Two years ago

“Kara? What the hell are you doing in my bed?”

Jeremy’s hand closed around my arm and yanked me to face him. I was naked. He was naked. Neither of us remembered a single thing about how we got there, and the room spun in a way that had everything to do with how much I must have had to drink the night before.

“I…” My mouth wouldn’t work right. My head pounded like something was trying to break out of my skull. The sheets smelled wrong, like a hotel room instead of my own bed, and nothing about the last twelve hours made any sense at all.

I scrambled off the bed, grabbing clothes off the floor, my hands shaking too hard to work properly. The door burst open before I even had my dress all the way on.

Cameras. A whole wall of them, flashing, blinding, filling a room that ten seconds ago belonged to no one but the two of us.

“Mr. Devonte, is it true you’re cheating on your fiancée?”

“Is your secretary the real relationship here?”

Jeremy sat frozen, clutching a blanket to his chest, saying absolutely nothing. I had a clear path straight to the door. Every single camera was pointed at him, not me.

I didn’t take it.

I don’t fully understand, even now, why I stepped in front of him instead of walking straight out. Two years of being the one who fixed his problems for him, maybe. Or the sick feeling that whatever happened here was somehow my fault, even though I couldn’t remember enough of the night to know if that was even true.

“You’re all mistaken.” I straightened my dress and planted myself between the cameras and the bed. “He had too much to drink celebrating his engagement. I came to help him get to bed safely. Nothing happened.”

My voice came out steadier than I felt. Somewhere behind me, Jeremy still hadn’t moved, still hadn’t said a single word to back me up, and I kept talking anyway because someone in that room had to.

For one second, it actually looked like it might work.

Then a reporter bent down and picked something up off the floor, and the whole room changed at once.

A sheet. Stained dark with blood. My blood, though I didn’t understand that part yet. Only that whatever happened last night had happened hard enough to leave a mark, and I had zero memory of the moment it happened.

The flashing started again, faster this time, and someone shouted a question I didn’t catch over the ringing in my own ears. My legs wanted to give out right there in front of everyone. I locked my knees and stayed standing, because falling now would only make the story worse.

I’ve turned that night over in my head every single day since. I remember the bar. I remember crying into a drink about a proposal I’d spent three weeks helping plan, for a man I’d loved since he pulled me out of a bad situation with bullies back in school. I remember kissing someone in the parking lot after, a voice I could almost place if I sat with it long enough.

It hadn’t been Jeremy’s voice.

I never let myself finish that thought back then. I was too busy trying to survive the version everyone else had already decided was true. It was easier to let them believe what they wanted than to stand in a room full of cameras and admit I didn’t actually know what happened to my own body that night.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON.

Mrs. Devonte’s hand cracked across my cheek hard enough that I tasted copper.

“How dare you,” she hissed.

I didn’t have the strength left to argue, not with the scandal already spreading online, not with Brittany already boarding a flight out of the country within hours of the story breaking.

That timing had bothered me even then, somewhere underneath everything else. A woman doesn’t keep a passport ready for a scandal she never saw coming.

My cheek throbbed where her hand had landed, and I pressed my fingers against it without meaning to, like I could hold the pain in one place and keep it from spreading.

“I’ve always told you to get rid of that secretary,” Mrs. Devonte snapped at Jeremy. He sat with his head in his hands and said nothing in my defense. Not one word. Not even a glance toward me across the room.

The door opened. Mr. Devonte walked in, looked around the room once, and made the decision that would rewrite the rest of my life.

“Jeremy will marry Kara,” he said. Flat. Final. Like it had already been decided somewhere I hadn’t been invited to sit in on.

Mrs. Devonte went pale as ash. “Over my dead body.”

“It’s already decided, Irish.” Arthur’s voice stayed calm, the calm of a man who’d made up his mind long before he walked into the room. “The press already has the story. Marriage fixes it. Divorce or scandal doesn’t fix anything.”

“He already told me he has feelings for her.” Arthur said the line carefully, like he was reciting something rehearsed instead of reporting something true, and that carefulness should have made me suspicious right then.

It didn’t. I was twenty three and in love, and a man I’d wanted for years was being handed to me by his own father, and I never once stopped to ask why a family that had made their disgust for me so obvious would suddenly hand me the one thing I wanted most.

“Kara.” Jeremy said my name for the first time since the reporters left, and something in his voice sounded almost gentle. He crossed the room and knelt in front of where I sat, taking my hand like it was something precious instead of something he’d ignored an hour ago. “Marry me. I mean it. I don’t want anyone else.”

I looked at him and my heart did something stupid and hopeful, even after everything that happened that morning. Years of watching him from behind a desk, years of pretending I didn’t notice the way he laughed or the way he said my name when he needed something fixed, and now he was kneeling in front of me like I was the only answer that made sense.

I said yes that night.

It was only afterward, alone in the hallway outside the room where they’d all just decided the rest of my life, that I overheard Mrs. Devonte’s voice through the door, low and vicious, meant for no one but her husband.

“She has no idea whose daughter she is. Let’s keep it that way until we’ve taken everything that’s owed to us.”

I froze, my hand still flat against the wall, my heart going very still and very loud at the exact same time. The hallway light buzzed overhead, and somewhere behind that closed door, my whole future had just been decided by people who saw me as nothing but a debt to collect.

Owed to them. By me.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​