POV: Catherine Rhodes
The leather chair beneath me felt stiff and expensive, the kind that forces you to sit up straight, as if it were judging you. I didn't belong here, not in this penthouse office, not under this ceiling of glass and steel. The walls were dark grey, matte, almost brooding, and the floor-to-ceiling windows behind Frey Johnson bathed the room in a bleak kind of light, the kind that exposed everything, everything except what he was thinking.
Across the desk, he sat like a statue carved out of entitlement; dark suit crisp, silver cufflinks gleaming under the faint glow of the desk lamp. The view behind him was breathtaking: Chicago's skyline painted in ice and iron. But all I could focus on was his face, unreadable, sculpted, and sharp like a blade that hadn't yet cut me… but might.
"You've had time to think about it," he said, voice smooth, slow, dangerously calm. "Have you come to a decision?"
A decision. Like this was a transaction, my life could hardly be reduced to bullet points on a legal document.
I glanced down at the contract again. Five years. No children. No emotional obligations. No interference in his private life.
In exchange? Fifty million dollars. Five years of pretending. Five years of silence.
But I knew better. It would cost more than that.
I hadn't slept the night before. I'd lain awake in the small guest room at home, staring at the ceiling, trying to count reasons not to come here. But each one fell apart when I remembered my father's shallow breathing… the unpaid hospital bills… the creditors circling like vultures around our dying company.
Rhodes Cycles was the only thing my father had ever built. And I couldn't just watch it die. Not again. Not while he still had hope.
"This… This isn't exactly something I dreamed about growing up," I said, my voice thinner than I wanted it to be.
Frey tilted his head, like he was inspecting me. "Neither did I."
The way he said it chilled me. There was no apology in his voice. No hesitation. Just a fact.
His office was immaculate, sleek black marble desk, minimal art, no clutter. Not a single photo frame, not even of his dying father. No hint of softness. Just control.
I breathed in the air, cold and expensive. Smelled like polish, leather, and barely disguised arrogance.
"Five years," I repeated. "No children. Ten million per year. And I have no say in what you do with your personal life?"
He leaned forward, the faintest trace of a smirk ghosting his lips. "That's the deal."
My heart pounded behind my ribs, but I forced my face to stay still.
I wasn't stupid. I knew what this meant.
He didn't want a wife. He wanted a mask. A trophy. A lie that looked good in photographs and boardroom headlines.
And I was willing to be that lie, for my family.
"What if I fall in love with you?" I asked, quietly, too quietly.
The words slipped out before I could stop them.
For a moment, everything in the room stilled, even the soft hum of the air conditioner seemed to pause. I didn't mean to say it, not like that, not in front of him, not when I knew better.
But I had meant it.
A part of me still remembered him, not the man in the suit before me now, but the boy I once knew, Frey Johnson.
Messy-haired, loud-laughing, troublemaker Frey.
The boy who dared me to climb the tallest tree in our Pensacola neighbourhood.
The one who used to steal popsicles for me from the back of his dad's freezer and swear he'd take the blame if we got caught.
The boy who once swore, with his hands stained in red chalk, that he'd marry me someday, "when we're all grown up and he takes over from his father."
But that boy was gone.
Replaced by the man sitting across from me now, cold, polished, detached. He looked at me like I was a stranger he happened to have history with. Like our childhood was just a forgotten postcard buried in a drawer somewhere, he never opened.
He didn't even blink.
"Then that's your problem," he said flatly.
There was no emotion in his voice. Not even cruelty. Just indifference.
It hurt more than I expected it to.
He reached into the drawer and pulled out the contract. The sound of paper sliding across the desk felt heavier than it should have. My name already sat there, printed cleanly beneath his, waiting to be caged beside his.
The pen he offered was the same kind I once used to draw hearts in the margins of my notebooks when we were thirteen.
Now it felt like a dagger.
"All that's left is your signature," he said.
I stared at the paper.
And for a second, I wanted to ask him if he remembered any of it: the tree house, the sand fights, the summer we both almost drowned, and he held my hand all the way back to shore. I wanted to ask if he even felt a flicker of something when he saw me now.
But I didn't because I already knew the answer.
The boy who once waited for me outside school with a half-melted snow cone in hand, just because I said I liked red cherry, didn't exist anymore.
This man, sitting across from me in an office that looked like it had never known warmth, had buried that version of himself so deeply, I wasn't sure he even remembered who he used to be, and maybe he didn't want to.
A soft gust of wind pressed against the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him. The clouds outside looked like bruises, thick, grey, heavy with rain. I wondered if the sky ever felt like I did, full of things it couldn't say, moments it couldn't let go of.
Frey didn't look at me as a person anymore. I could see it now, painfully clear.
He looked at me the way someone looked at a contract: something useful, something temporary, something he could fold up and put away when it no longer served him.
"You understand the terms?" he asked again, breaking the silence. His voice was as flat as before, but there was a tightness behind it. Maybe impatience. Maybe something else. "No second thoughts?"
I nodded, slowly. "I understand."
But I didn't think he did.
He didn't understand what this cost me. What I was giving up — not just freedom, but dignity, hope, maybe even the last pieces of who I was. Because the moment I signed, I wasn't just agreeing to marry him.
I was agreeing to disappear.
The Catherine who used to laugh freely… who used to believe in love… who once dreamed of painting her studio by the beach, was being boxed away.
And in her place would be someone new. Someone stronger. Colder. Unshakable.
To survive in his world, I would have to become something else entirely.
Frey tapped the edge of the paper again, his gaze drifting to his watch — a sleek silver Rolex that probably cost more than what was left of my father's company. He wasn't trying to be cruel.
That was the worst part.
This wasn't cruelty. It was apathy.
"You can read the fine print again if you want," he offered, though his tone said he didn't expect or want me to.
I didn't need to read it again.
I'd memorised every word. Every clause. Every stipulation about what I could or couldn't say to the media, how I was expected to dress in public, where I would be required to appear and with whom. A list of dates we'd need to be photographed together. Planned sightings. Social posts were drafted by his PR team.
Even a clause that specified that we would not share a bedroom.
Because heaven forbid the illusion look too convincing.
"All that's left is your signature," he said.
He placed the pen between us again.
It felt like a line drawn in blood.
I looked at him one last time, not the way he was now, but the way he used to be. I tried, just for a heartbeat, to find the boy I once adored. The one I'd written letters to after I moved to Chicago. The one who never replied.
I let her, the younger version of me, whisper goodbye.
Then I reached for the pen.
My fingers wrapped around it, slower this time. But steady. Determined.
"You're not selling yourself," I whispered beneath my breath. "You're saving what's left."
And I signed.
One letter at a time. Clean, deliberate, final.
Catherine Rhodes.
And just like that… it was done.