Chapter Five

**Chapter 5: The Deal**

MERIS

I'd rehearsed this.

The entire Uber ride. The elevator. The walk across that marble floor. I had the words lined up clean and ready, qualifications, circumstances, the upfront payment request, all of it organized into something that sounded composed and impossible to say no to.

Every single word of it was gone the moment our eyes met.

Because the man standing across the desk from me wasn't just Rafael Belmont, the next Alpha Chairman, business mogul, the man I'd built my entire dreams around at seventeen.

He was the man from the car park. The mask was gone, but I'd have known those eyes; I couldn't be mistaken. I'd felt his mouth on my throat less than twelve hours ago. I'd moaned under his breath without knowing it was him. And he stood there and let me walk away without saying a word.

I held my face very still and said nothing.

My wolf was making a considerable amount of noise inside me, none of it helpful.

"You were expecting me," I said. It didn't come out as a question, and he didn't treat it like one.

The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. Something more controlled than that, something that suggested he'd been waiting for exactly this moment and had decided in advance how to wear it. He crossed to his desk and settled into the chair with the ease of a man who had never once felt out of place anywhere in his life.

"Sit down, Meris."

Not Miss Volkov. Not please. Just my name, dropped into the room like he'd been using it for years.

I sat.

The desk between us was vast and almost bare, a laptop, a single folder placed with precision in the center. I noticed the tattoos for the first time in proper light. Dark ink curling from his fingers, disappearing past his wrists beneath the crisp white cuffs of his shirt. Last night I'd felt those hands on my waist in the dark and hadn't known what they meant.

"You came here for a job," he said.

"Yes."

"And a year's salary upfront."

I kept my voice level. "My mother needs surgery. Eighty thousand dollars. I have forty-eight hours." I said it the way I'd practiced it in my head, direct, no apology, no flinching.

He didn't react the way people usually did. No sharp intake of breath. No quick reshaping of his expression into something pitying. He just looked at me, steady and unreadable.

"I know about your mother," he said.

The room went very quiet.

"I know about Connor. I know about last night, the party, the lodge, the rejection." A pause sat in the room and made itself comfortable. "I know about the email you never received."

I kept my hands flat against the leather of the chair. Kept my face neutral. Said nothing, because there was nothing to say to that.

He'd known. Before I arrived. Before the elevator. Before I even decided to come here, he'd already known.

"How," I said quietly.

"Because I've been paying attention." He said it simply, like it was the most reasonable thing in the world. "For a long time."

The room felt smaller than it had a minute ago.

I thought about the party. The man near the entrance whose gaze had made the temperature drop two degrees. The man I'd walked into by the doors, who'd looked at me with that strange, unsettling recognition. Who'd followed me into a dark car park and kissed me like he already knew exactly how I'd respond.

My breath caught. So I was right, but I needed to ask to be certain.

"The man at the party last night…"

"Was me."

I wanted to look away. At the window, at the city, at literally anything that wasn't his face. But that would be worse, and we both knew it.

"You should have said something," I said.

"You didn't ask who I was."

I had nothing for that.

A beat of silence settled between us. He was still watching me, fingers relaxed against the desk, expression giving away nothing. The morning light made his eyes look darker than they were.

"I have a proposal for you," he said. "It isn't a job."

Something in the air shifted.

"I need a wife."

The words sat between us. I stared at him.

"Publicly," he continued, his voice even. "A full wedding. Documented. Announced." He opened the folder and turned it toward me. "Everything your mother needs will be covered. Surgery, aftercare, all of it. No limit."

My eyes dropped to the papers. Dense text. Clean formatting. A signature line.

I didn't touch it.

I was thinking about how long it must have taken to prepare this. How certain he must have been that I'd come.

"One year," he said. "Fulfill the terms, your mother is taken care of, and you walk away with enough to start over anywhere you want."

I looked at him.

One year. A contract marriage. With the man who'd disappeared from my life seven years ago and reappeared last night with his mouth against my throat and his hands in my hair. Who'd apparently been watching me closely enough to know things no one else knew.

I reached out and pulled the folder across the desk.

I read slowly. The terms were exactly what he'd said: my mother's surgery, her aftercare, everything covered within twenty-four hours of signing. One year of shared residence, public appearances, the full performance of a functioning marriage. At the end: half a million dollars and continued medical coverage for my mother.

Then I reached the punishment clause.

I read it twice.

For every term of this contract breached by the second party, consequences will be determined solely at the discretion of the first party.

I looked up.

He was watching me. He'd been watching me this entire time.

"This clause." I kept my voice even. "The punishment clause."

"Standard."

"It isn't standard." I turned the folder and pressed one finger to the paragraph. "You've given yourself complete discretion. No limits defined. No boundaries outlined. That's not a contract clause; it's a blank check."

He looked at the page. Then at me.

"It stays."

"Then I need to know what it means."

A pause. Long and deliberate.

"It means," he said, "that if you break the terms, there are consequences. And those consequences will not be gentle." His eyes held mine without apology. "I won't pretend otherwise."

The room was very quiet.

My mother had four days. Forty-eight hours for the payment. No Connor. No father. No options that didn't involve walking back to any of them who had already made it clear exactly what they thought I was worth.

I thought about her hands, cool and still under mine in that hospital room. The machines. The doctor giving me forty-eight hours like he was already counting down without me.

I pulled the contract toward me.

He produced a pen before I could ask for one.

Our eyes met. I held his gaze for one long second, and something moved behind his eyes, quiet and certain, the way a door closes on a decision that's already been made.

I took the pen and signed.

The scratch of it against paper was the loudest thing in the room. When I set it down, he was looking at my signature with an expression I couldn't quite read. Still. Satisfied. And underneath that, something older that I didn't have a name for yet.

"One year," I said.

His eyes moved over me slowly, deliberately, starting at my face and taking their time getting anywhere else. I wavered slightly. The corner of his mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile and was far more dangerous than one.

"Yes, Princess." His voice dropped just slightly. "One year. And we're getting married today."