CHAPTER TWO

Zahara's POV

The Lawson estate had not changed in five years, so I think...The same iron gates, the same gravel drive that crunched under tires like small bones breaking, the same rows of clipped hedges that had always felt more like a fence around me than decoration around the house.

I sat in the back of the car the lawyer sent for me. My hands folded tight on my lap so nobody would see them shake.

I watched the estate rise into view through the tinted window...the way a nightmare rises when you are not quite asleep and not quite awake.

Priya had promised to keep the twins safe at her place for as long as I needed. 

"Go, save the company. Just do not let them see your face crack.” So, she had told me at the door that morning, gripping my shoulders hard enough it hurts.

But, I held onto those words the whole drive...repeating them like a prayer under my breath every time the car passed a landmark I remembered too well, especially the small bakery where I used to escape as a girl just to feel invisible for an hour.

The front door opened before I even reached it, and Susan stood there in a cream dress that probably cost more than my monthly rent, her smile arriving a full second before her eyes did.

"Finally, the exile returns.” she said.

"Susan."

"Still so plain…" she fixed her gazed on me the way she used to when I was sixteen and desperate for anyone in that house to look at me kindly. "I suppose desperation does not care how you dress. Or perhaps wherever you ran off to did not have mirrors."

Clara appeared behind her mother shortly, arms crossed…the diamond on her finger catches the hall light. 

My younger stepsister…now married to the man who was supposed to marry me. She did not bother pretending sympathy. "You look tired, Zahara. Wherever you have been hiding must not agree with you."

"It agreed with me fine," I said quietly. "It was the leaving I never chose."

Clara's mouth tightened, but Susan only laughed, a short, brittle sound…and she swept past me into the house as though she owned every square foot of it, which, I supposed, in every way that mattered to her, she did.

I said nothing more...Five years of silence had taught me that arguing with them only fed whatever hunger lived behind their eyes.

My father found us in the hallway...older than I remembered, gray threading through his hair. But tension tightens the skin around his mouth. "Zahara." He called my name carefully...like he was not sure he still had the right to it.

"Where do you want me to sit while you explain how you plan to sell me?" I said nonchalantly.

Something flickered across his face, guilt maybe, or the memory of it, but he only gestured toward his study. "Please."

Inside, he poured himself a drink he did not touch and told me everything the lawyer had already said…the debt, the collapsing company, the marriage that would fix it all in one signature.

I watched his hands while he spoke, the same hands that had signed the papers exiling his own daughter without asking a single question first…the same hands that had once carried me on his shoulders through the estate garden before my mother died and everything after her turned cold.

"And if I refuse," I said.

"Then everything your mother built disappears, everything she worked for." His voice cracked slightly on the word mother...and for one unguarded second he looked like a man who had actually loved her once.

"I know what I did to you, Zahara...I know I cannot undo it. But I am asking you to do this for her, not for me."

I thought of Yvonne, the mother I barely remembered except in fragments…her laugh, the smell of her perfume, the company logo she designed herself before illness took her when I was still a child.

I thought of my twins asleep at Priya's…of the life I had rebuilt in secret, of how close I had come to losing everything once already because I trusted the wrong people in this house.

"Who is the groom?" I asked.

"Armando Ivas. He runs Ivas Holdings. Ruthless...from what I heard but a man of his word." My father hesitated, glancing toward the closed door...like he expected it to open on its own. "He asked to meet you tonight. Before the contracts are signed."

Something cold moved through me again...the same feeling from the doorstep the night before, a memory trying to surface before I could stop it.

"Tonight," I repeated.

"Yes, and I think he’s already here."

The study door opened before I could ask anything else, and a man stepped through it…tall enough to fill the frame, broad shoulders in a dark suit that fit him like it had been built around his body.

My mouth went dry before I even saw his face clearly. Then he lifted his head...and I found myself staring into a pair of sea blue eyes I had spent five years trying to forget.

The glass in my father's hand meant nothing anymore. The company, the contracts…none of it mattered in that frozen second, because the stranger from the bar, the father of my children, the man who did not even know my name that night, was standing three feet away from me wearing the face of the groom my family had chosen to save us all.

His eyes narrowed as recognition slides into place.

"You," he said quietly, and the single word hit me harder than anything Susan or Clara had said all night.