Chapter 4

Skylar's POV

The ceiling was unfamiliar.

That was the first thing I noticed — before the throbbing behind my eyes, before the cotton-dry taste in my mouth, before any of it. The ceiling was the wrong color, the wrong height, and the morning light was coming from the wrong direction entirely.

I sat up.

Slowly. Carefully. The way you do when your body isn't sure it's ready to rejoin the world.

The room materialized around me in pieces. Expensive furniture. Heavy curtains. A hotel room that cost more per night than my monthly rent.

And a man.

Sitting in the chair across from me, watching me with the measured calm of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment — the moment I woke up and realized.

He was young. Mid-twenties, maybe. Sharp jaw, easy posture, dark eyes that held something between amusement and calculation. Handsome in the way that expensive things are handsome — polished, deliberate, slightly dangerous.

"How did I get here?" My voice came out rough. Foreign.

"You chose the room number." His tone was light, conversational, like we were catching up over coffee. "You walked up to me at the bar. You—"

"I don't know you." I cut him off, the words arriving before the panic did, and then the panic followed immediately after, cold and fast. I looked down.

The sheet pooled around my waist.

My dress was on the floor.

My bra. My shoes. Everything, arranged in a trail that told a story I desperately did not want to read.

"Don't—" I threw my hand up as he rose from the chair, stepping toward me. "Don't come near me. Don't touch me. You drugged me. You brought me here and you—"

"I didn't drug you." He stopped moving. Reached for his phone instead, unhurried, tapping the screen twice before holding it out toward me.

I didn't want to take it.

I took it.

The video was loud in the quiet room. My own voice, slurred and laughing, directing a hotel receptionist toward an elevator. My hands pulling at a jacket that wasn't mine. My face — flushed, reckless, completely unrecognizable — looking directly into the camera of his phone as I said things that made my stomach drop straight through the mattress.

I fast-forwarded.

I wished I hadn't.

The second video was worse.

I shoved the phone back at him, my hands shaking, bile rising in my throat. "Delete those."

He plucked the phone from my grip before I could do it myself, and something in his expression shifted — the amusement thinning into something sharper underneath.

"Delete them." My voice cracked. "Right now. Those are—"

"Do you know who I am?"

The question landed quietly. Too quietly. I looked up.

He was watching me with an expression that no longer looked young or easy or casually entertained. He looked like someone who had just realized he was holding something valuable.

I raised my hand. The slap connected before I could think it through.

The sound of it was very loud.

He didn't move. Didn't flinch. Just turned his face back toward me slowly, a red mark blooming across his cheekbone, and smiled.

"I'm going to pretend you didn't just do that," he said softly, "because I think when you hear what I'm about to say, you'll wish you'd saved the energy." He slid the phone into his pocket. "My name is James Scott. William Scott's son." He tilted his head. "And when I went through your phone while you were sleeping — yes, I did that — I saw that you're the personal assistant to Zane Hills."

The name hit me like a bucket of ice water.

"Isn't that something." He settled back into the chair, crossing one leg over the other, studying me the way someone studies a chess piece they've just decided how to use. "I've been trying to find a pressure point on that man for months. And you walked right into my bar and introduced yourself."

The room was spinning, and it had nothing to do with the alcohol this time.

William Scott. Zane's most vicious rival. The man Zane had outbid at the auction just last night — had it only been last night? — by three hundred million dollars, in front of everyone, without blinking.

And I had slept with his son.

I pressed both hands over my face.

Two men. One night. Zero braincells, apparently.

The thought of Zane's contract flashed through my mind like a neon warning sign I had walked past and ignored. The paper. The pen. My own name already printed, waiting.

Why didn't I just sign it?

I grabbed my dress from the floor.

I drove to Zane's house in a state that existed somewhere between autopilot and full psychological collapse. My hands stayed at ten and two. My eyes stayed on the road. I did not allow myself to think about James Scott's videos, or the bar, or Ray's voice on the phone, or the fact that I had walked out of a billionaire's mansion this morning with my dignity mostly intact and had since dismantled the rest of it entirely on my own.

I parked. Got out. Walked to the door.

Zane was in the living room, standing by the window with a glass of wine. Because of course he was. Because some people exist in a permanent state of composed elegance and he was infuriatingly one of them.

He turned when he heard me.

I didn't let him speak first.

"I need a pen."

A beat of silence. Something moved across his face — brief, unreadable, gone before I could name it.

"I have one right here," he said.

He produced the contract from somewhere with the ease of a man who had fully expected this outcome. I didn't look at the pages. I had read them once already and I understood what I was signing and I was choosing to do it anyway, which meant thinking about it any further was only going to talk me out of it.

I signed.

Handed it back.

He looked down at my signature for a moment. Then he looked up, and the corner of his mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile — more like the expression of a man who had placed a bet months ago and was only now collecting.

"Mrs. Hills suits you," he said.

"Don't push it."

"We get married today."

I blinked. "Today."

"Today."

"Zane." I exhaled slowly. "There are things people do before a wedding. Invitations. Families. A dress—"

"Dress is already ordered." He turned back to the window. "And we're not telling anyone. Not yet. We go to the Ministry, we make it official, and then we return to our lives."

"We return to our—" I stopped. Pressed my lips together. Looked at the ceiling for patience that wasn't there. "I am going to be your wife."

"You are going to be my wife," he confirmed, with the same energy one might use to confirm a meeting time. "Which is why I'd like the process to be as uncomplicated as possible. I don't do stress, Skylar. It's in the contract."

I was fairly certain it was not in the contract, but I had already signed the contract, so.

"Fine," I said.

One of his drivers dropped me home. I sat on the edge of my bed in my regular clothes and stared at the wall for what felt like a reasonable amount of time given the circumstances.

Then I looked at the garment bag hanging on the back of my door.

The dress inside it was the kind of beautiful that made you angry — champagne silk that caught the light like it was performing, tailored in a way that suggested whoever made it had my measurements, which raised questions I didn't have the bandwidth to explore right now. A year's salary. Possibly two. Hanging there like it was nothing.

I wore my own dress instead.

A small act of defiance. I needed at least one.

I did my makeup carefully, slowly, the way I did when I needed to feel like I was in control of something. It came out better than expected. I stared at myself in the mirror for a long moment.

You're getting married today.

The woman in the mirror stared back, looking composed and terrified in equal measure.

He was forty minutes late.

I sat in my car outside the Ministry of Marriage, engine idling, watching the minutes tick over on the dashboard clock with the specific kind of dread that accumulates when you've made an impulsive decision and have been given too much time to reconsider it.

What if the contract was fake. What if this is a setup. What if he's not coming.

I turned the key in the ignition.

His car pulled in.

I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding and watched him step out onto the pavement — and immediately, as if summoned, three photographers materialized from somewhere with cameras already raised. Because he was Zane Hills and this was simply what happened wherever he went.

He spotted me across the car park. Walked over, unhurried, as though we were meeting for lunch.

"Mrs. Hills," he said.

"You're late," I said.

"I had to collect a document from my mother."

"You couldn't have done that earlier?"

"Good morning to you too." The ghost of something warm passed through his expression before his face settled back into its usual composed arrangement. "Shall we?"

We went inside.

The paperwork was efficient. The officiant asked questions in a bored, procedural tone that suggested he had witnessed every variety of human decision-making and had long since stopped being surprised by any of it. I answered when it was my turn. I signed where indicated.

And then it was done.

I stood on the steps of the Ministry of Marriage in a dress I had chosen myself, holding a certificate with both our names on it, trying to locate the feeling I was supposed to have in this moment.

I'm married.

I am Mrs. Hills.

I am married to the richest, most aggravating, most complicated man in this city, and I did it for my mother's debt and to cover up two one-night stands, and this is my life now.

Zane stood beside me, looking at the certificate briefly before sliding it into his jacket. He glanced over.

"Hungry?" he asked.

I stared at him.

"It was a simple question."

"You just married me in a government office on forty minutes notice and your follow-up is whether I want lunch?"

"Brunch, technically." He checked his watch. "It's not quite noon."

I opened my mouth.

Closed it.

Started walking toward my car.

"Skylar."

I stopped but didn't turn around.

"For what it's worth," he said, and something in his voice was different — quieter, stripped of the easy authority he wore everywhere like a second suit, "I don't think you'll regret this."

I stood there for a moment, my back to him, the marriage certificate somewhere in his jacket pocket, my whole life rearranged in the span of twenty-four hours.

"You'd better be right," I said.

And I got in my car.