CHAPTER NINE — The Folder

The call came four days after the wedding, while I was still learning the geography of a marriage that had somehow become real — which side of the bed he favoured, that he drank too much black coffee, that he touched the small of my back now even with no cameras watching.

Sofia's voice was tight when she asked to see us both in the study.

"Vaughn sent this to three board members an hour ago," she said, sliding a folder across the desk. "He's giving us until Friday's vote before he sends it to the press."

Damien opened it, and his face went very still — not the composed stillness of the boardroom, something colder.

"Read it," he said, handing it to me without looking up.

Private messages, from the week I'd first agreed to the contract. Terms finalised. She signed without pushback. Should satisfy the trust language cleanly. Clinical, stripped of everything that had grown between us since.

"He's had these the whole time," I said quietly.

"A paralegal on retainer, most likely." Damien's voice dropped into something low and lethal. "I should have anticipated this."

"It means Vaughn intends to prove the marriage began as fraud, regardless of what it's become," Sofia said. "If he convinces even a handful of board members, he delays the vote past the deadline."

Something locked into place behind Damien's eyes. "He wants a fight. He's going to get one he didn't plan for."

"Damien—"

"I'm not letting him touch you." He turned to me, intensity startling, nothing careful about it. "Whatever this costs me, he doesn't get to use you as a weapon."

"I'm not worried about that," I said, though the ferocity sent something complicated through me — fear, and underneath it, something uncomfortably close to thrilled. "I'm worried about what happens to you if this goes public before you control it."

"Then we control it first." He was already reaching for his phone. "Sofia, get Griffith on the line. Trace every message Vaughn's paralegal has ever touched. And find out what Vaughn actually wants beyond the company."

"And if what he wants is you gone?" I asked. "Ruined, whatever it costs?"

Damien crossed the room and took my face in both hands, gentler than his voice a moment before. "Then he's going to learn taking things from me isn't the same as keeping them." He kissed my forehead. "I didn't marry you to lose you to my cousin's ambition. Whatever happens Friday, that isn't negotiable."

"I understand," I said, though I wasn't sure whether the thing unfurling in my chest was fear of Vaughn, or fear of exactly how much power this man now had over what I felt.

Outside, the city kept moving, indifferent to the folder between us, indifferent to the war that had just quietly begun.

That night, long after Sofia and Griffith had gone, I found Damien still in the study, the same lamp burning that had lit our two a.m. conversation weeks earlier. This time he wasn't working. He was just sitting, staring at nothing, the folder closed in front of him like something he couldn't bring himself to touch again.

"You're allowed to be angry," I said, sitting across from him. "You don't have to perform composure for me."

"I'm not angry," he said, and then, after a moment, "I'm angry. I built every wall in my life to keep exactly this from happening — someone I couldn't afford to lose, used against me by someone who's spent years waiting for the opportunity."

"You didn't lose me," I said. "You're not going to. Whatever he throws at that boardroom on Friday, it doesn't get to decide what's true between us."

He reached across the desk and took my hand, quiet for a long moment. "I know that. I'm still allowed to hate that he tried."

"You're allowed to hate it," I agreed. "Just don't let it be the only thing you feel tonight."

Friday was three days away.