Chapter 4

They put her in a room alone with him.

That was how she'd think about it afterward. Not: the brothers escorted them both to the boardroom and gave them privacy to review the proposal. Just — they put her in a room alone with him. Because that was the truth of it. The walls were glass and the city burned sixty floors below and Kane Wilder sat across the long obsidian table looking at her like a man who had already decided how this conversation was going to end and was simply waiting for her to arrive at the same conclusion.

She didn't sit immediately. She walked to the window first. Old habit — she always needed to see the exits before she committed to a chair. The city lay below them in every direction, all those lit windows like eyes that couldn't quite see what was happening up here.

She turned around. Kane was still watching her. He hadn't touched the documents in front of him. Hadn't opened his phone. Hadn't done anything, in fact, except exist in the room with a stillness that made her oddly aware of how much space he occupied without moving.

"You've read the proposal," she said. Not a question.

"Three times." He leaned back, one arm draped across the chair beside him, completely at ease. "Alexander sent it over six hours ago. Before you signed the inheritance documents. Before you knew I existed."

"That bothers you?"

"That they were so certain you'd say yes?" The corner of his mouth moved. "No. I was certain too."

She pulled out the chair at her end of the table—not the one beside him, the one directly across, with the full length of the obsidian between them—and sat. "Then let's be honest about what this is. A fake engagement. A media show. A joint business venture designed to make Damian Voss bleed market share until there's nothing left to bleed." She folded her hands on the table. "You hate him."

"Deeply," Kane said, without hesitation and without drama. "He buried a patent dispute three years ago that cost my company fourteen months of development. He did it through a third party so it couldn't be traced. I traced it anyway." He paused. "I've been waiting for an opening."

"And I'm the opening."

"You're considerably more than that." His eyes moved over her face—not invasively, not rudely. More like a man reading something he finds genuinely interesting. "But yes. The timing is exceptional."

She slid the proposal across to him. "Then sign it."

He picked up the pen. He read the final page one more time—not because he hadn't read it, she suspected, but because he was the kind of man who signed nothing without reading it one final time. She respected that. She had married a man who signed things without reading them and look how that turned out.

Kane signed. Clean, unhesitating, a signature that took up more space than strictly necessary.

Then he turned the document back to face him, uncapped the pen again, and wrote something by hand in the margin of clause seven.

He slid it back across.

Addendum to Clause 7 — Public Presentation Requirements: For media credibility, the engagement must be demonstrated through convincing physical affection at all public appearances. Both parties acknowledge that half-measures will not serve the performance. — K.W.

Lila read it once. She read it again. She set the document down on the table with great care and looked up at him.

"Convincing physical affection," she said.

"For media optics." His expression was perfectly neutral. His eyes were not.

"You wrote that in the margin of a legal contract."

"I wanted it on record."

"It isn't legally binding."

"No," he agreed. "But it's honest." He leaned forward now, just slightly, elbows on the table. This close she could see that his eyes weren't simply dark—they were a deep, layered brown, the kind of color that changed depending on the light. Right now the boardroom light made them look almost black. "We're going to be photographed together constantly. At galas, at press events, at dinners with people who knew you as Damian Voss's wife and will be watching every micro-expression on your face for signs of a story. If we look like a business arrangement, we are a business arrangement. If we look like a couple—"

"We become a headline."

"We become a headline that destroys him," he corrected gently. "There's a difference."

She looked at the handwritten clause. Then at him. She picked up her own pen and signed her name directly beneath his addendum. No counter-clause. No conditions. Just her name.

Kane looked at her signature for a moment. Something shifted in his face — gone too fast to name.

"Tomorrow night," she said, sliding the contract back toward him. "There's an elite gala at the Meridian. Half the city's financial press will be there. We announce the engagement publicly. You get me a ring." She stood, buttoning the top button of her jacket. "Nothing understated."

"Wasn't planning on understated." He rose too—all that height unfolding from the chair in a single unhurried movement that brought him to the end of the table at the same moment she reached it. They were closer than she'd planned. Close enough that she could smell his cologne—dark wood, something cool underneath, something that made her think of winter and open windows and bad decisions that felt excellent in the making.

She held her ground. She had signed divorce papers at midnight and inherited an empire before dawn. She was not going to step back from a man in a boardroom.

"This is a transaction," she said. Steady. Clear. A reminder aimed at least partly at herself. "We both get what we want. We both walk away clean when it's done."

Kane looked down at her. He was close enough now that she could see the faint line of a scar along his jaw—old, faded, barely there. A detail the press photos never caught.

"Lila." Her name in his mouth landed differently than she expected. Not soft. Not hard. Just — precise. Like he'd been saying it privately and was only now trying it out loud. "I've built three companies from the ground up. Taken two hostile competitors apart piece by piece. I have never, in my professional life, done anything halfway."

She met his eyes. "Your point?"

"I don't do fake for long," he said. "Fair warning."

The city hummed below them. Sixty floors of air between them and the rest of the world, and the boardroom was very quiet, and Lila's pulse was doing something she chose not to examine too closely.

She picked up her copy of the contract from the table. She tucked it under her arm. She walked to the door and opened it and paused with one hand on the glass, her back to him.

"I'll see you tomorrow night, Mr. Wilder." She didn't look back. "Try to look like you're in love with me."

Behind her, she heard a sound that might have been a quiet laugh. Low. Warm. The kind that knew something she didn't.

"That," he said, "is the one part I'm not worried about."

She walked out before her face could do anything interesting.

In the corridor, she pressed her back against the cool marble wall and exhaled slowly through her nose. Her heart was beating at a speed that had nothing to do with the contract and everything to do with the man she'd just left in that room.

Transaction, she reminded herself. Just a transaction.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Marcus: How'd it go? Did he behave? He never behaves.

She was still composing a suitably detached response when she heard Kane's footsteps behind her — unhurried, like everything else about him — and his own phone chimed with a breaking news alert. She watched his face as he read it. Something flickered across it — sharp, satisfied, dangerously pleased.

He turned the screen toward her.

The headline was three lines. VOSS INNOVATIONS CEO RETURNS TO NEW YORK ON PRIVATE JET — OFFERS $5 MILLION REWARD FOR INFORMATION ON MISSING WIFE.

Missing wife. As though she'd wandered off. As though she hadn't walked out on her own two feet with her dignity intact and her pen already dry.

She felt the heat of it — the audacity, the desperation dressed up as control — move through her like a slow fire.

"He's here," she said.

"He's here." Kane slid his phone back into his pocket. His jaw had set, that scar catching the corridor light. His eyes had gone very still in the way that meant the stillness was doing a lot of work. He looked like a man who had been waiting for this specific moment for a very long time and found it, now that it had arrived, deeply satisfying.

Kane's smirk arrived slowly, the way things do when they mean it — spreading from one corner of his mouth like smoke from a lit fuse.

"Let him come," he said.

And the way he said it — quiet, absolute, almost gentle — was somehow the most terrifying thing Lila had heard all night.

She found, to her own surprise, that she wasn't scared.

She was ready.