All Chapters of The Ruthless proposal: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

SofiaThe letter arrived on a Tuesday, which felt insulting somehow, like even bad news couldn’t be bothered to wait for a day that already expected it.I read it twice at the register before I let myself believe it, and then a third time in the back office with the door closed, because some sentences need three readings before your body agrees to feel them. Reyes Imports, foreclosure proceedings, nine days, a stack of numbers I’d been quietly managing for three years finally catching up to the one truth I’d never said out loud: we were never going to climb out of this.My father didn’t know yet. He was out front, charming a table of regulars with the same story about the restaurant’s opening night that he told at least once a week, the one where my mother burned the first batch of empanadas so badly the smoke alarm brought half the block outside. He still laughed at that story like it was new. I used to love that about him. Lately it scared me, the way a man laughing at the past look

Sofia“Marry me,” he said, “for eighteen months, and your father keeps everything.”I laughed, actually laughed, a short disbelieving sound that had nowhere else to go. It wasn’t amusement. It was the particular noise a body makes when it needs somewhere to put shock that has nowhere polite to land. “You don’t know me.”“I know more about you than you’d be comfortable with,” he said, not unkindly, though the words landed like something heavier than comfort allowed. “I know you’ve been keeping that restaurant open on nothing but stubbornness for three years. I know your father doesn’t know how close he’s come to losing it. I know you came here alone instead of bringing a lawyer, because some part of you already understood that whatever I offered today, you weren’t going to be able to afford to refuse it.”“That’s not an answer. That’s a diagnosis.”“Then here’s an answer. Eighteen months, my name, my protection, and the debt disappears the day we sign. No cameras, no performance beyond

SofiaI didn’t sleep. I sat at the kitchen table above the restaurant until almost three in the morning, the contract draft Damian’s lawyer had emailed open on my laptop, reading every clause until the words stopped making sense and started simply repeating themselves in my head like a song I couldn’t turn off.It was, as far as I could tell, exactly what he’d promised. Eighteen months. Full debt forgiveness upon signing. No claim on the restaurant, the building, or any asset belonging to my father, structured instead as a personal arrangement between Damian and myself. A monthly allowance that made my eyes water for reasons that had nothing to do with gratitude. An exit clause at the end of the term with no further obligation on either side.It read like mercy. I didn’t trust mercy that came wrapped this neatly, not from a man who’d spent three years building the exact conditions that made refusing it impossible.My father found me there at six, moving slower than he used to, the tre

SofiaThe dress arrived two days before the wedding, delivered by a stylist I hadn’t hired, paid for by an account I hadn’t asked to be opened, in a box too elegant to belong to any closet I’d ever owned.“Mr. Castellano wanted you to have options,” the stylist said, laying out three gowns across my childhood bed like she hadn’t noticed the peeling wallpaper or the water stain in the corner of the ceiling I’d been meaning to fix for two years. “He said to tell you there’s no obligation to choose any of these. He simply didn’t want cost to be the reason you settled for something you didn’t actually want.”I chose the simplest one, a pale ivory dress with long sleeves and no beading, nothing that photographed as a statement, because some stubborn part of me refused to let this wedding look like anything other than what it actually was. A transaction. An arrangement. Not the kind of day a woman spent years imagining.City hall on Saturday morning was smaller than I’d ex

Sofia My new bedroom was larger than the entire apartment I’d grown up in, and I hated how much that fact unsettled me more than the wedding itself had. I stood in the doorway for a long moment before I made myself walk in, running my hand along furniture that probably cost more than a year of the restaurant’s profits, feeling like an intruder in a life I’d technically agreed to but hadn’t yet learned how to actually occupy. Somewhere down the hall, behind a door I had no intention of opening, Damian was presumably doing whatever ruthless billionaires did on their wedding night when the marriage wasn’t real and the bride wasn’t speaking to them. I wasn’t speaking to him because I didn’t trust myself to, not because I had nothing to say. There was something underneath his careful explanations, some weight he was carrying that had nothing to do with security details or board functions, and I’d spent three years reading people across a restaurant counter well enough to know when someo