Chapter 4.

Elena’s POV.

The rage from last night hadn’t cooled. It had settled into something sharper, something that no longer burned but stayed, precise and permanent.

Last night, Henry Lawes laid those yellowed papers across my dining table. Magnus Voss’s signature. Richard Hartman’s signature. Proof that my father hadn’t crashed, but had been removed cleanly and deliberately so one man could rise and another could profit.

And now Adrian Voss was walking into my office asking for a lifeline.

“They’re here, Elena,” Henry said quietly from the doorway.

“Send them in.”

I crossed to the glass desk and sat, folding my hands loosely in front of me. No smile. No courtesy. Just stillness.

Adrian stepped inside first. The navy suit was perfect, tailored within an inch of precision, but it didn’t hide the exhaustion etched into his face. He looked like a man who had spent the night calculating how far he had left to fall. Robert Vance followed, composed and polished, the kind of man who built careers off other people’s desperation.

For a second, the room shifted, the glass and steel blurring at the edges until I was back in that apartment—the one with peeling paint and a leaking sink, two weeks after I walked out of Richard’s house. Sick every morning, scrubbing floors just to keep my hands busy enough not to think, two thousand dollars and nowhere to go.

Then the knock.

Henry Lawes standing in the doorway with a briefcase, his voice calm as he told me my father had created a blind trust that activated the night I left my uncle’s home, that I controlled his estate in full.

Fifteen percent of Voss Industries.

Nine hundred and eighty million dollars.

I had stared at him like he was lying.

Now I sat across from the man who once paid to erase me, knowing my father had made sure I would be the one he could never control.

“Clara,” Adrian said, stopping in front of my desk, his voice stripped of the cold authority I remembered, careful in a way that didn’t belong to him. “Thank you for agreeing to this.”

“Sit.”

He obeyed without hesitation, lowering himself into the chair across from me. Vance remained standing, placing his briefcase on the glass with a quiet, deliberate click.

“Miss Everett,” Vance began smoothly, “my client is very pleased we could come to a mutual understanding. I’ve drafted a standard prenuptial agreement and corporate merger contract. It outlines the immediate transfer of your proxy voting rights to Mr. Voss upon legalization of the marriage, as well as a generous alimony structure should the union dissolve after—”

“Stop talking, Mr. Vance.”

His voice cut off mid-sentence.

I didn’t look at him. My gaze stayed on Adrian.

“If your lawyer speaks to me again like I’m a naïve socialite waiting to be bought, I’ll have security escort both of you out, and you can watch Dorian keep your company.”

Adrian inhaled slowly, then lifted a hand. “Robert. Step back.”

“But—”

“I said step back.”

The authority slipped through, brief but unmistakable. Vance’s jaw tightened, but he moved away from the desk, clasping his hands behind him.

“Better.”

I opened the drawer and pulled out a black folder, sliding it across the glass until it stopped in front of Adrian.

“Last night, I said I had no price. I have rules. That’s the contract.”

He hesitated before opening it, and I watched the shift in his expression as he read the first page, the tension settling into his shoulders.

“You’re not reading a negotiation,” I said quietly. “You’re reading terms. If you don’t like them, you can leave.”

His eyes moved down the page.

“I retain full control of my fifteen percent. My voting rights do not transfer. We act as a bloc only when I decide we do.”

His head lifted. “That defeats the purpose. If I don’t hold the proxy, Dorian will challenge the merger.”

“Then convince him your wife agrees with you,” I said evenly. “Isn’t that what you’re good at? Selling things that aren’t real.”

His jaw tightened, but he didn’t argue again.

“Complete financial separation,” I continued. “What’s mine stays mine. If your situation collapses, it doesn’t touch me.”

He didn’t ask how I knew. He didn’t need to.

“This marriage exists publicly. We will appear together when required. We will perform when necessary. But privately, we are strangers. No shared life. No shared bed.”

This time, he reacted, the answer coming immediately. “No. That won’t work.”

“It’s not a suggestion.”

“Elena, listen,” he said, leaning forward, lowering his voice. “You can set every other condition you want, but this has to look real. We have to live together.”

“I’m not living with you.”

“You think Magnus won’t check?” His voice sharpened. “You think Dorian won’t dig? If we live apart, they’ll expose it in a day. The marriage gets voided, and we’re done.”

I held his gaze, letting the words settle without answering, weighing the truth in them.

“He’s right,” Henry said from the doorway, his tone even. “Separate residences will give them grounds to challenge everything.”

Silence stretched between us, heavier now.

Adrian wasn’t posturing anymore. There was no arrogance left, no distance—just urgency held tight behind control.

I exhaled slowly. “Fine. We share a residence. You move into my penthouse.”

“No.”

The answer came instantly, flat and certain, and I stilled.

“The Voss family has a tradition,” he continued. “Newly married couples live at the estate. Minimum six months. If we don’t follow that, Magnus blocks it before it starts.”

The words landed heavier than they should have.

The Voss estate.

That house.

My father’s blood built those walls, and they had buried him to do it.

My hands went still against the desk.

“You expect me to live there.”

“I expect you to understand the situation,” Adrian said. “If we don’t do this properly, there is no deal.”

“I’m not setting foot in that house.”

“Elena—”

“Not for six months. Not for six minutes.”

The room went quiet.

Vance shifted slightly. Henry didn’t move at all.

Adrian watched me for a long moment, something in his expression dimming, like he had already calculated the outcome and didn’t like it.

“Then we don’t have a marriage,” he said finally, his voice lower now. “And Dorian wins.”

I already knew what that meant. I had seen the way Dorian moved, the offers he didn’t bother to hide, the patience behind them. He wasn’t the kind of man who accepted refusal. He turned it into leverage.

The contract sat between us, untouched.

Adrian didn’t move.

I didn’t either.

On the surface, it looked like a dead end—a clean refusal, a line I wasn’t willing to cross.

But the truth settled quietly beneath it, cold and unyielding.

If I wanted Magnus Voss—if I wanted the truth buried inside that house—then sooner or later, I was going to have to walk through those doors.

I just wasn’t ready to say it out loud.

And for the first time since he walked in, neither of us moved to break the silence.