Chapter Two: The Order

Layla’s POV

The word left my mouth before I could stop it.

“What.”

It sat in the air between us — small, insufficient, entirely inadequate for the size of what my grandfather had just said. I stared at him across the desk and waited for the part where he told me he was joking, or testing me, or making some kind of elaborate point about business decisions that I was supposed to learn from.

He looked back at me with the expression of a man who had never made a joke in his life and did not intend to start today.

I took a breath.

There was no use screaming. Derick Thompson did not respond to screaming. He was a no-nonsense man who had built an empire on cold decisions and colder logic, and raising my voice at him would accomplish nothing except giving him a reason to dismiss me from the room faster.

So I kept my voice calm. Steady. The way he had taught me to be in boardrooms, in negotiations, in every situation where the instinct was to react and the skill was to respond.

“Grandpa.” I folded my hands in my lap. “You know my lifelong wish. You have always known it. I want to fall in love and get married to someone I choose. I cannot marry someone I barely know. Someone I don’t love.”

He leaned back in his chair. “You will grow to love him. Ian Lawson is disciplined, intelligent and driven. He is probably the best decision I could have made for you.”

“With respect — that is not your decision to make.”

His expression didn’t change. “It was made. Years ago. The contract exists.”

“Grandpa.” I leaned forward slightly. “I woke up this morning and found out that my life has been arranged without my knowledge or my consent. That is not a small thing. This is my life. I should be the one to decide when I get married and who I get married to.”

“This is a good life we are offering you both,” he said, and something in his voice had shifted — the patience thinning, the hardness underneath beginning to show. “The Lawson family is the best family in New York. You will want for nothing.”

“I want to choose,” I said. My voice had risen without my permission. “That is all I want. Just the right to choose.”

“You are getting married to Ian Lawson.” He stood. His voice was final in the way of someone closing a door. “That is not a request. It is an order.”

He walked out of his own study.

I sat in the chair he had left behind and stared at the empty desk and breathed very carefully through the thing rising in my chest — not quite anger, not quite grief, something that was both and neither and had no name I was comfortable giving it.

I was tempted to go after him. To follow him down the hallway and into whatever room he had retreated to and say every single thing I had swallowed in that study. There was plenty left.

Instead I stood up, walked out, went down the hallway to the staircase and climbed it slowly, one step at a time, until I reached my room and closed the door behind me.

I sat on the edge of my bed and called Hailey.

She answered on the fourth ring with the voice of someone who had been forcibly separated from sleep and was not happy about it.

“Your Majesty.” Her tone was flat. “Did it occur to you that some of us are still sleeping?”

“It’s past nine, Hailey.”

“It’s the weekend.”

“Grandpa wants me to get married.”

The silence that followed lasted approximately one second.

Then she screamed.

Not a small sound. A full, committed, wall-rattling scream that made me pull the phone away from my ear and wait for it to finish.

“WHAT.” Her voice had gone up three octaves. “Layla. WHAT.”

“I just found out this morning.” I leaned back against my pillow and stared at the ceiling. “Apparently he arranged it when we were teenagers. Some kind of contract between him and another family.”

“Okay.” I could hear her sitting up, the sleepiness completely gone. “More information. Now. Everything.”

“He made an agreement with another family years ago when his company was in trouble. They helped him and in return—” I paused. “In return I marry their grandson.”

“So you’re actually getting married.” It wasn’t a question.

“It looks that way.”

“Did you agree?”

“Not yet. But Hailey, you know that man. Do I actually stand a chance against him?”

She was quiet for a moment — which from Hailey was unusual enough to be significant. Then: “Who is it? Who are you marrying?”

I closed my eyes.

“Ian Lawson.”

The second scream was louder than the first.

I held the phone at arm’s length and waited.

“IAN LAWSON.” Her voice had reached a frequency I was fairly certain only dogs could hear. “Ian LAWSON and you are sitting here complaining? Layla I would literally sell my left shoe to be in your position right now—”

“Hailey.”

“That man is fine. That man is FINE fine. Have you seen his arms? Have you seen his tattoos? I once saw a photo of him at a charity event and I genuinely had to sit down—”

“Hailey.” I sat up. “Have you forgotten what that man did to me? In the club at  Manhattan? That arrogant, insufferable—”

“Okay but to be fair,” she said, with the breezy confidence of someone about to say something completely unreasonable, “he was probably just in a bad mood that day.”

I stared at the ceiling.

“A bad mood,” I repeated.

“People have bad days, Layla.”

“Hailey. What he did—”

“Was rude, yes, completely rude, one hundred percent rude,” she said quickly. “But also — Ian Lawson. Those tattoos. That jaw. The way Forbes keeps putting him on covers like he personally invented money—”

“You are genuinely not helping me right now.”

She laughed. The bright, unrepentant laugh of someone who was enjoying this entirely too much and had no intention of stopping.

We talked for a while longer — or rather, Hailey talked and I let her, because sometimes the most useful thing a best friend could do was fill the silence with enough noise that the weight of a situation became slightly more bearable.

By the time we hung up she had not solved a single one of my problems. She had, however, made me smile twice without meaning to, which was possibly the most Hailey thing she had ever done.

I put the phone down and went to the window.

New York spread out below me — wide and loud and entirely indifferent, the city going about its Saturday morning without any awareness that somewhere in a study downstairs an old man had just rearranged the entire trajectory of my life with the calm authority of someone moving pieces on a board.

I thought about Ian Lawson.

Not the Forbes covers. Not the tattoos that Hailey had practically composed poetry about. Not the version of him that existed in photographs and business headlines and the breathless way people said his name when they thought power was the most attractive thing about a person.

I thought about Manhattan. About three months ago. About the specific, precise, entirely unforgivable thing he had done the first and only time we had stood in the same room together.

My jaw tightened.

That man was ego and arrogance in an expensive suit. He was the kind of person who moved through the world as though it had been arranged for his personal convenience and everyone in it existed merely to confirm that belief.

And I was supposed to marry him.

I pressed my fingers against the cool glass of the window and looked out at the city and made myself a quiet, private promise.

I did not know how yet. I did not know what form the fight would take or how long it would last or whether I had any real power against a contract signed before I was old enough to understand what contracts meant.

But I was not going to simply accept this.

Derick Thompson had raised me to be many things. Quiet and obedient were not among them.

Ian Lawson, I thought. The name sat in my chest like a stone.

You have no idea what’s coming.

*******

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— Ruthie ❤️