CHAPTER FIVE

EDEN

Seven days.. I had exactly seven days to produce a wife or watch my stepbrother take the biggest deal of my career and dismantle everything I had spent a decade building.

Mr. Dan had delivered the news with the calm of a man who enjoyed delivering impossible things. He had sat across my desk, expensive suit, cold eyes, and laid it out like a verdict.

"Seven of the richest countries. Long-term. Global reach. This deal makes you untouchable, Eden." He had paused. "There is one condition."

"Name it."

"You must be married."

I had laughed. Not because it was funny. Because sometimes the world does something so perfectly cruel that laughter is the only honest response.

"Married," I repeated.

"They want stability. A family man. Someone with roots." He had folded his hands. "You have seven days. If you cannot present a wife, the deal transfers to Nathan."

Nathan. My stepbrother. The one who had walked into my father's house after my mother's funeral and never left. The one my father introduced to boardrooms and business partners with the pride he had never once offered me. The one who had been waiting, patiently, for ten years, for one opportunity to take what I had built.

Mr. Dan had left. I had sat in my chair for a long time.

* * *

David and Val found me there an hour later. They were my oldest friends. They had been there for the contract marriage at twenty-three that had nearly ended me. They had been there for the rebuilding, the years of work, the slow and painful construction of something I could be proud of.

They did not knock. They never knocked.

"You look terrible," Val said.

"Thank you," I said.

David dropped into the chair across from me. "What happened?"

"I need a wife," I said. "Seven days."

The silence that followed was the kind that only happens between people who know each other too well for pretending.

"Arrange something," Val said finally. "A contract. Someone clean, no complications…"

"No," I said. Flat. Final. "Never again."

David looked at me carefully. "Then what?"

I pulled up my phone. I had not meant to open the gallery. My thumb just, went there. The way it always did when my guard was down.

Evelyn's wedding photos were everywhere online. Mrs. James. White dress. Flowers. Oscar's hand on her back.

And her face, her face was the same face I had been carrying inside my chest for seven years like a stone I refused to put down.

"It's Evelyn," I said.

Val went very still.

"She's married," David said carefully.

"Three days ago."

"Eden.."

"She still loves me." I looked up. "I saw it at the wedding. She looked at me the way she always looked at me, like she was trying to decide whether to run toward me or away, and it was taking everything she had to choose away." I set the phone down. "That's not a woman who has moved on. That's a woman who is surviving."

"That's a woman who is married," Val said firmly.

"To a man she settled for because I was gone." The words came out sharper than I intended. I pressed my hands flat against the desk. "I know what I did. I know I left. I know I stayed away too long, and I know Mia buried my message, and I know Evelyn spent years thinking I had abandoned her." I paused. "But she also spent those years becoming a woman I want to spend the rest of my life beside. And I am not going to let Nathan win. And I am not going to spend my life watching Evelyn be ordinary when she was made for more."

David shook his head slowly. "You're describing a war, Eden."

"Yes," I said.

"Wars have casualties."

"I know."

"She could hate you for this."

I looked at the photo on my screen.

Evelyn, mid-laugh, three seconds before she noticed the camera. Unguarded. Real. The most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

"She already hates me," I said quietly. "At least this way, she'll have to face me to do it."

Val threw up his hands. David stared at the ceiling.

Outside, the city moved on. I picked up my phone and opened a new message.

Seven days

 .. And I intended to use every single one..