The wrong vow: I MARRIED MY EX'S SUPPOSED UNCLE

The champagne was too sweet, the way it always was at Carter events, and Maya remembered laughing anyway, head tipped back, Damien's arm sliding around her waist like it belonged there. "You're staring," he murmured against her ear, two years ago, a lifetime ago, in a ballroom dripping with chandeliers and old money. "Everyone's staring at you, actually. I love watching them figure out I got here first." "Careful," she'd said, breathless with the kind of happiness that felt bottomless at the time. "That almost sounded romantic." "I contain multitudes." She'd believed him. That was the part that still burned, two years later, standing in her bathroom with her makeup bag open on the counter and her hands not quite steady enough to apply eyeliner. Not that he'd lied to her — people lied, that was survivable — but that she'd believed every word of it so completely she hadn't seen the ground giving way beneath her until she was already falling. Maya set the eyeliner down and gripped th

Elias was already moving before Maya could ask why, his hand landing at the small of her back — firm, careful, guiding rather than grabbing — as he steered her out of the office and down a narrow hallway she hadn't noticed before. "What's happening?" she demanded, half-jogging to keep pace with his longer stride. "In a moment." "That's not an answer." "I'm aware." His jaw was tight, eyes fixed straight ahead. "Just walk, Maya." He stopped at an unmarked door near the end of the corridor, pressed his palm to a keypad, and pulled her inside the second it clicked open. The door shut behind them with a heavy, final sound, and he threw the lock manually — an old-fashioned bolt that looked out of place in a building otherwise run entirely on glass and code. The room was smaller than his office. A desk, two chairs, a wall of bookshelves. Private in a way that felt deliberate, like a space built for conversations that weren't meant to have witnesses. "Someone leaked your meeting locatio

"He what?" Viv's voice cracked through the phone loud enough that Maya had to pull it away from her ear. She was pacing her apartment now, the manila folder — Elias had let her keep it, insisted she keep it, actually — sitting open on the coffee table like something radioactive. "He proposed," Maya said again. "In the middle of a security lockdown. With a folder of surveillance photos as a sales pitch." "Okay, I need you to back up, because I feel like you skipped several very important steps between 'went to a mysterious meeting' and 'received a marriage proposal from a man you've known for forty-five minutes.'" "There weren't steps, Viv. That's the problem. It just happened." Maya dropped onto the couch, pressing the heel of her hand against her eyes. "One minute he's telling me there's a leak to the press, the next he's telling me to marry him or Richard Carter destroys us both, and somewhere in between there's a photograph of me from before I ever met Damien sitting on his side

The courier was already at Maya's door when she opened it, holding out a thick envelope like it was something ordinary, like it wasn't about to reshape the entire rest of her life. "Sullivan?" he asked, and when she nodded, mute, he had her sign for it on a tablet without so much as a second glance, then disappeared down the hallway before she'd fully processed that the contract had arrived. She carried it back inside like it might detonate. It took her twenty minutes to work up the nerve to open it, and another hour after that to make it through the whole thing once, her stomach twisting tighter with every clause. One year. Public appearances required, minimum twice monthly. Separate wings of the house. A payout at the end large enough to erase every financial worry she'd carried since college — enough, if she was being honest with herself, to rebuild an entire life from scratch. Buried three pages deep, in language so dry it took her a second read to fully register it, was a clau