Chapter 1: The Proposition

Amelia Hart counted the money twice before she believed it.

Four hundred and twelve dollars. That was all that stood between her mother's next round of medication and nothing. She sat on the edge of her bed in the small apartment on Ninth Street, the bills spread out on the blanket like a losing hand of cards, and she did the math again anyway, because some part of her still hoped she'd made a mistake the first time.

She hadn't.

Outside, the city was loud in the way it always was at six in the morning, garbage trucks and delivery vans and someone's car alarm going off two blocks over. Amelia barely heard any of it. She was thinking about the letter from the hospital, folded into a small, tight square at the bottom of her bag, and about the man who had called her twice this week already, a man named Ferris who spoke in a voice so calm it made her skin crawl.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She looked at it and felt her stomach drop before she even read the name.

Ferris.

She let it ring three times before she answered.

"Miss Hart," he said, pleasant as ever, like he was calling about the weather. "I trust you got my message yesterday."

"I got it."

"Then you understand the position we're in. Your father's debt doesn't disappear because he did. I've been patient, Amelia. More patient than most men in my position would be."

"I need more time." She hated how small her voice sounded. "I have a plan. I'm working three jobs. I just need"

"You've needed more time for eight months." His tone didn't change, and that was the worst part. He never raised his voice. He didn't have to. "I'll be honest with you, because I like you, and because your father was, in his way, an honest man who made a foolish mistake. If this isn't resolved by the end of the month, I will have to involve people who are less patient than I am. I don't think you want that. I don't think your mother wants that."

The line went dead before she could answer.

Amelia sat there with the phone still pressed to her ear for a long moment, listening to nothing.

By nine that morning she was in a law office on the thirty-first floor of a glass building downtown, sitting across from a woman named Patricia Yoon, who had been her father's lawyer once and was, as far as Amelia knew, the only person left who still returned her calls.

"I don't usually do this," Patricia said, sliding a folder across the desk. "But I've known you since you were twelve years old, and I'm not going to sit here and watch Ferris bury you the way he buried your father."

Amelia opened the folder. Inside was a single page, a name at the top in bold letters.

*Damian Blackwood.*

She knew the name the way everyone in the city knew it from magazine covers, from business headlines, from the kind of gossip that followed a man who was rich enough that his personal life became public property. Blackwood Industries. A face that showed up in the paper more often for his silence than anything he said.

"I don't understand," Amelia said. "What does this have to do with me?"

"He's looking for a wife." Patricia said it plainly, like she was reading off a grocery list. "A temporary one. One year, a legal contract, an arrangement that ends when the year does. In exchange, he clears any debt you name and pays a settlement large enough to set your mother up properly for the rest of her life."

Amelia laughed, short and disbelieving. "That's insane."

"It's business. His business, not yours to understand. All I know is he asked me, weeks ago, if I knew anyone in a hard enough spot that they'd actually consider it. I told him no. Then I heard about Ferris." Patricia's eyes softened, just slightly. "I'm not telling you to do this, Amelia. I'm telling you the offer exists, and that you deserve to know it exists before you make any decisions out of fear."

Amelia stared down at the name on the page. Damian Blackwood. Cold, unreadable, a man she had never met and knew nothing about except what the tabloids printed.

"Why me?" she asked. "He doesn't even know me."

"I don't know," Patricia admitted. "Maybe that's exactly why."

Amelia didn't decide anything that day. She went home, checked on her mother, who was sleeping in the armchair by the window with a blanket pulled up to her chin, thinner than she'd been a year ago, thinner than Amelia could stand to think about for too long. She made tea she didn't drink. She sat with the folder unopened on the kitchen table until it got dark.

It was Nolan who found her like that, letting himself in with the spare key he'd had since college, dropping a bag of takeout on the counter before he even said hello.

"You look like someone died," he said, then winced. "Sorry. Bad joke."

"Ferris called again."

Nolan's face changed instantly. He'd hated Ferris from the first time Amelia mentioned the name, had offered more than once to "look into him," which Amelia knew meant something reckless and probably illegal, and which she'd always talked him out of.

She told him about the meeting with Patricia. About the folder. About the name in bold letters at the top of the page.

Nolan was quiet for a long moment after she finished. Then he said, "You're actually considering it."

"I don't know what I'm considering."

"Amelia." He sat down across from her, serious now in a way he rarely was. "A stranger. A billionaire nobody actually knows anything about, except that half the city's afraid of him. You'd be married to him. Legally. In his house. For a year."

"I know how marriage works, Nolan."

"That's not what I mean and you know it." He rubbed a hand over his face. "I just don't want you walking into something because you're scared, and then finding out too late that you should've been more scared."

She didn't have an answer for that. She wasn't sure there was one.

She called Ferris back three days later, not to agree to anything, only to buy time she didn't have. He gave her a week. A week, and then, in his words, matters would be "handled differently."

That night Amelia sat at the kitchen table again, the folder open in front of her, the photograph of Damian Blackwood staring back at her from the page a face that gave nothing away, dark eyes that looked like they'd never once needed anyone.

She thought about her mother's medication. About the hospital letter. About Ferris's voice, calm as a closed door.

She picked up her phone and dialed the number Patricia had given her before she could talk herself out of it.

A man answered on the second ring. His voice was low, flat, businesslike, exactly what she'd expected from a face like that.

"This is Damian Blackwood."

Amelia closed her eyes.

"My name is Amelia Hart," she said. "I was told you're looking for a wife."

There was a pause on the other end of the line, long enough that she almost thought the call had dropped.

"Come to my office tomorrow," he said finally. "Nine o'clock. We'll discuss terms."

The line went dead, the second time that week someone had hung up on her without a goodbye.

Amelia sat there in the dark kitchen for a long time after, the phone still warm in her hand, wondering what exactly she had just agreed to.