CHAPTER 3: A PRENUPTIAL AGREEMENT?

The word "fiancée" kept bouncing off the walls of my skull with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. I stood frozen in the center of the office, waiting to wake up on my air mattress with a stiff neck, but the thick carpet beneath my feet and the smell of expensive leather confirmed this was real.

I barely had time to process that I had just gotten engaged to a billionaire I met three minutes ago, when the frosted glass door violently swung open again.

Maximiliano Montenegro marched in with the urgency of a man who controlled the rest of the world’s time. In his right hand, he held a bound stack of paper as thick as a cinder block. Before I could even make a sound, he raised his arm and dropped the massive brick of paper onto my mahogany desk.

The impact echoed like a gunshot.

"Sign," he ordered.

I jumped, cautiously approaching the desk. The document had a black cardstock cover with silver embossed letters: Prenuptial Agreement, Asset Merger, and Terms of Corporate Cohabitation.

I swallowed hard. My throat was so dry it felt like I had swallowed a handful of cat litter.

"What is all this?" I managed to say, my voice squeaking two octaves higher than normal. "It looks like the encyclopedia of fraud... I mean, of finance."

Max locked his gray eyes on me, judging me with mathematical coldness. He crossed his arms, stretching the fabric of his Italian suit jacket across his broad shoulders.

"It’s the document your father’s lawyers and mine drafted early this morning. It details the confidentiality clauses of our marriage, the division of shares in the event of a divorce, and the financial penalties for public scandals. Read it fast. We have the shareholder meeting in eight minutes."

Fifty pages of legal jargon in eight minutes. Right. As if my brain could process anything more complex than the instructions on a cup of instant ramen.

I flipped to the first page with trembling fingers. I saw words like usufruct, jurisprudence, dividends, and blind trusts. Every paragraph looked like it was written in ancient Aramaic. I started to break out in a cold sweat. If my real name went into some corporate database when I signed, the lie would shatter, and he’d call security to throw me out the fiftieth-floor window.

Max leaned over the desk. His cologne, a mix of cedarwood and absolute authority, invaded my personal space, completely short-circuiting my ability to think. He extended a long, perfect finger, tapping page thirty-two.

"Before you sign, I want your thoughts on clause 4.B," he said, his tone taking on a challenging edge. "Your father claims you have a very unique perspective on capital flow. What is your take on our asset yield strategy versus retail market volatility?"

Panic slapped me in the face. Yield of what? Volatility of who? My only experience with the "retail market" was haggling over the price of tomatoes with the ruthless vendor at my neighborhood street market.

I had to make something up. I had to string together a bunch of professional-sounding words before he figured out that my biggest financial achievement was making a tube of toothpaste last three extra weeks by cutting it in half.

"Well..." I started, clearing my throat and trying to channel the arrogant expression of a soap opera villain. "Asset yield is, fundamentally, like the dynamics of a clothing bale at a Sunday flea market."

Maximiliano stopped breathing. His eyebrows drew together in a hard line.

"A flea market?" he repeated, dragging out the syllables like the words tasted like poison.

I was already in the mud, so I decided to roll around in it with style. I straightened my spine and spoke with total conviction, drawing on my years of experience haggling at street stalls.

"Exactly. Economics is just red canopy logistics, Maximiliano," I dropped his name with a familiarity that almost made him recoil. "Imagine you bring in new merchandise. If you don't move it fast before noon, the sun damages the product. If it rains and your canopy has holes, the merch gets wet and loses forty percent of its value. So, you have to slash prices to a dollar just to avoid losing your initial investment. Market volatility is the rain. The assets are the clothing bales. If you aren't agile enough to yell out new prices before the customers leave to eat street tacos, you're left with stagnant inventory and zero liquidity."

The silence that followed my monologue was absolute. I could hear the hum of the central air conditioning.

Maximiliano stared at me, his jaw clamped shut. His gray eyes scanned my face, searching for any trace of a joke. I kept my expression entirely neutral, mentally praying three Hail Marys for the earth to open up and swallow me whole.

Slowly, he let out a breath through his nose. He pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers, closing his eyes for a fraction of a second.

"The red canopy metaphor," he muttered to himself. "Incredible. Your father warned me that your art school in France filled your head with absurd macroeconomic analogies to challenge traditional capitalism. I suppose comparing my multinational corporation to a third-world swap meet is your way of saying we need to liquidate obsolete inventory before the fiscal close."

I blinked, marveling at the rich’s ability to overcomplicate the simplest things. He had just translated my used-clothes story into Wall Street jargon.

"Yes, exactly. That," I said quickly, nodding my head. "Liquidate inventory. Death to the red canopy."

Max dropped his hand and looked at me with a mix of exhaustion and resignation.

"Just sign it. I don't have time to decipher your revolutionary manifestos today."

He handed me the gold pen. It weighed more than my blender. I took it, feeling the cold metal against my sweaty fingers. I was about to commit a federal crime. I looked at the dotted line. I looked at the pen.

I could tell the truth. This was the exact moment to do it.