It used to be so simple before the accident, before the coma, before I woke up in a world where my father was dead, my stepmother was circling like a vulture, and the only way to keep everything he’d built from being gutted was to agree to a marriage clause he’d written when he still thought I’d be whole.
Get married. Stay married five years. Continue the Stonewood bloodline. It had felt hypothetical at the time. Distant. Something Future Ben would handle.
Then I’d walked into Stonewood Hardware one winter evening and a girl with big brown eyes and a bossy mouth had told the cashiers to move their asses and get me a first aid kit, and suddenly, hypothetical didn’t cut it anymore.
Chrissy.
My chest throbbed in a way that had nothing to do with the stitches in my side.
“Look at me,” Henry said quietly.
I forced my gaze back to his face.
“You have options,” he said. “They’re not all good, but they exist.”
“Let me guess,” I drawled. “Number one: I roll over, do nothing, and let Vivian carve the estate up like a Christmas ham.”
“Correct.”
I lifted my hand in a mocking little ta-da.
“See? Still good with strategy.”
“Option two,” he said, ignoring me, “you marry one of the remaining contestants who wasn’t eliminated before two of your hired actors went rogue and shot the Game to shit.”
My entire body recoiled at the suggestion.
“No.”
“Ben—”
“No.” The word came out rough and dangerous. “Pick another option.”
“You’re not in a position to be picky,” he said. “The contract doesn’t care how you feel about the woman involved. It cares that there is one. The other contestants signed NDAs. We could frame it as a windfall for whichever one you chose. Five years of convenience, separate lives as needed, payout at the end. Cold. Clean. Legal. No one would need to know it was anything other than a business arrangement.”
“Fuck. No.”
He exhaled hard through his nose.
“You can’t keep saying that as if it’s an argument.”
“It is an argument.”
“It’s a tantrum.”
I shot him a look.
“Careful.”
“Or what?” he said calmly. “You’ll fire me? Too late. I was your father’s head of security before I was yours. I promised him I’d keep you from doing anything irretrievably stupid, and right now you’re sprinting toward that cliff as fast as you can.”
My hands curled into fists.
“I am not marrying some random contestant as a — what did you call it? — ‘business arrangement’.”
“You picked them,” he reminded me. “Or at least signed off on them. You picked women who were, on paper, compatible enough to share your life.”
“I picked women the board liked the idea of… except for Chrissy,” I snapped. “Don’t romanticize my vetting process.”
