Chapter 1 The Clause

• Isla's Pov
• Say that again.
• The words came out sharp, disbelieving, my fingers already crushing the edge of the folder Mr. Halloway had slid across his desk. He didn't blink. He didn't even look uncomfortable, which somehow made it worse.
• "Your father amended the will eight months before he passed, Ms. Marchetti. If you don't marry within one calendar year of his death, full executorship of the estate transfers to your uncle."
• My father's signet ring was still on a chain around my neck, and I found myself gripping it hard enough to leave a mark in my palm. "He wouldn't do that. He hated arranging anything. He used to joke he'd disown me if I ever came home engaged to someone he hadn't vetted himself."
• "There's more." Halloway didn't look at me when he said it. He looked at the folder instead, like it was easier to deliver the next part to paper than to my face. "The clause specifies the marriage must be to an heir of the Voss family."
• The room tilted, just slightly, just enough that I had to put my hand flat on the desk to steady it.
• "Voss." I said the name like it belonged to a different language. "As in Cornelius Voss."
• "As in his grandson. Alaric Voss." Halloway finally met my eyes. "I'm told a corresponding clause exists on the Voss side. Both documents were drafted within weeks of each other."
• For a second nobody spoke. Desmond, beside me, didn't fill the silence the way he usually did — and that told me more than anything else in the room. My uncle never let it sit for more than three seconds unless he was deciding how to use it.
• "My father spent twenty years trying to bury that family," I said slowly. "Everyone in this city knows that. It isn't a secret."
• "I can't speak to history. Only the requirement."
• Desmond's hand landed on my arm, soft, practiced, the same touch he used at the funeral for the cameras. "Isla, sweetheart. Nobody's trying to trap you. Your father wanted you protected."
• "Protected." I pulled my arm free. "By marrying me into the family that destroyed his company."
• "There's another path." He said it carefully, like he'd been waiting the whole meeting to offer it. "Let the year run out. I take over as executor — temporarily. Your mother keeps the house. Nothing changes day to day."
• "Except I lose everything he actually built."
• "You lose a title. Not a roof."
• I almost laughed. There was nothing funny about it. That was the trick of it — dressing up losing everything as somehow keeping the only thing that mattered. He'd been doing that to me my whole life, and I'd been too busy grieving to notice how good he'd gotten at it.
• And that was when something in me stopped reacting and started deciding.
• "I'll marry him," I said.
• Desmond's expression flickered. "You will?"
• "Yes." I stood, smoothing my coat, meeting his eyes instead of Halloway's. "But not to save the estate. I don't actually care about the estate the way you think I do."
• "Then why."
• "Because my father never made a decision about that size without telling me first. Not about the house. Not the board. Not anything that mattered — until this. Which means either you're lying to me in a lawyer's office three weeks after his funeral, or there's a reason buried in this clause neither of us knows yet." I picked up my bag. "And I intend to find out which."
• I didn't wait for his answer. I walked out past the assistants, past the wall of framed photographs of my father shaking hands with men who'd smiled at his funeral and meant none of it, and out into the cold with my pulse still slamming from a decision I hadn't fully processed.
• I didn't see him until I nearly walked into him.
• He was standing outside the building like he'd been waiting there on purpose, dark coat, hands in his pockets, watching the door like he already knew exactly which one I'd come through. Tall enough that I had to tip my head back. Still enough that the whole street seemed to move around him instead of through him.
• "Isla Marchetti." He said my name like he was testing whether it still fit the person he remembered.
• My stomach dropped straight through the sidewalk.
• "You've got to be joking." The words came out before I could stop them. "You knew I'd be here."
• "I had a fairly good idea." Alaric Voss didn't smile. He didn't do anything a normal person would do meeting someone for the first time in ten years — no handshake, no small talk, nothing soft at the edges. "My grandfather's assistant confirmed your reading was this morning. I thought it made more sense to introduce myself before the lawyers did it for us."
• "You already knew about the clause."
• "I've known for three days." He said it flatly, with no apology in it. "I assume you just found out."
• "Ten minutes ago."
• Something crossed his face then — not surprise, not sympathy, something colder and more precise, like he was recalculating a number in his head. "Then I imagine you have questions."
• "I have about forty of them, starting with why your grandfather wants his heir marrying into a family he's spent twenty years trying to destroy."
• "That makes two of us." He studied me for a moment too long, and I felt it land somewhere under my collarbone, unwelcome and impossible to ignore. "I don't particularly want this marriage, Ms. Marchetti. I want the company my grandfather's holding hostage behind it. I imagine your reasons for saying yes are just as unsentimental."
• "You don't know anything about my reasons."
• "I know you just walked out of that building like you'd already made a decision no one in there expected." His eyes dropped, briefly, to my mouth, then back up, so fast I almost thought I'd imagined it. I hated that I'd noticed. I hated more that something in his expression told me he knew I had. "I'm rarely wrong about people, Isla. It's something you'll learn about me quickly, if we're doing this."
• "We haven't agreed to anything yet."
• "No." He held out a card between two fingers, black, nothing on it but a number. "But you will. And when you do, I'd rather we go in with our eyes open instead of pretending our families are giving us a gift instead of a leash."
• I took the card without meaning to.
• "I don't trust you," I said.
• "Good." Something almost like amusement moved behind his eyes, gone as fast as it came. "Trusting the wrong person is what put both of us here in the first place."
• He walked past me toward a car idling at the curb, and I stood on the sidewalk holding a stranger's number in my hand, feeling the ghost of his eyes on my mouth like it had left a mark.
• Eleven months. Eleven months to marry a man I didn't trust, whose family had spent two decades trying to bury mine — and somewhere underneath all of it, a reason our fathers had gone to their graves without ever explaining.
• I intended to find it before he did.