005 The Terms Nobody Warned Me About

Christabel

The text hadn't come from Beatrix. It had come from him.

I found that out the hard way, standing outside a private room at a restaurant so expensive it didn't have prices on the menu, my heart going so fast I could feel it in my throat, wondering if I'd walked into the wrong building entirely. A host in a black suit led me back without asking my name, like he already knew exactly who I was and exactly why I was there, which was somehow worse than if he'd asked.

Sebastian Vettel was already seated when I walked in, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the forearm, a single glass of water in front of him instead of wine, and he didn't stand when I came in, which I decided to be annoyed about instead of anything else, because annoyed was easier to hold onto than terrified.

"You're late," he said.

"You're the one who texted me two hours ago and told me to show up alone with no context. I had to figure out which restaurant this even was."

"Sit down."

"Is that how you talk to everyone, or am I special."

Something flickered across his face, not quite a smile, more like the ghost of one that had decided against showing up. "Sit down, Miss Chen."

I sat. Mostly because my legs had started shaking somewhere around the second flight of stairs and I didn't trust them to hold me up much longer.

"I want to be clear about something before we start," he said, no small talk, no condolences, nothing. "I did not want this meeting. I did not want this arrangement. If it were up to me, you would be at home right now, and this conversation would not exist."

"Good to know we agree on something."

That earned me a look, quick and sharp, like he hadn't expected me to have a spine left after everything. "This is not personal."

"You blamed me for his death at the funeral. Don't tell me it's not personal, I watched your face do it."

He didn't deny it. That, more than anything he could have said, told me everything I needed to know about what the next however-many years of my life were going to look like.

"Here are the terms," he said instead, sliding a folder across the table, thinner than the one my father had shown me but somehow heavier. "Your father's debt is cleared in full, quietly, before the end of the week. In exchange, you marry me within thirty days. You live in the penthouse. You appear, in public, as my wife, at the events that require it. You do not discuss family business with the press, ever, under any circumstance."

"That's it?"

"There's one more."

Of course there was.

"My daughter," he said, and something in his voice changed, dropped lower, less rehearsed than everything before it. "Jane. She is four years old. She has not spoken a full sentence in over a year. I need this marriage to look real to her, at minimum, because she has had enough people disappear from her life without one more."

I sat with that for a long moment, watching the ice melt in his water glass, thinking about a small girl in a black dress too big for her, swinging her feet at a funeral because they didn't reach the floor.

"You want me to lie to a four year old."

"I want you to be kind to her. Whether that becomes a lie is up to you."

"And what do I get out of this. Besides my father's shop."

"You get your father's shop," he said, like the question surprised him, like he hadn't considered there might be more to want. "That's the deal, Miss Chen. I'm not offering you a fairytale. I'm offering you a solution to a problem, the same way I solve every other problem in my life. Efficiently, and without illusions."

I should have said no. I know that now, looking back, I had a version of myself in that moment who could have stood up, walked out, let the shop fall, let my father figure something else out the way he swore he always did. But I thought about the number circled in red, and I thought about a little girl's feet not reaching the floor, and I thought, stupidly, about Gabriel, who would have hated every single thing about this dinner, the coldness of it, the way his brother sat across from me like I was a line item.

"Fine," I said. "I'll do it."

Something in Sebastian's shoulders loosened, barely, the first almost human thing I'd seen from him all night. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a second folder, thicker, and set it beside the first.

"Then we should discuss the prenuptial agreement," he said, "and the wedding date. Beatrix has already booked the cathedral for the sixteenth."

My stomach dropped clean through the floor.

"The sixteenth of what."

"This month."

"That's eleven days from now." My voice came out thin, strangled, nothing like the steady tone I'd been holding onto for the last ten minutes. "Sebastian, that's the same cathedral."

He went very still.

"The same one," I said again, because he clearly wasn't understanding, or didn't want to. "That's where we buried him eleven days ago. That's where I was supposed to marry him three weeks from now. You want me to walk down that aisle again, in that building, for you."

For the first time all night, Sebastian Vettel looked like he didn't have an answer ready.