Chapter 3

The bus dropped me four blocks short because the driver said traffic near the financial district wasn't worth fighting, so I walked the rest in shoes that weren't made for four blocks of concrete.

Exhaust and the sugared smell of a churro cart on the corner gave way, block by block, to something cleaner. Cologne. Cut flowers from a shop I couldn't afford to walk into. Money has a smell, it turns out, and it's mostly the absence of every other smell.

The building didn't look real up close. Sixty floors of black glass. A lobby big enough to swallow my whole apartment building twice over. The marble was polished enough that I could see the scuff on my own boots, looking back up at me. I'd worn the good coat. Standing under that ceiling, it still felt borrowed. Like, I don't belong in any way.

Security checked my ID against a list. My name was already on it. Printed clean, the kind of clean that costs money. That sat wrong in my stomach the whole ride up. This whole thing is wrong, but I do not have a choice.

I work to the bone, and I still cannot fight the courts to let me keep my sister. I know I have already been there. And my abusive uncle will do anything to fight. I tried to swallow my tears. I need to be strong for myself, my sister, and because I have no other choice.

Two women stepped into the elevator with me on the twenty-first floor, breaking my self-pity session. Blazers that probably cost more than my rent. One of them looked me over, quick, shoes first, and didn't bother finishing at my face. I straightened my spine anyway. I wasn't giving anyone in that elevator the satisfaction of watching me shrink.

The receptionist on sixty walked me past a wall of glass with half the city laid out below it.

"Please sit," she guided me to the chair. I nodded. Then she left me alone in an office bigger than my apartment before I could even thank her.

I looked around the enormous office. A desk carved from one slab of dark wood. Nothing on it but a closed laptop and a framed photo angled away from the door. I sat down and counted the awards on the wall until I made myself stop.

I'd looked him up, obviously. Three in the morning, I researched while Luz slept, and the custody clock kept ticking somewhere in the back of my head the whole time. A profile piece from a business magazine, a photo of him at maybe seventeen, stiff in a suit at some fundraising gala, half a step behind a father who looked exactly like him except for the eyes. Something about that photo was different from all other photos of him. I don't know why I felt that way. Just did. Whatever happened to him since had worn that part down.

He kept me waiting eleven minutes. Then the door opened without warning, and none of those photos had prepared me for the actual thing walking through it.

He was tall, taller than the photos let on, somewhere past six feet by a fair margin, built like a man who used his body for something other than sitting behind a desk all day. His eyes were gray, sharp enough that they didn't feel entirely comfortable to hold, and they found mine the second he crossed the threshold. I let myself take him in for exactly one second before I caught myself doing it and stopped.

"Ms. Reyes." He nodded his head, as if I were his business colleague rather than his soon-to-be wife. Fake wife.

"Mr. Blackwood." I settled into the chair across from him, spine straight. "Camila's fine. Camy, if you want something faster. 'Ms. Reyes' makes me feel like I'm being audited."

Something flickered near his mouth that wasn't quite a smile. "Noted."

"Rowan is fine," he said, echoing the offer back, and sat. "I assume Marissa covered the terms."

"Most of them. Yeah." I replied awkwardly. I could hear myself getting a bit off, but I remained strong.

"Then let's cover the rest." He folded his hands on the desk. "Public appearances happen approximately twice a month. Galas, dinners, press events. You'll be expected to look convincing, and I mean convincing in every direction. No public disagreements. No photographs of you with anyone who isn't me for the duration of the contract. This marriage needs to survive scrutiny, not just exist on paper."

"So I'm on an image clause," I replied, opening the folder that contained the contract.

"Yeah." He didn't blink. "Next, the personal space is also covered in the contract. I will reiterate. Separate wings of the house. Separate rooms."

"Wasn't going to assume otherwise." I kept my voice even, though something about the way he'd said it, deliberate, as he needed it on the record, made me wonder who exactly he was reassuring.

He ignored my words and continued. "One more thing, and I need you to actually hear this one. Nobody outside this office, Marissa's office, and the two of us knows the real nature of this arrangement. Not friends. Not coworkers. If Marissa contacts you about anything to do with this, you answer her directly, and you don't loop anyone else in, ever. That includes people you trust."

"I don't have many of those to loop in anyway," I said, mostly to myself, but he heard it and gave a short nod after a beat.

"Your sister moves in as agreed. Her own room, her own security if she wants one. I'd skip telling her the truth about any of this, though, or she'll have more questions than either of us wants to answer."

"That's not a condition, that's a given." I'd been holding this next part since Marissa's office. "What I need is her school. She's not switching mid-semester over paperwork that neither of us created. I want her to stay where she is. And I want a real plan for getting her there and back that doesn't turn into a story."

He studied me for a second. Didn't say anything right away. "Done. A car, a driver who doesn't talk to reporters, enough discretion that her school never has a reason to ask."

"Good." I hadn't expected that answer to come that easily, and it threw me slightly more than I let show.

"I don't leave details to chance," he said, before I could ask why he'd already had an answer ready. "It's the only way anything gets built to last. Or kept from falling apart."

Clipped. Controlled. Whatever was actually sitting underneath that sentence stayed there.

He stood and walked to the window instead of staying behind the desk. I noticed, against my better judgment, the line of his shoulders against the glass. My pulse did something unusual, and I chose to blame it on the altitude. Sixty floors will do that to a person. That was the story I told myself, anyway.

"There will be a ceremony," he said, back still to me. "Civil, small, this Saturday. My lawyer files the paperwork right after."

"Saturday. That's two days."

"You said you had seventeen. Now you have less." He turned around, gestured toward a form waiting at the edge of the desk. "Preliminary registration. I need you to confirm your full legal name."

I picked up the pen. "Camila Elena Reyes," I said out loud as I wrote it. My mother's name, threaded into mine the way it always is on anything official. Something I do without thinking.

He didn't say anything. But I felt the air shift half a second before I looked up, and when I did, his jaw had gone tight enough that a muscle stood out along the line of it, gray eyes fixed somewhere just past my shoulder like he was looking at something that wasn't in the room at all.

"Hmmm... Rowan?"

"Saturday. Nine a.m." His voice had dropped low. "Don't be late."

He walked me to the door himself, which felt like an ending and a dismissal at the same time. I was almost through it when I heard him say something under his breath, so low I nearly missed it entirely.

"Reyes." Just the name. Nothing after it. Said the way you'd test the weight of something before deciding whether to pick it up.

I turned back, but the door was already closing between us, and I stood in the hallway a full ten seconds trying to figure out why hearing my own last name in his mouth had just made every hair on my arms stand up.

The receptionist walked me out again, but I didn't have the energy left to make conversation after whatever had just happened in that office. Did I just sign my future away? What am I even supposed to tell Luz?

I was on the bus heading home, forehead against the cold window, still trying to process my own life. My mother would've beaten me with a spatula if she were still alive to see this.

My phone buzzed. A text from Marissa, no greeting, nothing soft about it at all. I need to get used to these cold people I guess.

Need to meet. Tonight, if possible. It's about your contract.

I read it twice, and both times my stomach dropped the exact same way.

Did Rowan already cancel the contract?