“We’re not together,” I say, hating how thin my voice sounds. “I’m raising the baby alone.”
“Of course,” he says, with a quiet chuckle that makes me want to shove him down the stairs.
Because he doesn’t believe me. Not for one second.
And I know, with cold, awful certainty, that he is very close to the truth now. Too close. If he finds out the baby is his, there will be no more pretending. No more distance. No more room for me to decide my own life.
He will marry me. Not because he wants the fairytale.
But because it would solve too many things at once. The child. The inheritance. The danger. Me.
And that should not make my heart beat harder than fear alone can explain.
So I go on the attack. “Why aren’t you married yet, huh?” I ask.
That gets him. Not dramatically. But enough.
I fold my arms and push while I can. “I thought you were on a deadline.”
His expression shifts. The smugness fades. The heat changes shape.
For the first time since we started this argument, he looks tired in a way that has nothing to do with lust. “Yes,” he says. “I was.”
I stare at him. “Was?”
He looks down the hallway once, then back at me. Something in him settles, like he has decided there is no point pretending this is still just strategy.
“My father made the will public months ago,” he says. “He started hitting my warehouses. Buying loyalty. Pressuring investors. Every day I didn’t marry someone made him stronger.”
I blink.
That part I knew in fragments. Rumors. Headlines. Jake muttering about violence in the city. But hearing it from his mouth makes it heavier. More real.
“So why didn’t you?” I ask. “You had women lining up.”
His gaze holds mine. “I know.”
“Then why didn’t you just pick one?”
He takes another step, close enough now that the wall behind me feels less like architecture and more like fate. “Because after you,” he says quietly, “every match was impossible.”
My breath leaves me.
He keeps his voice low, but there is no teasing in it now. No manipulation. Just brutal honesty. “I tried,” he says. “Dates. Names. Alliances. Alena. Every ‘reasonable’ option anyone could put in front of me.” His mouth twists slightly on reasonable. “None of them were you.”
I search his face for an angle. An escape hatch. Some sign that this is just another move in a game I’m losing.
I don’t find one.
“I thought,” he says, “it would pass.”
The words hit me harder than all the rest. Because I know exactly what he means.
That feeling. Too fast. Too wrong. Too intense for the amount of time. Something that should have burned off and didn’t.
“It didn’t,” I whisper.
“No.”
