Chapter 5

Chapter 5

REIGNS

I didn't sleep that night. I sat on the hospital floor with my back against my mother's bed and my cracked phone in my hand, and I read everything I could find about the Vance brothers.

I started with Rhett, because I wanted to know exactly how much I should hate him.

It didn't take long. He was everywhere. There was a new picture almost every week. Rhett on a yacht with a girl in a red bikini. Rhett outside a club at three in the morning with a girl in a silver dress. Rhett at a football match, a car launch, a birthday party, and every time a different girl on his arm, a different hand on his chest.

The girls never lasted. I found one interview with a model who cried on camera. She said he took her to Dubai for a weekend, told her she was special, and then blocked her number on the flight home. She found out from his driver.

Another girl wrote a long post about him. She said he never remembered her name, and he called her "sweetheart" the whole time because it was easier.

Under every post, people made jokes. They called him the Vance Rag Collector. He picked women up, used them, and dropped them on the floor.

This was the man my father wanted me to marry. This was the man who laughed at my picture and said I was dirty.

I closed the page and felt sick.

Then I searched Cassian.

---

Cassian Vance was harder to find.

There were no club pictures, no yachts, no girls. Most of what I found was business news, long boring articles with words like "merger" and "acquisition" that I had to read twice.

But between the boring words, a picture of him started to form. It wasn't a nice one.

At thirty, he became CEO of Vance Maritime after his father's stroke. In his first month, he fired the entire board in one meeting. Twelve people. Some of them had worked for his family for thirty years. One man was his own uncle.

Two years later, a rival company tried to steal one of his contracts. Cassian didn't sue them. He just bought their debt, quietly, piece by piece, and then called it all in on the same day. The owner lost his company, his house, and his car. A newspaper said the man went to Cassian's office to beg. Cassian let him wait in the lobby for six hours and never came down.

There was one photo of him at a charity dinner. He stood alone by a window in a dark suit, holding a glass he wasn't drinking from. Everyone else in the picture was laughing and talking. He was just looking at the room like he was counting everyone's price.

I searched for a girlfriend. A date. A rumor. Anything.

There was nothing.

In ten years of pictures, he was never photographed with a woman. Not once. One gossip page said he had turned down three arranged marriages already. Another said he once made a famous actress cry at a party just by looking at her. A comment under it said, "He doesn't hate women. He hates everyone. Women just get closer so they notice it more."

I read that line five times.

---

By the time the sun came up, I had made my choice.

I thought about it the way my mother taught me to think about money. You don't ask which choice is good. You ask which choice hurts less.

Rhett used everyone. A man like that would take me, laugh at me, and throw me away the moment he got bored. He would make me into one more joke on one more gossip page. The mistress's daughter, the Rag Collector's newest rag.

Cassian hated everyone. But a man who hates everyone doesn't bother to use you. He just leaves you alone. He looks through you like glass.

And I had spent my whole life being looked through. I knew how to survive that.

Most of all, there was one simple fact. Cassian only wanted the Ashford ships. That was what the old deal was about. My father and the Vances, joining two companies together. He didn't want Odalys. From everything I read, he didn't want anyone.

So why would he care which sister he got?

If I married Cassian, I would still be inside the will. The shares would still unlock. Odalys would still get her money.

But she would lose him. She would lose the one thing she was promised. And for once in my life, I would have something she wanted.

I looked at my mother sleeping with the bandage on her arm, and I decided I didn't care if it was petty. She had earned it.

---

The problem was that I couldn't walk into Vance Tower in a waitress uniform with a stain on the sleeve.

I had no money. The envelope from Mr. Okoro was enough for one week of food, maybe. Nothing more.

My mother woke up at seven. A nurse came to check her arm. When the nurse left, I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the thin gold chain around my mother's neck.

It was the only nice thing we owned. My father gave it to her the year I was born. She never took it off. Not when we moved, not when she got sick, not even in the hospital.

"Mama," I said. "I need to ask you something."

She looked at me. Then she looked at my eyes, and I think she knew before I said it.

She reached up and took it off.