Chapter 6

Cameras, Lies, and a Man Named Étienne

By seven the next morning, there were reporters outside Vivienne's studio.

She saw them from her bedroom window: a small crowd, cameras with long lenses, a van with a satellite dish parked crooked across two spots on her narrow SoHo street. Her phone had forty-three missed calls. Her email was flooded. Somewhere in the mess, Renata had sent one single text at 6:02 a.m.:

Girl. GIRL. You're on the news. Open your door for NO ONE. I'm bringing bagels and a plan.

Vivienne sat on the edge of her bed, still in yesterday's clothes, staring at the sapphire ring on her hand as it belonged to a stranger.

Her phone buzzed again. Damian.

Don't leave your building. I'm sending a car. We need to get ahead of this together before Étienne takes control of the story for us.

She almost laughed. Twelve hours as a wife, and already someone was trying to write the ending before she'd had a chance to live the middle.

The car took her straight to Voss Enterprises, past a wall of photographers screaming her name her actual name, which meant somebody had done their homework fast and into the private garage where Damian was already waiting, tie straight, face unreadable, looking like a man who hadn't slept and had decided not to let it show.

"Are you all right?" he asked, the second the door shut behind her.

"I have never had a stranger yell 'Mrs. Voss, over here!' at me before," Vivienne said. "So. No. Not really."

Something flickered across his face guilt, maybe, or the closest thing to it he allowed himself. "I'm sorry. This isn't how I wanted your first morning as my wife to go." Did you find out who leaked it?

"Not yet." His jaw tightened. "Only four people knew the signing happened last night in that office. Me. You. Ms. Adler. And my assistant, who buzzed you in." A pause. "I trust exactly two of those four people completely."

"And the other two?"

Are about to have a very uncomfortable conversation with my head of security, Damian said. "But that's not what we need to deal with first. Étienne moved the board meeting up. It's in forty minutes. He's going to use the leak as proof that this marriage is a stunt, staged to protect me from the deadline clause, rather than a real one. His eyes met hers, steady, searching. "I need you in that room. I need the board to see two people who chose this, not two people who got caught."

Vivienne looked down at the ring on her hand, then back up at him.

"Then let's give them something to see," she said. The boardroom was already half full when they walked in, hand in hand, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees the moment Étienne looked up. He was handsome in a sharper, colder way than Damian, the same dark hair, a thinner version of the same jaw, a smile that looked practiced in a mirror. He stood at the head of the table like he already owned it.

"Damian," he said smoothly. "And the new Mrs. Voss. How lovely you could both make time, given the circumstances."

"Étienne," Damian said, pulling out Vivienne's chair before taking his own, a small, deliberate gesture that made two of the older board members exchange a glance. "Say what you came to say."

"Gladly." Étienne slid a folder down the table, the same kind of folder Vivienne had come to dread over the last six days. "Grandfather's will requires a marriage entered in good faith, not a transaction assembled overnight to dodge a deadline. I have reason to believe this entire arrangement was negotiated, drafted, and signed within the last week, timed suspiciously close to Damian's birthday, involving a woman whose family owed this company over two million dollars." He looked at Vivienne with something close to pity. "No offense intended, Ms. Marsh. I'm sure you have your reasons. But a marriage born out of debt relief isn't the 'good faith union' our grandfather intended when he wrote that clause."

The room was silent. A few board members were nodding slowly, and Vivienne felt her stomach twist. She stood up before she'd fully decided to.

"May I say something?"

Étienne's smile flickered, surprised. "Of course."

"You're right that I owed this company money," Vivienne said, her voice steadier than she felt. "You're right that this started as a transaction. I'm not going to stand here and pretend otherwise, because I think everyone in this room is smart enough to smell a lie the second I tell one, and I'd rather you trust the truth." She took a breath. "But I've spent six days with your cousin, Mr. Voss. I've watched him fix a mistake his own lawyer made without being asked to. I've watched him tell me the truth about his ex-fiancée when it would have been so much easier to lie. I found out, three days ago, that someone paid a fired employee to feed me a false story about a pregnancy, specifically designed to scare me out of signing this contract before I ever had the chance to decide for myself." She let that land, watching several board members sit up straighter. "I don't know who paid Sabrina Cole to lie to me. But I'd be very curious to hear Mr. Étienne Voss's answer to that question, since he seems to be the only person in this room with anything to gain from me walking away."

The room erupted into murmurs. Étienne's composure cracked for exactly one visible second before he smoothed it back over.

"That's a serious accusation with no evidence behind it," he said tightly.

"So was yours," Vivienne said. "Except mine has a name attached. Sabrina Cole. Legal department. Fired eight months ago for leaking confidential files, including, I've since learned, files belonging to Claire Bennett, your cousin's ex-fiancée. I'd love to know how a woman fired for leaking documents happened to have my personal phone number within twenty-four hours of my first meeting with Damian."

Damian rose beside her, sliding a single sheet of paper down the table: a phone record, subpoenaed overnight through channels Vivienne hadn't even known existed.

"Sabrina Cole's severance account received a payment of fifteen thousand dollars two days ago," Damian said, his voice gone cold and precise in a way that made the whole room go still. "Routed through a shell account registered to an address in Connecticut. The same address as a property owned by my cousin's wife. Étienne's face went white.

"That's- this is fabricated"

"It's a bank record," Damian said. "Feel free to have your own lawyers verify it. I already have."

The silence that followed was long enough to feel like its own kind of verdict. One by one, board members began closing their folders, exchanging glances, the momentum of the room shifting so visibly that even Vivienne could feel it, like watching a wave finally break after building for days.

The board chair, an older woman named Mrs. Hargrove who had said nothing until now, finally spoke.

"Étienne. I think you and I need to have a private conversation after this meeting." Her tone left no room for argument. "Damian. Ms. Marsh. Thank you for your candor. This meeting is adjourned."

They didn't speak until they were alone in the elevator, the doors sliding shut, the sudden quiet after the chaos of the boardroom feeling almost unbearably loud.

"You didn't have to defend me like that," Damian said quietly. "You could have let the board sort it out."

"I wasn't defending you," Vivienne said. "I was defending the truth. There's a difference."

Something in his face softened, unguarded in a way she hadn't seen since the night before, right before the phone had rung.

"Thank you," he said. "For staying. After everything you learned this week, you could have walked away a dozen times. You didn't."

"I don't walk away from things I've decided are worth saving," Vivienne said. "I told you that on day one."

He reached out, slowly, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, his fingers lingering against her cheek a moment longer than the gesture required.

"I'm starting to think," he said quietly, "that I might be one of them."

The air between them went thick and warm, the elevator's soft hum the only sound in the world, and this time, when he leaned in, there was no phone left to interrupt them.

His mouth found hers, careful at first, like a question, and then not careful at all, one hand sliding into her hair, the other pulling her flush against him, six days of tension finally breaking loose all at once. Vivienne kissed him back like she'd been waiting to since the moment she'd turned around in that elevator lobby and forgotten how to speak.

The doors slid open on the ground floor.

They broke apart, breathless, right as a wall of camera flashes exploded in their faces, reporters who had somehow gotten past security, screaming questions, phones held high to catch every second of it.

"Mrs. Voss! Is it true your marriage started as a debt payoff?"

"Damian, is it true your cousin tried to sabotage the wedding?"

"Over here, is that a real kiss or a performance for the cameras?"

Damian's arm came around her instantly, steering her back toward the elevator, his security team suddenly appearing from nowhere to hold the crowd back, but not before Vivienne caught sight of one face in the chaos that made her blood run cold.

Standing at the very back of the crowd, not shouting questions, not holding a camera, just watching with a small, satisfied smile on her face, was Sabrina Cole.

She caught Vivienne's eye across the lobby and mouthed three words that Vivienne would replay in her head for the rest of the day.

This isn't over.

Then she turned and disappeared into the crowd before Damian's security could reach her, leaving Vivienne standing frozen in the flashing lights, one terrifying question sitting heavy in her chest.

If Étienne had already been caught paying Sabrina off, why did the woman who'd just been exposed as a liar look like she'd just won something?