Pretenders

Isabella Pov

I froze, my mind running a thousand miles. I did not move nor did I blink. I kept my face exactly where it blank, and I looked at him like I had no idea what he was talking about.

He was not convinced.

"what? You wanna play dumb?." His voice did not rise. He set his fork down and folded his hands on the table, looking at me patiently, at the same time, it looked like his patience was wearing thin. "There is no need to play meek in front of me, Isabella. I know you can speak. I know everything about you."

My stomach dropped, and my mind flew.

How did he know? Since when? Was that why he requested for me?  

I did not let my anxiety show. I kept my breathing even, kept my shoulders loose, and kept my hands resting in my lap like they were not gripping each other underneath the table.

He waited. And the thing about Mateo Hale, the thing I was beginning to understand very quickly, was that he was comfortable waiting. He had the stillness of a man who had never once been in a hurry because he had never once needed to be.

I looked at his eyes. The seriousness in them was not the kind you performed. It was the kind that came from actually knowing. From holding something and being entirely unbothered by it.

He knew.

I held his gaze for one more second. Two. Then I exhaled slowly through my nose, sat up a little straighter, and opened my mouth.

"How did you know."

My own voice felt strange in my throat. It was low, and a little rough at the edges from years of near-disuse in company. But it came out steady. I made sure of that.

Something moved across his face. He didn't look surprised. It was more like satisfaction that he finally got what he wanted from me.

He reached for his fork again.

"I like to keep track of my…" he paused, the briefest pause, and took a calm, unhurried bite of his food before finishing the sentence, "...things."

Things.

I stared at him.

He chewed, swallowed, and looked back at me with the same blank expression, like he had not just said what he said. Like calling me a thing was so natural it did not warrant a reaction from either of us.

I decided, very quietly, that I despised him.

"What exactly do you know," I said.

"Enough." He picked up his coffee. "But I did not bring you here to interrogate your history. I brought you here because I need something specific and you happen to fit the requirement." He set the cup down. "I do not care about the mute act. I do not care about whatever it is you are doing or why you are doing it. That is your business. I am not threatening you."

I watched him carefully.

"What I need," he continued, "is a wife. Not in any sense that should concern you — I am not interested in your life, your feelings, or your personal arrangements. What I need is a wife on paper. A wife the world can see. We will attend events together, present well together, smile at the right people at the right times. That is the entirety of what I am asking from you."

He reached beside his chair again, and this time he placed a card on the table in front of me.

A black card with no name on the front. The kind of card that did not need one.

"Unlimited," he said simply. "Use it for whatever you want. Clothes, travel, whatever else. You will also be assigned a car and a driver, and a personal bodyguard who will accompany you whenever you leave the estate."

I looked at the card, then at him.

"You are not a prisoner here," he said, reading whatever was on my face. "Move around as you like. The only rooms that are closed to you are already in the document." A brief glance toward the bound pages still sitting beside my plate. "Everything else is yours to use."

The dining room was quiet. It was just the sound of our voices, echoing.

"And the mute thing," I said.

"Keep it up if you want. Drop it. I genuinely do not care." He said it like he was commenting on the weather. "The only person in this house who knows is me, and I have no interest in exposing you. As I said — your business."

I sat with that for a moment.

He was giving me a lot. Too much, too easily, which meant he was getting something significant in return. People who moved like Mateo Hale did not make comfortable arrangements out of generosity. Every soft edge on this deal had a hard calculation behind it.

"So what do you actually want," I said. "You could have married anyone. Someone easier. Someone who wouldn't…" I stopped.

"Someone who wouldn't what?" There was a faint trace of something at the corner of his mouth. It wasn't a smile.

"Someone who wouldn't need managing," I said.

"Yes," he agreed. "I could have." He reached out and picked up his glass of wine, and then he did something I had not seen coming.

He stood up.

Not like he shifted, or leaned, he stood on both legs, straight and steady, rising from that chair with ease, as if he had been doing it his whole life, which of course he had. He was tall. Taller than I had registered on the driveway, where the wheelchair had done the work of cutting his height down. He stood with his full height now and reached for the wine glass on the sideboard beside him, turning it once in his fingers.

I kept my face still.

So that was confirmed, then.

"I chose you," he said, turning to look at me from where he stood, the glass loose in one hand, "because you are exactly like me."

I said nothing.

"You sit in a room full of people who think they know what you are," he continued, "and you let them. You wear their assumptions like a coat and you walk around inside them and nobody questions it, because nobody thinks to." He tilted his head slightly. "That is not weakness. That is a particular kind of intelligence. And it is very, very rare."

He raised his glass.

"You are a pretender, Isabella." The word came out almost gentle. "So am I."

He took a slow sip, watching me over the rim of the glass.

I did not look away.

The morning light was coming through the window behind him, catching the edge of his glasses, the line of his jaw. He looked completely at ease — a man holding a glass of wine at a dining table, saying outrageous things in a quiet voice, like none of this was unusual.

And maybe for him it wasn't.

I picked up the black card from the table. I turned it over once, and I set it back down.

"I have conditions too," I said.

He looked at me. His gl

ass was still raised, not quite lowered yet.

The corner of his mouth moved.

"Of course you do," he said.