Chapter - No More Guessing

Roman's Pov

Three years ago, Roman had let her walk away without a single word to stop her, and he had told himself for three years that the silence had been dignity. It hadn't been dignity. It had been fear, dressed up nicely enough that he could live with it.

He wasn't going to make that mistake with the same woman twice in one lifetime.

"Don't marry him," Roman said.

Ivy's breath caught, sharp enough that he heard it in the quiet of the car. "That's not an answer to what I asked you."

"It's the only part of the answer I can say out loud right now, sitting outside my mother's house, with your father's company hanging over both our heads." He turned to face her fully, needing her to see exactly how much this was costing him to say. "I'm not going to pretend I don't want you to walk away from that wedding. I have wanted that since the second you got out of your car in that parking lot and I heard my own voice say your name like no time had passed at all."

"Roman—"

"But I'm not going to ask you to blow up your father's company to prove something to me. That's not a choice. That's blackmail with better lighting." His jaw tightened. "So here's what I can actually give you. I will personally restructure your father's loan through my own holdings, separate from my mother's leverage entirely, so that whatever you decide about Julian, it isn't decided by a debt anymore."

Ivy stared at him. "You'd do that."

"I already started this morning." He hadn't meant to admit that yet — hadn't meant to hand her proof of exactly how much he'd already rearranged his life around a possibility she hadn't agreed to yet — but it was too late to take back now, and some stubborn part of him didn't want to. "Your father's company will be fine regardless of what happens with Julian. That's not a bargaining chip. That's just true."

For a long moment she didn't say anything at all, and Roman made himself sit in the silence instead of filling it, because the last time he'd rushed her into an answer she wasn't ready for, he'd lost her for three years.

"Why," she finally said, voice unsteady in a way he'd never once heard from her, "why m wwould you do that for me, if you're not asking for anything back?"

"Because you deserve one decision in your life that isn't made for you by a debt." He held her gaze, steady even though nothing about this moment felt steady at all. "What you do with Julian after that is yours to decide. Not mine. Not my mother's. Yours."

---

Ivy's POV

She hadn't cried once through the entire scandal — not through Julian's affair, not through the leaked photo, not through Margaret Ashford's quiet, surgical ultimatum in a study that smelled like old money and older secrets. She'd held every single piece of herself together through sheer professional will, because that was the only skill she trusted to actually work.

Sitting in Roman's car, she felt the first crack go straight through the center of it.

"I don't know how to just decide something for myself anymore," she admitted, and hated how small her voice sounded saying it. "I've spent three years making sure everyone else's disaster gets solved. I don't remember what it feels like to want something without calculating what it costs everyone around me first."

"Then don't calculate it." Roman's voice had gone rough. "Just tell me the truth. Not the version that keeps your father's company safe, or keeps the Ashford name clean, or keeps Julian from feeling like he lost something in front of a camera. Just the truth."

Ivy looked at him — really looked, past three years of careful distance and one very inconvenient car accident — and something that had been locked down since the night she'd left him without an explanation finally came loose.

"I never should have left," she said. "Three years ago. I told myself it was for your career, that a scandal with my family's name attached to yours would have cost you everything you'd worked for. I told myself I was protecting you." Her hands were shaking now, and she let them. "That wasn't the truth either. I was scared. Of how much I wanted to stay. So I left before you could realize I wasn't worth staying for."

"Wren." He hadn't called her that since the parking lot, and hearing it now undid something in her chest she'd spent three years reinforcing. "You were always worth staying for. I just never got the chance to prove it."

The space between them in the car had gone very small.

"If I end things with Julian," she said, barely above a whisper, "it can't be about you. It has to be because I don't want to marry a man who chose someone else the moment things got hard. It has to be my decision. Not a debt. Not a rescue. Mine."

"I know." Roman's hand found hers across the console, slow enough that she could have pulled away but she didn't. "Take whatever time you need to make it that way. I'm not going anywhere this time."

Her phone buzzed between them, breaking whatever fragile thing had just started to form in the quiet of the car.

She looked down at the screen, and every ounce of warmth in her chest turned instantly cold.

It was a text from an unknown number, three words long, with a photo attached that made her stomach drop straight through the floor of the car.

We need to talk — Camille.

The photo was of a signed contract. And Julian's signature wasn't the only name on it.