Chapter 3

The Woman Who Knew Too Much

Vivienne stared at the text for a long time before she showed it to Renata. Ms. Marsh. You don't know me yet. But you should know exactly what you're signing up for before you put your name on that contract. Meet me. Alone. Tonight.

"Absolutely not," Renata said, the second she read it. "No. We are not doing this. This is how women end up on true crime podcasts."

"They know about the contract, Renata. Nobody outside that office is supposed to know about the contract." Which is exactly why it's a trap. Or exactly why I need to hear what they have to say.

They argued about it for two hours. In the end, Vivienne agreed to go but not alone. Renata sat two tables away at the small wine bar in the West Village where the stranger had asked to meet, phone out, ready to call the police at the first sign of trouble, glaring at every man who walked in like he might be the villain of the evening.

None of them were.

The woman who slid into the seat across from Vivienne at exactly eight o'clock was maybe thirty-five, elegant in a quiet, expensive way, with tired eyes that had clearly done a lot of crying at some point and had decided, since then, to stop. Thank you for coming, the woman said. "My name is Sabrina Cole. I used to work for Voss Enterprises. Legal department."

"Used to?"

"I was let go eight months ago. Officially, for 'restructuring.'" Sabrina's mouth twisted. "Unofficially, because I knew something I wasn't supposed to know, and Damian Voss doesn't like people who know things."

Vivienne's stomach tightened. "What do you know?"

Sabrina reached into her bag and slid a folded piece of paper across the table. Vivienne opened it with shaking hands.

It was a contract. Old, dated three years ago. The same kind of language she'd read in her own folder eighteen months ago:a marriage of convenience, an inheritance clause. Except the name on this one wasn't Vivienne Marsh.

It was Claire Bennett.

"He's done this before," Vivienne whispered.

"Once that I know of," Sabrina said. "Maybe more. I only found this one because I drafted it myself." She leaned forward, voice low. "Claire Bennett was engaged to him for real, once, years before that. They broke up publicly, ugly, all over the papers. Then two years ago, right before another deadline like the one you're facing, he brought her back, not for love. For the same reason he's approaching you now. A clause. A deadline. A convenient solution."

"What happened?"

Something dark crossed Sabrina's face. "She fell for him. Really fell, the way you're probably starting to, even if you don't want to admit it yet. And when the eighteen months were up, he ended it exactly the way the contract said he would. Clean. Efficient. No feelings involved  on his side, anyway." Sabrina sat back. "She left the company. Left the city, actually, for a while. I heard she's back now. I heard she's still not over it." Vivienne's mind raced back to a name Damian had said with something like a curse in his voice on the phone that morning. Étienne. Not Claire. But it didn't matter; the shape of the story was the same, and it was sitting in front of her in black and white.

Why are you telling me this? Vivienne asked. "What do you get out of warning me?"

Sabrina's jaw tightened. "Because nobody warned her. And I've spent two years wondering if I could have stopped it, if I'd just said something before she signed instead of after she was already in love with a man who was always going to let her go on schedule." She stood, pulling her coat tighter around herself. "I'm not telling you not to sign, Ms. Marsh. Your debt is your debt, and I don't know your situation well enough to tell you what to do about it. I'm telling you to walk into this with your eyes open. Ask him about Claire. Ask him what he told her at the end. And then decide if you're the kind of woman who can survive eighteen months of pretending, and walk away exactly on schedule, feeling nothing at all."

She left a business card on the table, no company name on it now, just a phone number and walked out into the cold before Vivienne could ask another question.

Renata slid into the seat Sabrina had left warm.

"Well?" she said. "Do I need to burn something down?"

"He's done this before," Vivienne said numbly, sliding the old contract across the table. "With his ex-fiancée. Two years ago."

Renata read it twice, her face going through several emotions in quick succession: shock, fury, and finally something more careful.

"Okay," she said slowly. But Vivi, think about this like a restoration for a second. You always tell me the damage isn't the whole story. You look at what's underneath before you decide if something's worth saving.

"This isn't a painting, Renata."

No. But you're doing the thing you do with paintings anyway  deciding what it means before you've actually looked at the whole picture." Renata tapped the old contract. "You don't know what happened between him and this Claire woman. You're getting one very angry, very hurt woman's version of it, secondhand, from someone who got fired and clearly still has feelings about it herself."

"So you think I should still sign?"

"I think," Renata said carefully, "you should ask him. Today. Look him in the eye and ask him about Claire Bennett, and watch what his face does. You're good at reading damage, Vivi. Read him."

Vivienne didn't sleep. At six in the morning, she was standing outside Voss Enterprises again, for the second time in two days, the old contract folded in her coat pocket like a weapon.

Damian was already at his desk when his assistant let her in, dark circles under his eyes suggesting he hadn't slept either.

"Ms. Marsh. You're becoming a very early riser."

"Who is Claire Bennett?" Vivienne said, no greeting, no warm-up, straight for the throat.

Every trace of morning politeness drained out of Damian's face at once.

"Where did you hear that name?"

"Does it matter? Answer the question."

He was quiet for a long moment, his jaw working, and when he finally spoke, his voice had gone flat and careful in a way she'd never heard from him before not cold like the boardroom, something worse. Guarded.

"She's my ex-fiancée," he said. We ended things badly, publicly, three years ago. It's ancient history."

Vivienne pulled the old contract out of her pocket and set it on his desk between them. This isn't ancient history, she said. "This was dated two years ago. Eighteen months. A marriage of convenience.  She watched his face carefully, the way Renata had told her to. "Tell me this isn't what it looks like."

Damian looked down at the paper, and something moved behind his eyes that Vivienne couldn't quite name not guilt, exactly. Something closer to grief. I can't tell you that, he said quietly. "Because it's exactly what it looks like."

The room went very still.

"You did this before," Vivienne said. "You offered her exactly the deal you're offering me. And then you" she couldn't even finish the sentence, the anger and something else, something that felt embarrassingly close to hurt, tangling together in her chest.

"I ended it exactly the way the contract said I would," Damian said, and his voice had gone rough now, quieter, like a man finally admitting something he'd spent two years avoiding. "Because that's what I do, Ms. Marsh. I honor contracts. I don't break my word. I told her, from the very first day, exactly what this would be and exactly when it would end, and I kept that promise down to the letter."

"And she fell in love with you anyway."

Something flinched behind his eyes. "Yes."

"And you let her."

"I told her not to," Damian said, and for the first time, real anger cracked through his careful voice. "I told her, the same way I'm about to tell you, that this isn't a love story. It's a business arrangement with a ring attached. She chose to believe it could be more than that. I never once lied to her about what it was."

Vivienne stood there, shaking, torn between two feelings that refused to sit still long enough for her to pick one, fury at a man who had apparently broken a woman's heart with a straight face and called it honesty, and something quieter and more dangerous underneath it, a small voice asking whether she was standing here right now for the same reason Claire had once stood in this same office. Because some part of her, already, four days in, was starting to want more than a contract from this man.

"I need to think," she said again, backing toward the door, her voice unsteady.

"Vivienne."

It was the first time he'd used her first name. It landed somewhere she didn't want it to. You have until Friday, he said quietly. "I meant that. Whatever you decide, whatever you think of me after today,  I need you to know the offer was never a trick. It's the only honest thing I have left to give anyone."

She left without answering.

She walked for almost an hour, through the cold, past a dozen blocks she didn't remember crossing, until her phone buzzed in her pocket. A text from the same unknown number as the night before.

She almost didn't open it. She opened it anyway.

I told you to ask him. I hope you did. There's one more thing you should know before you decide, something he'll never tell you himself. Claire didn't just fall in love and get her heart broken on schedule, Ms. Marsh. She's pregnant. Six months. And the timeline says the baby isn't from anyone she's dated since him.

Vivienne stopped walking in the middle of the sidewalk, cars honking around her, snow falling silently over a city that had no idea her entire world had just tilted sideways. If it was true, if Damian Voss had a child on the way with the last woman he'd offered this exact contract to, then everything he'd just told her in that office, every careful, honest-sounding word about contracts and promises kept, was either an enormous lie.

Or he didn't know at all.

And Vivienne had five days left to decide which terrified her more.