Her gaze slid to him, proprietary, the gaze of someone with history she wanted witnessed. "Don't you, darling? Remember the Hamptons? You said you'd never settle down with someone who couldn't keep up."

"I remember the Hamptons," Alexander said evenly, and his hand tightened almost imperceptibly at Maren's waist. "I remember telling you the same thing, actually, right before you sold that story to a tabloid for eleven thousand dollars."

The temperature at their end of the ballroom dropped ten degrees. Delphine's smile didn't so much fall as freeze, brittle, mid-construction.

"That was never proven," she said.

"It was never denied, either," Alexander said, and turned, unhurried, back to Maren, dismissing Delphine with nothing more than the angle of his shoulders — a small, surgical cruelty that Maren suspected was the entire point. "Dance with me."

He didn't wait for an answer. His hand found hers, and then they were moving through the crowd toward the dance floor, leaving Delphine standing alone in her red silk with her rings and her ruined ambush, and Maren didn't look back to see her face, though she desperately wanted to.

"You didn't have to do that," Maren said, once they were moving, his hand warm at her waist, her palm against the solid heat of his chest.

"I wanted to." He turned her, easy, practiced, like dancing was just one more language he'd been fluent in his whole life. "She's spent three years trying to manufacture a moment exactly like that one. I've been waiting even longer to end it in front of witnesses."

"That's not the only reason." Maren tipped her head back to look at him, close enough now to see the individual flecks of grey pushing into the storm-color of his eyes. "You looked like you actually meant it. The part where you said I was doing beautifully."

His jaw worked. For a moment she thought he'd deflect, a joke, a rule, a reminder that none of this was real, the way he'd been doing since day one, like a man checking a smoke detector on a schedule.

"I did mean it," he said instead, quiet enough that it barely cleared the music. "That's the part that's starting to be a problem."

The song ended around them. Neither of them stepped back.

"Alexander"

"Don't," he said, but gently, his thumb tracing one slow, absent line along her spine that undid something in her chest she'd been very carefully keeping laced shut. "Not here. Not with three hundred cameras deciding what our whole marriage means before we've even figured it out ourselves."

"Do we get to figure it out?" Maren asked. "Or is that against the rules?"

Alexander looked at her for a long moment, the ballroom spinning gold and loud around them, Delphine's ruined ambush already becoming tomorrow's gossip column, the ring on Maren's finger catching the light like it had somewhere to be.

"I think," he said slowly, like a man renegotiating a contract with himself in real time, "I made those rules before I met you. I didn't account for you."

He didn't kiss her. Not there, not with the cameras. But his hand found hers again as they walked off the floor, fingers laced through hers instead of just resting at her waist, and Maren understood, with a lurch somewhere under her ribs, that whatever this arrangement had started as, it had just quietly, irreversibly, become something else.