Chapter 3

Leon Knight’s POV

The contract was signed.

The girl with the death wish and the desperate eyes was now bound to me by twelve pages of navy leather and her own signature.

She got what she came for. I got what I needed. A clean reason on paper for the next six months of financial moves that were going to look very suspicious to very dangerous people.

Simple. Neat. Done.

I had Miss Thorne handle the security reports before we even reached the elevator. Whatever Nickie had done to get past the lobby was going to be filed away as a classified isolated incident and never spoken of again. Reputation first. Always.

The elevator ride up to the penthouse was quiet. Nickie stood straight with her eyes fixed on the steel doors like she was waiting for something to jump out of them. I watched her reflection. She was small. But the anger was still there under everything, sitting low and quiet, waiting.

I was fairly sure she was calculating the price of my briefcase.

The penthouse doors opened and she stepped out and her eyes went everywhere at once. The ceilings, the stone floors, the sculpture in the corner that I bought three years ago purely because it would be worth four times the price by now. She looked at it the way people look at things they want to either clean or steal.

“Don’t touch anything,” I said, walking to the media console. “Everything in this room costs more than your debt.”

She flinched. Then came back fast.

“I wasn’t going to touch anything, Leon. I’m just trying to figure out which cushion could pay off my student loans.”

I noted that. The wit. Quick, unfiltered, slightly reckless. In any other situation it would be a problem. Right now it might actually be useful. She needed to seem like a real person in public and real people were rarely this easy to script.

I pulled up the cover story on the console.

“We need a narrative,” I said. “Listen carefully. We met three weeks ago at the Children’s Art Foundation benefit gala. You volunteer there. You spilled wine on my suit. You apologized badly. I found it charming. We kept it private. It only came out now because keeping it quiet stopped being practical.”

Nickie stared at me.

“Wine. I hate wine. And I don’t volunteer anywhere, I barely sleep. Why can’t we say we met at a library?”

“Billionaires don’t meet people at libraries.”

“Why not?”

“Because we buy the building and turn it into a private lab. Keep going.”

She chewed her lip.

“Okay but think about it for a second. You’re forty three. I’m twenty four. How does anyone believe I just fell for you at a charity gala? No offense.”

“None taken. Wealth cancels age. It always has.”

“That’s depressing.”

“That’s accurate. Moving on.”

She threw her hands up.

“Fine. But can the story at least sound like a human wrote it? Found her lack of social grace charming sounds like your PR team describing a robot.”

Then she just started talking. Fast and messy, some version of a story where she broke into his R&D lab to look at plans for a quantum processing core and he caught her and instead of calling security he gave her a puzzle and she solved it and that was when he fell for her mind but her body kept getting in the way.

She did not stop for air.

I watched her. The nerves were running everything now, that particular kind of panic that comes when someone realizes they are fully trapped and their brain starts throwing anything at the wall.

The corner of my mouth moved.

Just slightly. Less than a second.

She stopped talking immediately.

Her eyes, which I was now noticing were a very unsettling shade of green, locked onto my face.

She saw it. She actually caught it.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I said, turning back to the console. The amusement was already gone. I don’t know why it appeared in the first place. “The story is set. We move to logistics.”

The next few hours were not something I would choose to repeat.

My stylist came and measured her. That jacket she had worn into my building was not going to appear in public again.

Then the rings.

I had a tray brought up. Emerald cut, cushion cut, solitaire, all of them designed to make people stop walking.

“Pick one,” I said.

She looked at the tray like it was a math problem.

“Any of them? They’re all huge. That one.” She pointed at a two carat solitaire.

“Too small. It looks uncertain. The cushion cut. Ten carats.”

“That’s the size of a small country.”

“Put it on.”

She put it on. It sat on her finger like an anchor. Cold and heavy and exactly right for what we needed it to say.

Then the photos. A photographer. Us standing close, me looking at her, her looking just slightly past me.

Then the handholding.

That was the worst part.

“Loosen your grip,” I said. “You’re holding my hand like I stole something from you.”

“You kind of did,” she muttered.

“Look at me. Smile. Not like that. That looks like a hostage photo. Think about your dad walking out of that hospital. Use that.”

It was painful. Her hands were small and warm and the whole thing felt completely absurd. I do not do absurd. I do not do warm. I run a company worth eleven billion dollars and I was standing in my own penthouse practicing handholding with a girl who had slid under my lobby turnstile four hours ago.

But it had to be perfect. This was not a relationship. This was a defense strategy. And defense strategies do not fail.

I sent her down to the guest suite with simple instructions. Memorize the story. Don’t leave the building. Be ready.

I sat down with the compliance reports.

My phone buzzed.

Marcus Vance. Board member. One of the more difficult ones.

The message was short.

The board has concerns about the undocumented nature of your engagement. We want a formal meeting with the girl. Tomorrow. Ten in the morning. The merger depends on how well she performs. Don’t disappoint us.

I put the phone down.

The board wasn’t going to wait six months to test this. They were starting tomorrow.

I had paid two million dollars for a fiancée who couldn’t hold my hand without looking like she was being arrested.

And now she had less than twelve hours to become convincing.

Nickie Chen was about to find out that getting the money was the easy part.

Surviving my world was something else entirely.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​