Chapter 3: Where Do I Sign?

Xena.

I have had some strange experiences in my lifetime.

Being born illegitimate into a family that kept me like a footnote. Being sent to a wedding that wasn't mine with twenty minutes of notice. And spending three years married to a man who looked through me at dinner every night.

But none of them — not one — came close to sitting in a police interrogation room while a man who shared a last name with the people who just destroyed my life slid a deal across the table like we were closing a business lunch.

"Yeah," I scoffed. "You must be out of your mind."

He chuckled. Actual amusement, like I'd said something genuinely funny. Then the smile faded and was replaced with a cold expression. A chill went down my spine..

"Some may say that." His eyes drifted to the door. "But it would be in your best interest to hear me out."

I followed his gaze. The small window at the top of the door framed three officers waiting like there was good news to be told. The detective was pacing. He looked personally invested in whatever was about to happen to me.

"I've heard the conditions here aren't particularly favorable to your gender," Dante added. His tone was conversational. Which made it worse somehow.

I looked back at him.

Okay. Fine.

"What do you want?"

The smile that returned to his face was satisfied in a way that was already irritating me. "Nothing much."

He snapped his fingers once.

The door opened. A man in black walked in carrying a file, set it on the table without a word, and left. Through the brief gap before the door closed I caught the detective's expression. He was fuming. 

Interesting. I wonder how much he was paid to make sure I got arrested.

Dante's voice pulled my attention back.

"Ms. Cross."

I turned. He was watching me with that same cold pleasant expression.

He opened the file and slid it down the table toward me.

I looked at it then back at him.

He raised an eyebrow. "Go ahead."

I lifted my hands. The cuffs caught the light.

His mouth formed a small ‘oh’. He glanced toward the door like he was considering something, and for one moment I genuinely thought he was going to have them removed.

Instead, the man in black reappeared from nowhere, picked the file up without comment, and held the open pages in front of my face.

I stared at him.

Did this man have a single functioning nerve of empathy in his entire body? For someone who looked like he was a Greek god, he was remarkably unbothered by basic human inconvenience. Mine specifically.

I read the page anyway.

Then I read it again.

"You're not serious."

"Would you like to rot in jail?" he returned.

Ugh. I looked back at the document. A marriage contract. What was it with billionaires and marriage contracts? Could he not just — take me to dinner first? Ask like a normal person? Take me somewhere nice and then —

I stopped that thought before it finished forming and buried it.

I looked at the papers.

The jail option was genuinely off the table. I knew that. The video had already circulated, the crowd had already turned, and walking into a cell tonight with that story attached to my name would give it time to calcify into fact. My career. My reputation. Everything I had built without a single Cross family resource behind it — it would all be sitting exposed while I was in here.

But another contract marriage.

With another Yale? 

I was still turning it over in my head when he spoke.

"You're hesitating." He said it without judgment. "I understand why."

I didn't respond.

"Adrian had three years to treat you like a person," he continued. "He chose not to. Your sister stood beside him tonight and pointed at you in front of everyone. And your family —" He paused, just briefly. "The family you stepped in to protect without being asked. They didn't defend you. They haven't visited. Not one of them."

The room was very quiet.

"So why," he added, "would you trust a stranger carrying the same last name as the people who you very much detest?"

I looked at him.

Did I detest them?

I turned the word over. Detest. Before tonight I would have said no. I would have said I was indifferent, that I had made my peace, that I didn't carry hate. 

But sitting here in cuffs with my face on every phone in that ballroom and not a single Cross in this building —

I wanted to see Adrian on his knees begging. That image arrived with a clarity that surprised me.

I wanted to see it. I wanted it badly enough that I considered signing the contract at that moment..

Hannah —

I pushed the thought down before it could open. I wasn't ready for that one yet.

Dante stood. He moved around the table slowly, with no urgency, and stopped beside my chair. He put two fingers beneath my chin and tilted my face up to meet his eyes.

They were dark and steady. The eyes of someone who had made decisions like this one many times before and stopped losing sleep over them a long time ago.

"We want the same thing," he said quietly. "I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm not asking for anything that requires trust." His thumb moved once across my jaw. "I want the Yale family dismantled from the inside. So do you. That's enough. You don't need to believe in me. You just need to hate them."

He was right. That was the thing that settled in my chest with an almost uncomfortable steadiness.

I didn't need to trust him. I didn't need to feel anything about him. I needed leverage, I needed my name back, and I needed someone with enough power to fight what Adrian had already put in motion. Dante Yale, whoever he actually was, had just walked into a police station and cleared a room with a snap of his fingers.

He had resources and I had a motive. People had built empires on less of a foundation than that.

His hand moved — tracing a slow line down from my jaw, between the open lapels of my jacket between my breasts, coming to rest at my waist. He leaned down until his mouth was close enough to my ear that I could feel the warmth of it before he said a word.

Whatever he said, I didn't fully process it.

Because my entire nervous system had apparently decided that right now, in this specific moment, was an excellent time to completely abandon professionalism.

No. I straightened internally. Absolutely not. You are in handcuffs. In a police station. Focus.

I could use him. That was the operative word. He wanted Yale destroyed. I wanted Yale destroyed. Everything else was noise.

I looked up at him.

The silence between us had stretched long enough that he was watching me with something that might have been patience or might have been certainty. Like he already knew what I was going to say and was simply waiting for me to arrive at it.

"Where do I sign?"