The Rival I Let In

The black dress felt too tight around my ribs, like it had been made for someone who could still breathe without feeling suffocated.

I stood in the hallway of Castellane House, watching people I barely knew touch the walls like they already owned them. Distant cousins, Board members, A woman from my grandmother's charity foundation who kept dabbing at eyes that weren't wet.

"She was so strong," someone said behind me. "You have to be strong too, Sabine."

I didn't turn around. I have heard the same version of that sentence eleven times today. Maybe twelve. I had stopped counting after the fourth hour.

Strong? As if grief was a task I needed to complete accurately.

I found my way to the study, my grandmother's study, though I suppose I would have to stop calling it that now, and closed the door behind me. The silence inside felt different from the silence in the rest of the house. Heavier. Hers.

Her reading glasses were still on the desk. Exactly where she'd left them.

I didn't get more than a minute alone before the door opened again.

"There you are." Vesper's voice, smooth as always, like he'd rehearsed the concern in it. My uncle walked in, adjusting his cufflinks, his dark suit without a single wrinkle, even after a full day of funeral formalities. "Everyone's asking about you." Silence …………

"I needed a moment."

"Of course you do." He crossed the room and stood near the window, hands clasped behind his back, surveying the study like he was already redecorating it in his mind. "This is a difficult day. For us all."

       I stared at him, the exhausted expression speaking volumes than I could have said with my mouth. I'd learned a long time ago that silence made Vesper uncomfortable, and his discomfort usually revealed more than his words did. "I want you to know," he continued, "that whatever happens with the company, whatever the transition looks like, I'll help you manage it. Until you're ready."

"I'm ready now."

"Sabine." He whispered my name like a caring father, like I was a child refusing medicine. "Grief affects judgment. No one expects you to run Castellane Group the week your grandmother dies."

       "I'm not planning to run it the week she dies. I'm planning to run it the way I've been running half of it for the last three years, while everyone kept insisting I wasn't ready yet." I said, staring at him sternly. Something flickered behind his eyes. Gone before I could name it.

"I only want to help," he said.

"I know exactly what you want to do, Uncle Vesper." I kept my voice even. "And it doesn't help."

     He smiled at that, the calm, patient smile he used in board meetings right before he said something designed to undercut you politely. "We'll talk more after the will is read." He left without waiting for a response. He always did that. Left a door open just enough that you'd wonder if you'd misjudged him, then walked through it before you could even decide.

       I sat down in my grandmother's chair and let myself have thirty seconds of feeling like the floor had disappeared beneath me. Then I stood up, smoothed my dress, and went back out to face the rest of the day. The family gathered in the main sitting room at seven that evening for the reading of the will. I sat between my grandmother's lawyer, Mr. Aldric, and an empty chair that should have held her.

     Vesper sat across from me, one leg crossed over the other, relaxed, looking like a man waiting for confirmation of something he already knew. Mr. Aldric cleared his throat and opened the folder in front of him. "Most of Margaret Castellane's estate is straightforward," he began. "Personal property, charitable allocations, staff provisions, all specified in detail and not in dispute."

"And the company?" Vesper asked, before Aldric could finish his sentence.

"I'm getting there." Aldric didn't look up from the pages. "Controlling shares of Castellane Group, along with Castellane House and the associated personal estate, pass to Sabine Castellane." I felt something in my chest loosen. The huge weight of fear, uncertainty, pain, lifted off my shoulders.

Then Aldric kept reading.

"However. This inheritance is dependent upon one condition."

The room went quiet in a different way than before.

"Sabine must become formally engaged within thirty days of this reading. Should she fail to meet this condition, control of the company and estate will transfer to a trust structure overseen by Vesper Castellane until such time as the condition is satisfied, or until an alternate arrangement is approved by the board."

For a moment I thought I'd misheard him. I sat up, eyes squinted at Mr Aldric.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Engaged? To whom?"

Whispers moved through the room like static. I heard my cousin Delphine mutter something to her husband. I saw Vesper's expression carefully neutral, but not neutral enough. He wasn't surprised. He had known.

"There's more," Aldric said.

I stared at him. “More?”

"Your grandmother specified the individual."

My stomach dropped, and my mouth opened out of its own will, before he even said the name. I don't know how I knew. Maybe it was the way the room felt like it was holding its breath.

"Julianii Marchetti."

The words landed like a slap.

"That's absurd." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. I do not approve! Absolutely not. I don't even know if that's legal."

"It's a condition on an inheritance, not a contract of marriage," Aldric said slowly and carefully. "It's legal." He's my competitor!! I could hear my own voice rising and I didn't try to stop it. "We've spent three years at each other's throat trying to destroy each other in every negotiation we've been in. Why would my grandmother possibly……"

"I don't have an answer to that, Miss Castellane. I only state the terms."

       Vesper leaned back in his chair, one hand pressed thoughtfully against his mouth, but I caught the corner of his mouth twitching. He wasn't hiding his satisfaction well enough. "This is ridiculous!" I said, to no one in particular. "She can't possibly have wanted this."

      "There's a letter," Aldric said. "Your grandmother left it for you specifically, to be given to you after the reading." He handed me a cream colored envelope with my name written across it in my grandmother's handwriting. I recognized it instantly, the same handwriting from birthday cards, from notes left on my desk, from the letter she wrote to me the day I graduated university.

I opened it with hands that weren't quite steady.

Inside was a single line.

“There are some people we understand only after we are forced to stand beside them.”

That was all. No explanation. No apology. No acknowledgment of what she was asking of me.

I read it three times, waiting for it to make sense. It didn't.

"This isn't helping me," I said quietly, more to myself than to anyone in the room. "This is a trap!" What am I to do? I asked myself, my mind started running through every possibility of a solution.

Vesper's voice cut through my thoughts, gentle and infuriating. "Or it's your grandmother trying to make sure you don't end up alone running the company, Sabine. She was always worried about that."

I looked at him. "Don't."

"I'm only saying…."

"I know exactly what you're saying." I stood, eyes bulging and glaring at him, folding the letter and pressing it flat against my palm like I could crush the words out of it. "And I know exactly what you get if I fail."

The room went silent again. Aldric shifted in his seat. Delphine looked down at her hands.

Vesper simply watched me, unbothered, the same calm expression on his face that he wore into every meeting where he already believed he'd won.

“Excuse me.” I turned and stormed out of the room, breath heavy, rage building up in my chest as I walked down the hallway, back into my grandmother's study, and I shut the door harder than I meant to.

I stood still in the quiet, staring at the name written in Aldric's careful print on the copy of the will, still in my hand.

Julianii Marchetti.

Three years of boardroom war. Three years of watching him read my strategies before I finished presenting them. Three years of hating how good he was at being one step ahead of me.

And now my grandmother, the one person I trusted without question, had decided he was the man I needed standing beside me.

I clenched my teeth at the thought of him standing with me or being engaged to me, it made my heart boil. I will never be engaged to Julianii Marchetti. Fake, real, temporary, permanent, it didn't matter. I would find another way.

My phone buzzed against the desk.

I looked down at the screen, and my whole body went still, my eye brows furrowed together.

Julianii Marchetti.

I didn't answer.

It rang again, consistently, his name glowing against the

dark screen like it already knew something I didn't.

Then it stopped, and a message appeared instead.

“We need to talk.”