Chapter 2 - The Terms of Surrender
The silence between us hummed with tension so thick it felt suffocating. I wrenched my wrist from his grasp, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing my hand tremble.
“Don't you dare rewrite history,” I snapped, stepping back until the edge of the metal table bit into my thighs. “You ignored me for eight years. You treated me like a decorative piece of furniture Conrad brought along to charity galas. Now you expect me to believe you’re my savior?”
“I wasn’t your savior,” Roman replied, his voice deadly calm as he stripped off his leather gloves and tossed them onto the table beside my father’s journal. “I was the leash holding back men who would have stripped you down to nothing and used your father’s scandal to put you in an orange jumpsuit. You lived like a princess in Portugal because I spent seventy-hour weeks cleaning up the rot Conrad left behind in the boardrooms.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because at twenty-one, you would have made a martyr out of yourself,” he said, stepping into my space. The physical presence of him was overwhelming. He loomed over me, not with overt threat, but with an absolute, gravity-like dominance that made taking a full breath impossible. “You would have come running back to Chicago, walked into Julian Vance’s office, and traded your signature away to keep your father’s name clean. Conrad was a coward, Abigail. He made a dozen fatal mistakes. The only smart thing he ever did was putting you in my hands.”
“I am not in your hands,” I hissed.
Roman’s mouth curved into a faint, cruel semblance of a smile. “Your name is on the front door of Mercer Tower, but Julian Vance filed an emergency injunction at four o’clock this afternoon. He purchased forty-two percent of the legacy stock while you were upstairs parading around in that dress. By tomorrow morning at nine, he convenes a vote to oust you as heir and seize control of the trust.”
The floor seemed to tilt under my heels. “How? The bylaws prohibit an outside takeover unless—”
“Unless the primary heir is deemed legally unfit due to unresolved offshore liabilities,” Roman finished for me. “Which your father conveniently created in your name before he passed.”
I stared at him, nausea roiling in my stomach. The romantic game, the petty office flirtation, the lingering glances—they all evaporated beneath the brutal reality of corporate warfare. My father hadn't just left me an inheritance; he had left me a loaded gun pointed directly at my head.
“What are my options?” I asked, forcing my voice to stay even, though my knees felt like water.
Roman reached into the interior pocket of his jacket and drew out a fountain pen—the same one that had halted mid-stroke on his desk an hour ago. He laid it flat on top of the marriage clause.
“Option one: Julian Vance buys your debt, seizes the foundation, and leaves you with ten thousand dollars and a federal indictment for your father's tax evasion.”
“And option two?”
Roman’s eyes locked onto mine, gray and predatory, entirely stripped of hesitation.
“You announce our engagement tonight at the Winter Gala. We execute the consolidation clause before the markets open tomorrow. Vance’s hostile bid collapses instantly because our joint shares command fifty-one percent of the voting power.”
May you like
“A fake marriage,” I breathed.
“There won’t be anything fake about it on paper,” Roman murmured, his fingers brushing the fabric of my sleeve as he reached to pick up the pen, letting his knuckles graze my skin just long enough to set my pulse hammering against my ribs. “And out in public, you will play the devoted, adoring woman whose heart I’ve supposedly had since Lisbon. You wanted a vote, Abigail. Here it is. Sign the document, or let Vance drag your name through the gutter.”
