Chapter 4 –"Ghost of a Night He Can't Shake"  

Ivan’s POV

I left the cash on the nightstand and closed the door without looking back.

That’s the rule. It always has been. No mornings, No names. No awkward daylight conversations where someone pretends last night meant more than a mutual escape.

 I always leave cash. Cash makes it clean and honest. Everyone knows exactly what they paid for and what they got.

By the time the elevator hits the lobby, she’s already supposed to be a memory.

Except she isn’t.

I step into my penthouse at 4:52 AM, the city is still dark outside the floor to ceiling windows. The place is exactly how I like it, cold, precise and empty. I shower off the scent of whiskey and sex, but the ghost of her stays on my skin anyway. Warm, floral and dangerous.

I pull on a fresh shirt, pour black coffee, and open my laptop.

The numbers are a bloodbath.

Two billion gone with Yamamoto’s withdrawal. Three more deals gone radio silent overnight. The board is drafting emergency motions and my PR team sent a seventeen point crisis memo at 3 AM like seventeen bullet points could fix the fact that my past just detonated my future.

I handle it cold and methodical. Emails answered. Calls made. Damages contained.

Until I lift my wrist to check the time and catch the faint trace of her perfume still clinging there.

My fingers freeze on the keyboard.

That scent. The low Spanish curse she breathed against my ear. The way her tight little body clenched around me when she came. The sharp gasp when I first pushed inside her.

I set the coffee down harder than I mean to.

*Forget it.*

That was one anonymous, transactional night. The exact kind I’ve perfected because it requires nothing and leaves nothing behind.

I opened another report and read the same line three times then closed it.

The feel of her nails tracking down my back, her legs locked around my waist, and that broken moan she made when I filled her distracted me. 

The memory refuses to stay buried.

My phone rings at nine. Then again at nine fourteen and again at nine twenty two.

The board chair wants an emergency call. My legal team wants a statement approved. Three journalists have sourced my personal cell somehow and I'm adding that security breach to the list of fires currently burning through my morning.

I handle them in order. Cold, precise, and efficient. I give the board chair thirty minutes and a roadmap. I approve a modified statement. I have my Alex block the journalist numbers and trace the leak.

This is manageable. I've survived worse.

My phone rings again.

*Reginald.*

“Oh God” I said as I let it ring twice then I picked up.

"Hello, Grandpa."

"Do you see what is happening?" His voice lands with the particular weight of a man who has been watching something go wrong for days and waited until he had the full picture before speaking. "We have lost important deals because of the life you live."

*The life you live.* 

Not *the tape.* or  *the scandal.* The life. Like this was always coming and the tape was just the delivery mechanism.

"Grandpa, I will sort this out. I am handling it."

"And how has that been going?" He took a pause, not a cruel one, just honest. "You know the only solution to this."

I stand up from my desk and move to the window. Thirty floors down, the city is going about its business without any awareness that my grandfather is on the phone constructing a cage out of love and good intentions. "Gramps, it hasn't gotten to that. I will—"

"Ivan. You can only hit a scandal with a bigger news" 

His voice drops. Quieter. Like he's not arguing anymore and he's already past the point of negotiation. 

"You have thirty days. Marry someone suitable, or the will changes and you lose everything." A beat. "I won't watch you waste your life and end up alone."

"Grandpa, this is just-"

The line goes dead.

I stand there with the phone against my ear, the city spread out below me and the silence where his voice just was.

*How the hell am I supposed to do that?*

The question sits in my chest without an answer. I have thirty days to find a wife. A solution to a problem that is also somehow supposed to fix something else, something older and quieter that Reginald has been watching with worried eyes for years.

I stare at nothing.

Then I call Alex.

He picks up on the second ring. "Ivan?"

"The firm," I say. "The one you mentioned last night about contract marriages."

A beat. "Yeah?"

"Set it up." I turn from the window. "Find me a wife."

Alex goes quiet for exactly two seconds, surprise i think but quickly buried. "With the way they work I should have a shortlist in three weeks."

" Two."

"Two," he agrees, and I can hear him already moving. "I'll send you the vetting criteria they use and-"

"Just find someone suitable. Clean background, no complications, no press connections." I pause. "Someone who needs the arrangement as much as I do. I need a woman who is ready to start a fucking family"

"Understood."

“Thanks” with that I ended the call.

The penthouse is very quiet. But my phone isn’t. 

And underneath all of it, buried under the board, the lawyers and the thirty day countdown is something else. Something faint and stubborn that keeps refusing to file itself away where I put it.

That thing is Her. My mind keeps playing over her warm skin, her touches and Spanish on her tongue. The specific sound she made when she stopped being careful.

I close the laptop.

*Gosh what is wrong with me?*

Why can’t she leave my head?