Chapter 4: The Contract

Elena's pov

At 6:03 AM, the banging stopped.

At 6:04 AM, the doorbell rang.

It didn't ring once. It rang like it owned the house. Long, demanding, impossible to ignore.

I heard Mrs. Sterling's shrill voice downstairs. "Who dares ring at this hour? Do you know whose house this is?"

Silence.

Then a man's voice. Low, rough and terrifyingly calm responded.

"We do."

Damien Blackwood.

I scrambled out of bed. I was still in yesterday's stained slip, hair messy, and a dark bruise turned purple under bad concealer. Adrian's bloody handkerchief was still clutched in my fist.

I ran downstairs.

The grand foyer of the Sterling mansion — the mansion my father had bought for me when I was sixteen — was no longer theirs because Marcus had surrendered every claim to it the night before.

Three men stood in the entrance. In fresh suits. Like they had never left.

Damien, Adrian and Roman.

Behind them, two lawyers in black held briefcases and on his knees in the middle of the marble floor, in the same wine-stained suit from last night, was Marcus.

His mother stood over him, face white. Clara was screaming.

"What is the meaning of this?" Mrs. Sterling shrieked. "Security! Get these men out of my house! Marcus, do something! Why are you on your knees? We won, remember? You sold her company let's kick them out now!"

Marcus didn't move. He stared at the floor shaking terribly like he had just understood that he made a terrible mistake.

Roman stepped forward and slid a thick, bound document across the marble floor. It stopped right at Marcus's knees.

"Read it," Roman said quietly.

Marcus looked up at me. His eyes were red, swollen, desperate.

"Elena," he whispered. "Baby, please. Tell them. Tell them you don't want this. Tell them we are married. Please, you can't let them do this to me. I begged you last night. I begged you!"

He crawled across the floor toward me and grabbed the hem of my slip.

"I grovel! Look! I'm groveling! Isn't this what you wanted? I am on my knees! Forgive me! Come back to me! I will fire my mother! I will send Clara away! I will give you everything! Please!"

Mrs. Sterling gasped. "Marcus! Get up! Don't humiliate yourself for this ungrateful brat!" Adrian laughed. It was a soft, deadly sound. He crouched down next to Marcus and grabbed his jaw, forcing his face up.

"She is not your wife anymore. Not after what you signed last night at the club."

"What?" I whispered.

Damien's black eyes finally moved to me. He looked at my bruised cheek, my bleeding hand, and my bare feet. Something dangerous flashed in his gaze.

"Tell her, Marcus," Damien growled. "Tell your wife what you signed to keep yourself out of a federal prison."

Marcus started sobbing. Real sobs.

"I only signed because they threatened to hand me to the prosecutors! I was drunk! I was scared! It means nothing unless you sign it too! Tell them no!"

Roman opened his briefcase and pulled out a single page. He held it up for me.

It was not the sale he had planned for.

It was a DIVORCE AND FULL ASSET SURRENDER AGREEMENT.

Marcus had not sold the company. He had signed away his entire marriage.

"Your dear ex husband said that he was tired of the company. He said that it was drowning in debt when in reality he had been moving the company funds to offshore accounts," Adrian said, smirking the way people did when they found someone genuinely amusing.

"He wanted to sell your father's company and walk away with the money leaving you with nothing." Roman said calmly. "So we gave him a choice. He took this."

He stretched the paper towards me and I slowly took it from his hands. As I scanned through the document, realization dawned on me.

Last night at the club, drunk and cornered, he had signed a document that stated:

I, Marcus Sterling, hereby resign as CEO of Hart Global effective immediately. I surrender all voting proxies, all marital rights, and all claims to any property previously owned by Elena Hart. I agree to a forensic audit and personal repayment of all misappropriated funds.

And at the bottom, in Marcus's own drunk, looping signature, he had signed away his hold on me.

He had just surrendered everything he had taken from me.

The meaning hit me like ice water.

"Wait," I said, my voice shaking. "How... how could you enforce this? This is my house. Hart Global is—"

"Yours," Adrian finished for me. He stood up and walked toward me, slowly, like I was a spooked animal. "It has always been yours, Elena."

He took my bleeding hand gently and turned it over. He pointed to the signature line on the contract in Roman's hand.

"Do you see the witness signature?"

I looked and my blood froze.

The witness wasn't just any lawyer. It was my father's own signature. Victor Hart. Dated the day after his funeral.

A day after the world had buried him.

Mrs. Sterling made a choked sound and collapsed onto the stairs.

"That's impossible!" Clara screamed. "He's dead! He died five years ago!"

Damien walked to me. He took my face in both his large, hot hands and forced me to look at him.

"Your father didn't die of a heart attack five years ago, Elena," he whispered, so low only I could hear. "He faked his death to protect you. Because seven years ago, you didn't destroy us in a boardroom."

His thumb brushed over my bruised cheek, so gently it made me shiver.

"Seven years ago, you saved us."

The world tilted and memories began to flood my head. Not the ones Marcus told me but real ones that I could actually remember happening.

A long glass table came into view and three young men, barely out of their twenties, furious, and bankrupt, about to lose everything to a hostile takeover. I stood in that boardroom at the age of twenty-one and screamed at my own father after an extraordinary presentation that was too good to refuse.

Nobody wanted to fund their company despite my flawless presentation. So I turned to my father who was seated with the other big families in the new york corporate world and spoke fearlessly.

"Don't you dare! If you let them take their company, I will never speak to you again!"

That was how I saved them.

I threatened to disown my father if he didn't save Blackwood, Hayes and Kane.

And he did. He saved them. And in return, they promised him they would protect his daughter when he was gone.

"Why... why don't I remember?" I whispered.

"Because after you saved us, your father sent you away to London," Roman said behind me, his silver eyes soft for the first time. "And you had an accident that caused you to lose two years. You disappeared and you almost forgot us. But when you came back, Marcus was there. He told you your father trusted him which was a lie. Your father never trusted him. In fact, he prepared this document in advance because he could foresee this happening."

Adrian tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. His amber eyes burned.

"We've been looking for you for seven years, Ghost. And we found you on your knees, cleaning your mother-in-law's mess."

At my feet, Marcus was still kneeling, still begging, still chasing a woman who had already left him.

"Elena! Please! Tell them no! I love you! I can change! I will kneel here all day! I will lick your feet! Just don't let them take me!"

I looked down at my ex-husband.

For three years, I had begged him to love me. Now he was begging me to save him.

Slowly, I pulled my slip out of his hands.

"No," I said. My voice was not shaking anymore. It was clear and cold. The voice of the woman who stood for justice and save three powerful CEO's seven years ago.

"You don't get to beg now, Marcus. You had three years to be a man but you chose to be a parasite."

I turned to Damien. "What happens now?"

Damien smiled. It was a dark, possessive, terrifyingly beautiful smile.

"Now," he said, taking the contract from Roman and placing a pen in my bleeding hand, "you sign as CEO. You divorce him and take your house back. What comes after that is your decision."

He leaned down, his lips brushing my ear, his voice a growl that made my knees weak.

"And then we make him watch you remember who the fuck you really are, Elena Hart."

Behind me, Mrs. Sterling screamed as the security approached her.

But Marcus just stayed on his knees, sobbing into the marble, groveling at the feet of the woman he thought he had erased.

He had no idea of who the woman he had just released was about to become.