CHAPTER 6: THE ULTIMATUM

The word hung in the room like something Maya could reach out and touch.

Marry me.

She stared at him, waiting for the rest of it — a punchline, a correction, some indication that she'd misheard him entirely. None came. Elias stood there, close enough that she could see he meant it, close enough that the sheer insanity of the moment pressed down on her chest like a physical weight.

"I'm sorry," she said finally, voice flat with disbelief. "Did you just propose to me in the middle of a security lockdown?"

"I know how it sounds."

"Do you? Because from where I'm standing, it sounds like a man who's lost his mind."

Elias exhaled, dragging a hand through his hair, and for the first time since she'd walked into this building, he looked less like a man giving orders and more like one running out of road. "There's an inheritance clause. Old, absurd, exactly the kind of thing my family loves to bury in decades-old paperwork. I have to be married by a deadline that's now less than a month away, or I lose control of everything — the company, my seat on the board, every piece of leverage I have to keep Richard Carter from destroying what's left of this family."

"That's insane."

"It's the truth."

"It's still insane." Maya crossed her arms, putting distance between them she couldn't physically make in the small room. "You want me to marry a stranger to save your inheritance."

"I want to keep you from becoming collateral damage in a war you didn't start," Elias said, and something in the steadiness of it — no flinch, no hesitation — made her pause despite herself.

"And if I say no?"

"Then I hope you're ready for what Richard Carter does to people who get in his way."

Maya laughed, short and disbelieving, and turned toward the door. "I'm leaving."

"Maya."

"No." She didn't stop walking. "I came here because you scared me into thinking someone was already hurting me. I didn't come here to be proposed to by a man who won't even tell me why he had a photo of me from before I ever met your nephew."

"Richard's already started digging into your background."

That stopped her.

She turned slowly, hand still on the door handle, and found Elias watching her with an expression that wasn't triumphant — it was almost apologetic, like he hated that this was the thing that would finally make her listen.

"Whatever he finds," Elias said quietly, "he'll use it. Not to hurt me. To hurt you. Publicly. Professionally. He'll make sure you can't work in this city, in this country, without the Carter name following you like a stain for the rest of your life."

"He's already doing that," Maya said, bitterness cracking through. "Three interviews, Elias. Three job offers that disappeared before I could sign anything. That was your family before I ever agreed to be part of it."

"That wasn't me."

"Convenient."

"It's the truth. And it's exactly the kind of thing Richard will escalate the second he realizes you're a complication instead of a footnote." Elias crossed to his desk, opened the top drawer, and pulled out a manila folder, setting it down and sliding it across the surface toward her. "This isn't a threat, Maya. This is proof someone's already watching you."

Reluctantly, she stepped back toward the desk and opened it.

Photographs. A dozen of them, at least, printed and organized with unnerving precision. Maya outside her apartment building, unaware, coffee in hand. Maya walking into the interview that morning. Maya at her mother's house two weeks ago, framed through a car window like she was being tracked rather than photographed. The dates stamped in the corner of each one stretched back further than she wanted to think about.

Her hands went cold.

"Who took these?"

"I don't know yet. But I know it wasn't me, and I know whoever did this has resources most people don't." Elias's voice dropped, quieter now, almost gentle. "The only question left is whether I'm the one protecting you from them — or the one who's too late."

Maya set the folder down slowly, her pulse loud in her own ears. The room felt smaller than it had a minute ago, the walls pressing closer, the reality of what he was asking settling over her like something she couldn't outrun no matter how fast she walked toward that door.

She looked up at him. "I need time to think."

"You don't have much of it."

"I'm aware," she said, sharper than she meant to. "But I'm not signing my life away to a stranger in the next five minutes just because you handed me a folder of surveillance photos and a countdown clock."

Something in his expression shifted — not disappointment, exactly. Understanding, maybe. Like he'd expected this, planned for it even, and was simply waiting to see how much of a fight she had left in her before she gave him an answer either way.

"Take the night," he said. "But Maya — whatever you decide, do it fast. I don't think either of us has the luxury of pretending this will wait."