Chapter five

Linnea’s POV

Three days is not enough time to plan a wedding. It is more than enough time to ruin your life.

The news didn’t leak. It exploded. By seven the next morning, every sports blog, newspaper, and gossip channel had the same headline: Hockey Royalty Unites: Hartwell Heiress to Marry Voss Star. Under it, a picture of me at the fundraiser, mid-argument with Cassian, my face contorted in fury. Someone had cropped it so it looked like a quarrel between lovers.

Someone had leaked it. Only a few people knew about the contract. I thought of Magnus’s thin, polite smile.

My phone buzzed for twenty-four hours without stopping. Reporters camped at our front gate, shouting questions about whether we had sold out. A tabloid ran the headline Gold Digger or Hostage? A sports commentator called me the Hartwell family’s last bargaining chip.

But the media wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was my family.

Julian found out from a headline, not from me. I walked into the kitchen on the second morning and found him standing at the counter with his phone in his hand and his face the color of ash. He didn’t yell. That would have been easier.

“Tell me it’s not true,” he said.

“It’s true.”

“You’re marrying him? Of all people?” His voice cracked. “After everything he did to me?”

“It’s only for a year,” I said. “It’s a business arrangement, Julian. It’s the only way to save the foundation.”

“We’d have found another way.”

“We tried every other way.”

“And you picked the one that spits on me.” He stared at me with those sad, broken eyes, and for the first time, there was something else in them besides grief. It looked like fear. “Linnea, don’t do this. Please. Whatever he’s offering, whatever he’s told you, he’s lying. You can’t trust him.”

“How do you know he’s lying?”

Julian opened his mouth. Closed it. “Because he’s a Voss.”

It was the kind of answer that sounded like an answer and wasn’t. It made the back of my neck prickle. But I was too tired and too frightened to chase it. I told myself I would ask later.

My mother was worse.

Adelaide Hartwell stood in the doorway of the sunroom with her arms crossed and her mouth set in a line so thin it looked painted. “I won’t come,” she said.

“Mom—”

“I will not watch my daughter hand herself to the people who destroyed her brother.” She never raised her voice. “If you do this, you do it without me.”

“I’m doing it for you,” I said. “For all of us.”

“Don’t you dare say that.” She turned away. “I raised you better than to sell yourself for a building.”

That was the moment I stopped crying. Something in my chest went hard and quiet. I had spent my whole life holding my family together. And my family had just decided I was the one who broke it.

On the second afternoon, Cassian came to the front door.

I was in the living room trying to explain, for the fourth time, to Julian why he couldn’t talk me out of it, when the knock came. When I opened the door, he stood on the porch in a dark charcoal suit with the afternoon sun behind him. Behind the gate, reporters were shouting. Cameras flashed.

Julian was up in an instant. He shoved past me. “Get off my porch.”

“Julian,” I said. “Don’t.”

“You’ve done enough damage to this family, Voss!”

Cassian didn’t speak. He just stood there.

Julian swung.

It happened so fast I barely saw it. His fist hit Cassian across the jaw with a sound like a snapped board. Cassian’s head turned with the blow. He staggered half a step. Then he straightened and wiped the blood from his lip with his thumb.

He didn’t hit back. He didn’t even raise his hands.

“I deserved that,” Cassian said quietly. Not to me. Not to the reporters. To Julian.

Julian froze. For a moment, something flashed across his face, panic, maybe, and then it vanished. His fist dropped.

“I came to see if you needed anything,” Cassian said, to me, in the same gentle voice he used for everything. He held out a card with a phone number on it. “Day or night. I’ll be in the car.” He turned and walked down the steps, past the shouting reporters, with a bleeding lip and a straight back.

I stood there holding the card.

“Why didn’t he hit me back?” Julian whispered.

I didn’t have an answer. I should have been furious. Instead, I felt something I couldn’t name, a crack in the wall I had built around my hatred. I told myself it was nothing. I told myself it was strategy.

That evening, there was a knock at my bedroom door. I opened it to find a young woman in a leather jacket and designer boots, holding a garment bag in each hand and a grin that looked like trouble.

“I’m Odette,” she said. “Cassian’s sister. Before you shut the door, I come in peace and with emergency supplies.”

“Did your father send you?”

“God, no. My father would rather swallow a hockey puck.” She marched past me and laid the garment bags on my bed. “I’m the only Voss who’s going to be on your side tomorrow. Probably.”

“Probably?”

“It’s a big family.” She unzipped one of the bags. Inside was a simple, elegant ivory dress with long lace sleeves. “The venue you had booked has canceled. Somebody called this morning and said there was a ‘scheduling conflict.’ Funny, that. So Cass and I found a judge who owed us a favor. It’s a small chamber downtown. It won’t be pretty, but it’s legal.”

I stared at the dress. “Why are you helping me?”

Odette looked at me for a long moment. Her smile faded, and she suddenly looked much older than twenty-three. “Because my brother has never asked anyone for anything,” she said. “And he asked me for this.”

I didn’t believe her. I didn’t trust her. But I put on the dress.

The wedding was Friday at ten in the morning. It wasn’t a big, beautiful party with flowers and smiling guests. It was a fast, cold, legal ceremony in a stuffy judge’s chamber with two nervous clerks, Odette in the back row with her arms crossed, and Jasper Quinn, Cassian’s best friend, standing awkwardly by the door. My mother didn’t come. Julian didn’t come.

I wore the ivory dress. Cassian wore a dark suit, and a faint bruise was blooming along his jaw. He looked like a king who had won a war and didn’t want to be congratulated.

We had barely begun when the door banged open.

A man in a navy suit stood in the doorway with a briefcase. “Your Honor,” he said, “I’m representing Voss Holdings. We have serious concerns that this marriage is a sham. We ask that the ceremony be postponed pending review.”

The judge frowned. “On what grounds?”

“That the bride is being coerced.” The lawyer’s eyes slid to me, cool and smiling. “And that the groom has deliberately concealed material facts.”

My heart stopped.

Magnus’s lawyer. It had to be. He was going to stop it. He was going to stop it now, and in three hours the board would vote, and the rink would belong to Magnus Voss.

The judge turned to me. “Miss Hartwell. Are you entering this marriage willingly?”

My mouth was dry. I looked at the lawyer. Then at the judge. Then, because I couldn’t stop myself, at Cassian.

He was looking at me. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t beg. His face was calm, but his hands, hanging at his sides, were curled into fists so tight his knuckles were white.

It has to be your choice, he had told me.

“Yes,” I said. My voice rang in the quiet room. “I am doing this of my own free will.”

“Sit down, counselor,” the judge said.

The lawyer opened his mouth, shut it, and left.

When the judge told us to exchange rings, Cassian took a plain silver band from his pocket. He took my shaking left hand and slid it onto my finger, his warm thumb brushing my pulse. A strange, electric spark went straight up my arm. My heart gave a violent, traitorous leap. I jerked my hand back a little and looked up at him in panic.

He looked away.

“You may now kiss the bride,” the judge said.

My whole body went stiff. Kiss? We hadn’t talked about a kiss.

Cassian turned back to me slowly, as if he were asking permission with his eyes. When I didn’t move, he leaned down and brushed his lips against my forehead. It was brief and polite and entirely correct. It should not have made my knees weak.

“There,” he said quietly, so that only I could hear. “That’s all anyone needs to see.”

I didn’t know whether I was relieved or insulted.

At 2:14 that afternoon, Naomi called me, her voice shaking. The first installment had landed in the foundation’s account. Brandt had quietly withdrawn the motion to sell the rink. The vote was off.

We had won. For now.

By evening, Cassian drove us out of the city to the place we were supposed to call home for the next year. It was a massive modern glass house perched on a hill above the ocean. The lights inside were warm and the furniture was sleek and expensive, and it was completely silent.

An older woman in a gray cardigan met us in the hall. “Mr. Voss. Mrs. Voss. I’m Mrs. Dale, the housekeeper. Your father’s office called to confirm that everything was in order with the bedroom arrangements.”

Cassian’s face didn’t change, but his shoulders went rigid. “Thank you, Mrs. Dale. That will be all.”

When she had gone, I turned to him. “His office called? About the bedroom?”

“The staff report to my father’s assistant,” Cassian said in a low voice. “Not to me. He placed them here years ago.”

“So he’s spying on us.”

“He’s watching. Yes.”

“And you didn’t think to mention this?”

“I’m mentioning it now.”

I wanted to scream. “The separate bedroom you agreed to—”

“We’ll find a way,” he said. “Go up. Take the master suite. You’ve had a long day.”

I climbed the wide, winding staircase and found the room easily. It was enormous, gray and navy, with a wall of windows showing the dark ocean far below. I let out a long, shaky breath. I thought I could finally shut a door and process the madness of the last three days.

Then I saw the bed.

It was a giant, king-sized bed with crisp white sheets, and it was the only bed in the room. I turned around. Cassian was standing in the doorway, one hand on the frame, his eyes on the floor.

“The guest rooms are in the east wing,” he said. “The staff clean them every morning. If any of them see an unslept-in bed, my father will know by lunch.”

“So we share a room.”

“I’ll take the armchair.”

“You’re six feet three.”

“I’ve slept in worse.” He almost smiled. “Goodnight, Linnea.”

I lay awake on my side of the bed for hours. In the armchair across the room, Cassian lay with his jacket over him, perfectly still, his breathing too even to be sleep. At two in the morning, I got up for a glass of water.

The house was dark and silent. I padded down the staircase and across the hall. A thin strip of light glowed under a door at the far end.

His study.

I shouldn’t have gone in. But the door wasn’t locked, and my feet moved before my mind did.

The room was neat, with a big desk, a leather chair, and one lamp burning. On the desk lay a thick folder, open. I stepped closer. I told myself I only wanted to see what was in it.

The first page was a ledger. Across the top it read: HARTWELL FOUNDATION: Debt Acquisition. Beneath it ran page after page of dates going back three years, loan documents, bank transfers, and signed assignments of debt. At the bottom of every page, in the same neat hand I had watched sign my marriage contract, was one name.

Cassian Voss.

I read it twice, and then a third time, because my brain wouldn’t accept it.

He owned the loan on our rink.

He had owned it for three years.

“Linnea.”

I spun around. Cassian stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, his hair rumpled, his face completely white. He looked at the folder in my hand and at my face, and for the first time since I had known him, he looked afraid.

“It isn’t what it looks like,” he said.

“You bought our debt.” My voice came out as a whisper. “Three years ago. You said no strings.”

“Linnea—”

“You owned us. This whole time, every penny I begged for, every investor who said no, I was begging in your hands.” My eyes filled. “Did you make Northline pull out? Did you plan all of this?”

“No.”

“Then explain.”

Cassian’s hands curled at his sides. For a long, awful moment, he stood there with his mouth half open, like a man standing at the edge of a cliff.

“I can’t,” he said at last. His voice was hoarse. “Not yet.”

I set the folder down very carefully, because if I didn’t, I was going to throw it at him.

“You asked why I would marry you,” I said. “I think I finally understand.” I looked at the ring on my finger, the plain silver band that had felt, for a moment that morning, like something more. “You didn’t save my family. You bought it.”

I walked out of his study.

I had just married my creditor.