CHAPTER ONE
AXEL SEVERIN READthrough the marriage contract again. He had only one question for the man who had been his employer and mentor: Why was the name of his prospective bride not spelled out on these pages?
He didn’t ask, though. He already knew the answer.
Otto Braun had no love for his daughter. She was “the biological issue of Otto Braun.” Otto took every opportunity to dismiss Mira. It was among the many reasons Axel had agreed to this arrangement—to compensate Mira for the glaring injustice of her father’s disregard.
Axel wasn’t a particularly compassionate man, but he did know right from wrong, and the way Otto treated Mira was wrong.
“Problem?” Otto asked gruffly from behind his marble-topped desk. He was a barrel-chested man well into his sixties. He wore his customary charcoal suit with a dark blue tie. His hair and beard were white and neatly trimmed. His eyes held the gleam that warned he was at his most cagey.
“Simply doing my due diligence,” Axel replied, even as he braced like a spider perceiving vibrations in the web.
The contract stated clearly that, on the date of their marriage, Otto would allow Axel to assume full control of the global engineering firm. That meant he would no longer be plagued with Otto’s last-minute interference. Then, after a full year of marriage, Otto would sign over his shares in Vorstoben to Axel and his wife.
It was exactly what Otto had promised Axel two years ago, when Axel had told him he was leaving to start his own firm.
Stay, Otto had urged.I’ll promote you to CEO. Marry my daughter, and I’ll gift the company to the two of you.
Axel had already been chafing under a decade of Otto’s dictates. He had caught Otto’s notice when he’d been a hardworking junior engineer of twenty-two and had been climbing the corporate ladder ever since. In the beginning, earning money had been Axel’s sole aspiration. Once he had his mother squared away, however, and built enough of an investment portfolio to ensure he would never fall back into the nothing he’d come from, he’d been ready to do bigger things. To be his own boss.
What if Mira doesn’t want to marry me?Axel had asked Otto.
I’ll never leave the company to her, was Otto’s dismissive reply.I wish I had a son. Marry my daughter, and I’ll have one.
The offer was too good to pass up. Sitting behind the CEO desk for the last two years, Axel’s ability to curb Otto’s worst impulses had resulted in steady expansion and record profits. He felt very proprietary toward Vorstoben these days. He ran it well and wanted it.
He glanced at Mira. She was a polished brunette in a dark skirt suit, hair in a stylish chignon, face drawn with strain. Axel had known her as long as he’d known Otto. He considered Mira a friend to the extent that either of them was capable of a close relationship. In reality, his predominant feeling toward her was pity. She had joined the firm after finishing her business degree three years ago. Since then, she had worked tirelessly to earn her father’s good opinion—while Otto took every opportunity to erode her confidence. He was cold and critical and dismissive for no reason that Axel could discern.
She was Otto’s only child. She ought to inherit the company and everything Otto possessed, especially when she had done her best to contribute to its success. Otto had deliberately held her back, though, refusing to promote her beyond a midlevel accounting position. She yearned to be taken seriously. To benoticed.
So, in an attempt to appease Otto and have a real chance at rising in the ranks here, Mira had agreed to Axel’s proposal.
Every time they had tried to set a date for the wedding, however, Otto had pushed them off. It had become enough of a frustration that Axel had issued an ultimatum last month. Otto had to make good on his promise or he was leaving.
Finally, the contract was in his hand. No more delays. Once they signed it, they could marry. Otto would retire and, in a year, Axel and Mira would jointly take possession of Otto’s shares, giving Axel the de facto ownership he’d been promised.
Mira’s jaw was set with hurt that her father hadn’t had the decency to put her name on the document beyond her signature line at the bottom, under a statement about her being of sound mind and agreeing to the conditions set forth herein, but she scrawled her name upon it.
Axel took the pen and rasped his name with a few hard strokes of black ink. He handed the pen to Otto.
Otto signed. Otto’s assistant witnessed and left the room.
Otto handed the contract to his lawyer, Umberto, a sixty-ish man who had a weariness in his expression that Axel knew had been stamped there by decades of working with the intractable Otto. Axel often thought he would look like that himself if he didn’t step onto his own path soon.
Which he was doing today.Finally.His inner tension eased.
“Give him the other,” Otto said.
Axel’s shoulders snapped back to rigidity.
Umberto didn’t meet Axel’s gaze as he placed the signed contract into his briefcase and offered a fresh envelope.
An acidic pang of premonition entered Axel’s gut. It was a sensation from his childhood, the one he had experienced every time the class bully noticed the new kid in school. Or his mother’s drug dealer had shaken him down for money she owed. Or the landlord had turned them out because he didn’t like finding his mother unconscious in the stairwell.
That sensation of being powerless—helpless—was suffocating. Axel had grown out of being a victim, though. He was too self-sufficient. Toosmart. Wasn’t he?
His hand turned cold as he took the envelope and broke the seal. He glanced at Mira. She bit her lip, watchful, expression mirroring his sense of dread.
