POV: Mara
He was still on one knee when I found my voice.
"What are you doing?"
"Giving you an option," he said. Calm. Like men proposed to strangers on sidewalks every Tuesday night. "But first — are you hurt?"
His eyes were on my cheek. Not in the way people stare at something uncomfortable and then look away. In the way someone catalogues information. Precise. Controlled.
"I'm fine," I said, which was the biggest lie I'd told all evening and that was truly saying something.
He stood up slowly. He was taller than I'd realized. Dark eyes, sharp jaw, the kind of face that belonged on the cover of magazines that I never bought because they made regular people feel bad about themselves.
"Dominic Crane," he said.
I knew the name. Everyone knew the name.
"I know who you are," I said.
"Then you know I don't do anything without a reason." He looked at me steadily. "I need a wife. Temporarily. You need — from the look of things — a complete exit from whatever just happened up there." He nodded toward the Solis building behind me. "I'm proposing a transaction. Not a romance."
I looked at this man — this stranger on a dark street making the most bizarre offer I'd ever received — and I thought about my mother's text. Come home. We'll explain. I thought about Seth's voice saying two years like it was a small thing. I thought about Lena's face.
"How temporary?" I asked.
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile.
"Long enough to matter," he said. "Short enough to survive."
I looked down at the shattered wine bottle between us. The wine was spreading slowly across the pavement, dark as blood under the streetlight.
I thought: I have nothing left to protect.
"Okay," I said.
---
His penthouse was on the top floor and the elevator ride up was the quietest sixty seconds of my life. A woman was waiting when the doors opened — sharp eyes, tablet in hand, looking at me with an expression that said she had approximately nine hundred questions and the discipline not to ask a single one.
"June," Dominic said, "call the legal team."
June looked at my cheek. Then at him. Then back at me.
"Tonight?" she asked.
"Now," he said, and walked away.
June looked at me for a long moment. "Are you hungry?"
I realized I hadn't eaten since morning. "Yes."
"Right answer," she said, and that was that.
---
I didn't sleep.
I lay on top of the guest bed — bigger than any bed I'd ever slept in — and stared at the ceiling and let myself finally, quietly, fall apart.
Not loudly. I didn't have the energy for loud. It was the silent kind of falling apart where you just lie there and feel the full weight of everything pressing down on your chest and you breathe through it because there is nothing else to do.
Lena was alive.
My parents knew.
Seth knew for two years.
And here I was in a stranger's apartment having agreed to marry him because my brain had apparently decided that the only logical response to my entire life being a lie was to immediately tell another one.
I pressed my hand against my cheek. The burning had faded to a dull throb.
Nobody had mentioned it. Not once, the whole evening.
Not Seth. Not Lena. Not my parents — and that was the one that kept snagging on something inside me, the one I couldn't smooth over no matter how I tried. My parents had walked into that room and my mother had gone straight to Lena with open arms and tears running down her face and my father had looked at the situation with his careful, calculating eyes — and neither of them had looked at me.
Not once.
I was standing right there with a handprint on my face and they looked straight through me to get to her.
She was always the real one, a small, mean voice said in the back of my head. You were always just the placeholder.
I closed my eyes hard against that thought.
My phone — June had put it on charge — lit up on the nightstand.
My father.
I watched it ring. Five times. Six. Then it stopped.
A text appeared.
I didn't want to read it. I read it anyway, because apparently I was committed to hurting myself tonight.
Mara. What happened cannot be undone. Lena needs time to settle back in. We ask that you give the family space to heal. Your behavior tonight was noted. We will discuss consequences when you are ready to have a calm conversation.
I read it three times.
Your behavior tonight was noted.
My behavior.
I had walked in on my dead sister alive in my fiancé's bed. I had been slapped across the face. And my father was texting me at midnight about my behavior.
I put the phone face down.
I breathed.
In. Out. In. Out.
And then a sound came through the wall — faint, from the hallway outside my door. A voice. Dominic's voice, low and sharp, on a phone call.
"— I don't care what Arlo thinks he has. Move the timeline up." A pause. "No. She signs tomorrow morning. It's done."
I stared at the ceiling.
She signs tomorrow morning.
He'd said the contract was a transaction. A temporary arrangement. Simple terms, clean exit.
But there was something in his voice just now — something coiled and deliberate — that made me sit up slowly in the dark.
I was a variable in someone's equation.
I had just agreed to be one.
And lying there in the silence, a thought arrived that turned my blood cold:
What if Dominic Crane knew about my family before tonight?
What if none of this was an accident?