Chapter 2 – "The Woman Who Felt Like Ruin"

Ivan’s POV

My empire is on fire and I'm drinking alone like a man who's already lost.

It's been forty eight hours since the tape dropped. Two billion in deals, gone.My phone has buzzed forty seven times in the last two hours.. The board wants emergency sessions. The PR firm wants statements. My grandfather Reginald wants… I don't know what Reginald wants yet because I've declined four of his calls and the fifth one I'm not ready for.

So Bar, whiskey and some peace.

Except she's there.

I spotted her at the corner stool. Dark hair loose around her shoulders. Her Blazer slightly rumpled, like she came straight from a war zone and didn't stop to change. She's not sad-drinking,  I know sad-drinking when I see one.  I've been in enough bars to catalog the species. This is rage drinking. Controlled but barely. The way she wraps both hands around that glass like she's strangling the day.

I move before I decide to.

"You look like you're trying to forget something dangerous."

She turns. Dim light keeps her face blurred, warm skin, full mouth, eyes that catch mine like a challenge already forming.

"Maybe I am," she mutters.

Then, under her breath: "*¡Hijo de puta…*"

Not at me. Just.. out into the air i think. Raw, unfiltered and somehow the most honest thing I've heard all week.

Something loosens in my chest without permission.

"Who destroyed your day?" I sit down. I don't ask, I just do it.

She raises an eyebrow. "Are you always this direct with strangers?"

"Only when they're interesting."

The eyebrow stays up. But she doesn't move away.

She tells me, not everything, just enough. A boss she has worked for for two years. The way he steals her ideas, shuts her down, buries her talent, and mocks her. And today she finally detonated. The way she says it, jaw tight, eyes lit with leftover fire.  I feel it move through me like current.

" So did you quit or you were fired?" I asked rationally. 

"I quit." Another beat, shorter. "Loudly.”

"Good," I say.

She blinks. "Good?"

"You waited too long, but good."

"You don't get to tell me—"

"I'm not telling you anything. I'm agreeing with you." I hold her gaze. "There's a difference."

The silence that follows is electric. She studies me like she's deciding whether I'm worth the next ten minutes of her life.

Apparently I am. Because she orders another drink.

My phone buzzes. It was Alex.

"Excuse me." I step away and she rolls her eyes at my back, I catch it in the bar mirror, and something almost like a smile moves through me.

Almost.

"Talk," I say.

"Yamamoto's office sent a formal withdrawal at six." Alex's voice is clipped. Efficient. "That Two billion gone, Ivan. In writing. The board is using the word liability now, which means lawyers are already involved." He pauses. "But I found something though, a firm, discreet, fast, airtight company that arranges contract marriages for high profile clients. Confidential matches, vetted women, clean backgrounds. No tabloid risk. No emotional complications." Another pause. "You need a wife. Reginald's been calling you all day. You know what he wants."

I do know.

A wife. A solution wrapped in a transaction. The only kind I've ever trusted.

"Keep the number," I say. "I'll think about it."

"Don't think too long. You have thirty days before—"

"I said I'll think about it."

I end the call. Turn back to the bar.

She's watching me return. Arms loosely crossed, one finger tracing the rim of her glass. The city blazes gold through the windows behind her. She's still, and everything around her is moving, and I don't know why I notice that.

"Crisis?" she asks.

"Ongoing."

"You own something big."

"What makes you say that?"

"The way you said *I'll think about it* to whoever that was." Her head tilts. "Like you're used to people waiting while you decide."

I say nothing.

She smiles small, sharp. "Thought so."

I should leave. My penthouse is twelve floors up and my lawyers need answers by morning.  This woman is a stranger whose face I can't quite read in this light and u think the whiskey is a factor.

Instead I ordered another round.

She argues with me about three different things over the next thirty minutes. She's wrong about one of them and right about two. The one she's wrong about is more interesting than most people's correct answers. Her hands move when she talks. She leans in when she's making a point and I catch her scent,  something warm and faintly floral under the whiskey.  It hits me somewhere I don't usually feel things.

My hand finds her waist. Testing. Light.

She doesn't move away.

Her fingers come up and press flat against my chest instead of a deliberate, unhurried, statement. My jaw tightens. The bar noise drops to nothing useful.

"We're not doing this," she says.

"No?" 

"I don't even know your name."

"Does that matter right now?"

She looks at me for a long moment. Her tongue touches her lower lip. Her eyes were dark, sharp, still half-lit with that leftover rage. They drop to my mouth and come back up.

"No," she says quietly. "I guess it doesn't."

Then we move.

The elevator mirrors show me fragments. Her hair. My hand was at the small of her back. The space between us evaporated floor by floor.

I press her against the mirrored wall before the doors finish closing.

My mouth finds her neck. She exhales not a gasp, something lower and more devastating than that, and her hands come up into my hair and pull, she says something against my ear in Spanish, low, filthy and completely deliberate.

I don't understand the words.

But I understand everything she means.

The doors open on my floor. She's already pulling at my jacket. I lift her and her legs lock around me, her face lost in shadow, warm light and dizziness of my eyes. We move through the suite door.

The city burns thirty floors below us.

I don't look at it.