Chapter 3: The Man From the Photograph

AMARA’S POV

I said yes the next morning, the way I'd known I would from the moment the folder opened in my lap.

The lawyer didn't look surprised. He simply nodded, slid a pen across the table, and told me a car would collect me in three days to bring me to "Mr. Morretti's estate" for what he called "the introduction", as if I were being onboarded into a company rather than married into a stranger's life.

Kally hugged me so hard when I told her I couldn't breathe, and then held my face in both hands and made me promise to call her every single day, and then cried anyway, because we both knew a promise like that only worked as well as the man on the other end of it allowed.

I packed lightly. I'd learned, the last time my life was rearranged without my consent, not to grow attached to what I brought with me.

The estate, when the car finally reached it three days later, didn't look real. Iron gates that took a full minute to open. A driveway long enough that I lost sight of the road behind me before the house came into view. And the house itself?.. pale stone, too many windows, the kind of place built less to be lived in than to be looked at from a distance and feared accordingly.

I was shown into a study by a member of staff who addressed me with a courtesy and told to wait. I sat in a chair too elegant to be comfortable, hands folded in my lap, and rehearsed nothing, because I genuinely didn't know what there was to say to a man I was about to marry for reasons that had nothing to do with either of us.

He came in without announcing himself. I heard the door and looked up, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all.

He was taller than the photograph had suggested, and colder in a way no photograph could have captured.. not cruel, exactly, but closed off in a manner that felt deliberate, like a door that had been shut so many times it no longer remembered how to open by accident. Dark hair. Sharp features. Eyes that moved over me once, assessing, the same unhurried way I imagined he assessed a contract before signing it.

Something about him tugged at the edge of my memory, faint and formless, gone before I could catch hold of it. I told myself it was only nerves.

"Amara." He said my name like he was testing its shape, not like a greeting.

"Mr. Morretti."

"Adrien is fine, since we're to be married." There was no warmth in the offer. It was simply efficient, the way everything about him seemed to be.

He took the seat across from me, and for a moment he studied me in a way that made me acutely aware of every detail I hadn't thought to prepare for, my plain dress, my chipped nail polish, the tiredness I was certain showed on my face after three sleepless nights.

"I assume you've been told the terms," he said.

"I've been told there are terms. I haven't been told very many of them."

Something flickered across his face, not quite surprise but close to it, as though he hadn't expected me to say that plainly. "Then let me be direct, since apparently no one else has been. This marriage exists to satisfy an obligation. My grandfather wants to see me get married before he dies. Your father owes my company more money than he will ever be able to repay. Our marriage solves both problems in a single signature. I am not asking you to love me. I am not offering to love you. I am asking you to be present, to behave appropriately in public, and to allow me to get my grandfather off my back for the rest of whatever time he has left."

It should have stung more than it did, hearing it laid out so plainly.. no love, no pretense of it, just an obligation dressed up in a wedding. But there was something almost restful in the honesty of it. At least this contract, unlike the last one, wasn't hiding what it actually was.

"And in exchange," I said, "my father's debt disappears."

"Cleared entirely. And you'll be provided for comfortably, for as long as the arrangement lasts."

"How long does it last?"

"Long enough to satisfy my grandfather that the matter is settled. After that.." he made a small, dismissive gesture, as though the details barely mattered to him. "We can discuss an end to it, on terms that suit us both."

I studied him for a long moment, this man who spoke about his own marriage the way other people discussed quarterly earnings, and felt none of the fear I'd expected to feel walking into that house. Only a strange, wary calm, the kind that comes from finally understanding exactly what you're dealing with.

"You said you're not asking me to love you," I said. "What are you asking?"

For the first time since he'd walked in, something in his expression shifted.. not quite softening, but sharpening into something more careful, more considered. "I have children," he said. "Twins. Five years old. Whatever this marriage is on paper, in that house, you'll be expected to be present for them. Not their mother. I won't ask that of you, and I doubt they'd accept it even if I did. But present. Kind. That much I do care about."

Something in my chest tightened at the mention of them, sharp and unexpected, though I had no reason yet to understand why. I only knew that the word *twins* landed somewhere old and tender in me, a place I kept carefully sealed, and I had to look down at my hands for a moment before I trusted my voice again.

"I can do that," I said quietly.

He watched me for a beat longer than the moment required, as though something in my reaction had caught his attention in a way he hadn't expected, and then he nodded once, business concluded.

"The wedding will be small but efficient. My assistant will handle the details so you needn't concern yourself with any of it beyond showing up in whatever you're given to wear." He rose from his chair, already moving on to whatever came next in his day. "I'll have someone show you to your room. We'll speak again before the ceremony."

"Adrien." His name felt strange in my mouth, unfamiliar in a way I couldn't quite place, though something in me insisted I ought to be able to place it. "Thank you. For being honest, at least."

He paused at the door, and for just a moment, something almost human crossed his face.. tired, maybe, or simply surprised that gratitude was the thing I'd chosen to offer him.

"Don't thank me," he said. "I'm not doing this to be kind. I'm doing it because it's the fastest way to make an old man stop asking me questions I don't want to answer."

Then he was gone, and I was left alone in a study too elegant to be comfortable, staring at the door he'd shut behind him, turning over the strange, persistent feeling that I had met this man somewhere before prolly in another life, in another room, in a memory I couldn't quite reach no matter how hard I tried.

I told myself it was nothing. A resemblance. A trick of nerves and exhaustion.

I did not yet know how wrong I was.