The Devil's Bargain

Chapter Five: The Cousin

Preston Voss arrived at the office unannounced on a Wednesday, which Alexander's assistant, a perpetually harried woman named Yuki, later described to Maren as "the corporate equivalent of a home invasion."

Maren was in the middle of reviewing seating charts for the shareholders' dinner — a task she'd been folded into somewhere around week four, half real assistant, half fiancée, the lines between the two blurring more every day — when the door to Alexander's office banged open without a knock.

"Well." Preston Voss looked like Alexander's face had been run through a machine designed to remove everything decent from it — same dark hair, same sharp bones, but where Alexander's eyes held weather, Preston's just held calculation. "The famous fiancée. Grandmother won't shut up about you."

"Preston." Alexander didn't look up from his monitor, which Maren had learned by now meant he was furious and controlling it with effort. "You don't have a meeting on my calendar."

"I don't need one. Family doesn't need appointments." Preston dropped into the chair across from the desk, uninvited, and turned his attention fully on Maren with the unhurried thoroughness of a man appraising livestock. "So. Poughkeepsie. Tell me — was it love at first sight, or did my dear cousin's accountants run the numbers on you first? I hear he does that. Background checks before breakfast."

"Get out of my office," Alexander said, quiet and final, the temperature of the room dropping ten degrees.

"Or what? You'll have security walk out the last blood relative you've got, right in front of the woman you're paying to sit at your dinner table?" Preston smiled, and it was uglier for how much it looked like Alexander's real one. "That's an interesting headline. I wonder if it writes itself, or if I'd need to help."

Maren felt something cold slide down her spine. "What is he talking about?"

"Nothing," Alexander said, too fast.

"Oh, he hasn't told you." Preston's grin widened, delighted, cruel. "Sweetheart, my cousin doesn't fall for administrative assistants from bankrupt hotels by accident. Every single relationship he's had in the last decade started with a folder on his desk before it started with a dinner date. Financials, medical records, family history — did he tell you he knows about your mother's hospital bills? Down to the cent?"

The room tilted, very slightly, under Maren's feet.

"That's not — " Alexander stood, and for the first time since she'd known him, he looked less like a man in control of a room and more like a man watching a building he'd built start to crack. "Maren, let me explain."

"Explain what, exactly." Her voice came out steadier than she felt, which was its own small, cold miracle. "That you knew everything about me before I ever sat down in that chair? That the whole speech about being the only honest person who walked through your door wasn't a coincidence — it was a background check?"

"I needed to know I could trust the person I was about to hand two million dollars and my family's reputation to," Alexander said, and there was real desperation cracking through the careful control now. "That's not the same as manufacturing what happened between us. I didn't script the elevator. I didn't script any of it."

"Didn't you, though," Preston said pleasantly, clearly enjoying himself more than a man had any right to. "Grandmother's estate lawyer tells me the arrangement was drawn up before you ever met Ms. Cole here. A generic template with a blank where her name eventually got typed in. Practically romantic, when you think about it."

"Get. Out." Alexander's voice had dropped to something Maren had never heard from him — low, lethal, the voice of a man who ran nine thousand employees and had just remembered he could have this one thrown out a window if he wanted. "Now, Preston, before I forget we're related."

Preston rose, unhurried, buttoning his jacket with the satisfaction of a man who'd gotten exactly what he came for. At the door, he paused.

"For what it's worth, Ms. Cole," he said, "I'd take the two million and run before he decides the arrangement's outlived its usefulness. He always does, eventually. Ask Delphine." The door clicked shut behind him with a softness that was somehow worse than a slam.

Silence dropped over the office like a held breath.

"Maren." Alexander came around the desk, reaching for her, and she stepped back before she could stop herself, watching something in his face fracture at the small, involuntary distance. "The background check was standard. It's what I do with every major contract, it has nothing to do with what's happened since—"

"You knew about my mother." Maren's voice cracked, finally, on the one thing that mattered more than the contract, more than the ring, more than the elevator and everything after it. "You knew, and you never said anything, and I've been sitting across from your grandmother lying about how we met while you were sitting on a file about the worst year of my life."

"I was trying to protect you from exactly this conversation," Alexander said. "I knew if it came out wrong, it would look like"

"Like you picked me because I was drowning enough to say yes to anything," Maren finished, and watched the truth of it land on his face, undeniable, unanswerable. "Was I ever anything else to you? Or was I always just the file with the right kind of debt in it?"

"You know that's not true."

"Do I?" She was already reaching for her coat, her hands steadier than her voice, some old, familiar instinct for self-preservation kicking in exactly the way it had every time in her life something good had turned out to have fine print she hadn't read closely enough. "Because from where I'm standing, Alexander, I don't actually know what's true anymore. I don't know which parts of the last month were you, and which parts were a very well-run acquisition."

"Maren—"

"I need air," she said, and left before he could find the sentence that might have stopped her, and didn't look back to see his face, though some small, treacherous part of her wanted to, all the way down forty floors and out into a city that had stopped, for the first time in a month, glittering like it was in on any kind of joke at all.