Chapter Five: The Aunt

"You must be Nadia," the woman said again, her smile still not reaching her eyes. "I'm Colleen. Damian's aunt."

Nadia forced her expression into something calm, something that didn't betray the fact that she'd just heard this woman's name twice in the last ten minutes, once on a phone call not meant for her ears, and once in gossip whispered by strangers at a bar. She took the offered hand and shook it, keeping her grip steady even as her pulse hammered.

"It's nice to meet you," Nadia said. "Damian hasn't mentioned much about his family."

"Hasn't he?" Colleen's eyes swept over her, slow and assessing, the way Nadia imagined she might look over a business proposal she hadn't yet decided whether to accept. "That does sound like him. He's always been protective of his privacy. Comes from losing his father so young, I think. Made him careful about who he lets close."

"That must have been hard for him."

"It was hard for all of us." Colleen's tone stayed light, pleasant, and somehow that made it worse — like she was discussing the weather rather than a family tragedy. "But we manage. Families always find a way to manage, don't they?"

There was something underneath the words, something Nadia couldn't quite name but felt clearly enough, like a current running just beneath still water. She thought of the laughing woman at the bar — *she'll find out in five years, same as everyone else* — and had to fight the urge to ask Colleen outright what she meant by any of it.

"If you'll excuse me," Nadia said instead, "I should find my husband."

"Of course." Colleen's smile widened, just slightly. "It was lovely meeting you, Nadia. I have a feeling we'll be seeing quite a lot of each other."

Nadia walked away without looking back, though she could feel Colleen's eyes on her the entire length of the ballroom.

She found Damian near the terrace doors, deep in conversation with an older man in a gray suit. He caught her expression the moment she approached, and whatever business smile he'd been wearing dropped instantly.

"What happened?" he asked quietly, stepping away from the conversation without excusing himself.

"Your aunt introduced herself to me," Nadia said. "Colleen."

Something shifted across Damian's face — not quite alarm, but close to it. "What did she say?"

"Nothing outright. But I heard two women talking before that. About Vivienne. About your aunt being furious you married someone else, but patient, because apparently five years isn't an obstacle to her." Nadia kept her voice low, aware of how many people surrounded them. "They said I'd find out in five years. Same as everyone else."

Damian went very still, the same stillness she'd seen through the gap in his study door three nights before.

"We need to talk," he said. "Not here."

They left the gala earlier than planned, Damian's hand firm at her back as he guided her through the crowd with an urgency he hadn't shown all evening. Neither of them spoke in the car. Nadia watched the city lights blur past the window and tried to piece together everything she'd overheard into something that made sense, and kept coming up short.

Once they reached the estate, Damian led her not to her room but to his study, the same room she'd stood outside of days before, listening through a gap in the door. He closed it firmly behind them this time.

"Tell me exactly what you heard," he said. "Word for word, if you can."

Nadia repeated it as precisely as she could remember — the conversation between the two women, Colleen's name, the mention of Vivienne, the casual certainty that whatever was coming would arrive in five years regardless of what either of them wanted.

Damian listened without interrupting, his jaw tightening more with every sentence, until by the end he looked like a man holding himself together through sheer will.

"The call I had three nights ago," he said finally. "It was with someone inside my family's business. I asked them directly whether my aunt had any involvement in setting up this marriage. They told me no." He laughed, short and humorless. "They lied to me. Badly, as it turns out, because they let something slip anyway — that the five-year term wasn't something I chose. That it was already decided before I ever went looking for a contract marriage at all."

Nadia's stomach turned cold. "You think your aunt arranged this. All of it. From the beginning."

"I think," Damian said slowly, "that I need to find out exactly how deep this goes, and I think you're the only person who might actually understand what it's like to have your whole life decided by someone who claims to love you."

The comment landed closer to home than he could have known, and Nadia looked away before he could see whatever crossed her face at the mention of it.

"There's something else," Damian said, quieter now. "The lawyer who arranged our contract. Mr. Grant." He met her eyes. "I've used him for years. Trusted him with everything. But if my aunt had a hand in this from the start, someone had to have helped her find you specifically. Someone with access to the entire process."

Nadia felt the floor tilt beneath her, the same sensation she'd had in the hospital when Dr. Whitmore named the cost of her mother's treatment.

"You think it was him."

"I think," Damian said, "we need to find out together. Tonight."

He sat down at his desk and pulled his laptop toward him. "Grant isn't just my personal attorney. He's company counsel too, which means his office line runs through our internal system. As the one who signs off on that system, I have standing access to the call logs — I've just never had a reason to look before."

He typed for a moment, entering credentials, opening a portal Nadia didn't recognize, his expression tightening with every second the page took to load.

"Here," he said finally, turning the screen toward her. "Grant's office line. Outgoing calls, last two weeks."

Nadia leaned forward to look. Most of the numbers meant nothing to her — client names she didn't recognize, area codes she couldn't place. But one number appeared four times in the last week alone, each call lasting longer than the ones around it.

"That one," Damian said, tapping the screen. "It's not a client I recognize. Not a vendor, not anyone on our internal directory. I want to know who it belongs to before we do anything else."

He picked up his own phone, dialed the number carefully, and waited. Nadia held her breath beside him, close enough now that she could hear the faint ringing on the other end before it cut to voicemail — a woman's voice, tired but familiar, reciting a greeting Nadia had heard a thousand times growing up.

Damian ended the call slowly and looked at her, something raw and unguarded crossing his face for the first time since she'd met him.

"Nadia," he said carefully. "Whose voice was that?"

She already knew the answer before she made herself say it out loud.

"My mother's."