Aisha Rao stared at the termination letter until the words blurred.
"Your employment is terminated, effective immediately."
Three years. Three years of late nights, missed meals, and rising through a job that never gave her credit — and just like that, removed with a stamped line and an empty apology.
Her hands trembled. The elevator dinged. Her manager's "Sorry, Aisha" sounded like a verdict. Everyone pretended not to notice as she walked past desks already whispering the rumor she had refused to sleep with a senior. The truth didn't change the result.
Outside, the city had decided to cry with her. Rain fell in hard, impatient sheets, drumming on her umbrella until it flipped inside out and turned into a useless skeleton in her hands. Her phone buzzed with a single-line message that felt like a punch.
Landlord: Final notice. Rent due in five days. Vacate if unpaid.
Her chest went ice-cold. No family, no savings, no safety net. Just the narrow room she called home — and the knowledge that in five days, even that could be taken away.
She tightened the strap of her bag and started to walk faster, trying to outrun the humiliation, the cold, the future she suddenly couldn't afford.
She didn't notice the black car parked across the street at first. She didn't notice the man watching from behind a tinted window, because people like that never watched people like her. They watched markets, mergers, art auctions. They didn't stand under bad umbrellas in the rain.
He stepped out from the shadow of the car when she did.
Tall. Tailored black suit. An umbrella that refused to be touched by the rain. The kind of man whose presence sliced through the ordinary like glass.
"Aisha Rao?" His voice was low, precise.
She froze. The name left her throat before she could stop it. "Yes?"
He looked at her like a man looking for an answer to a question he had rehearsed for a long time. There was no warmth in his features — only a well-constructed distance that made her instinctively step back.
"I'm Adrian Black." The name landed like a headline.
She had heard the rumors: Adrian Black, ghost CEO of Blackstone Holdings, a man who didn't do interviews, who let the world invent a past for him because he offered none. Ruthless. Untouchable. A man with no family on paper and no vulnerabilities in public.
"Why me?" Her voice came out smaller than she felt.
He reached into his coat and produced a thin leather folder that smelled faintly of expensive paper. He handed it to her with the formality of a judge delivering a sentence.
Aisha's fingers fumbled as she opened it. The first page made her heart stutter.
A marriage contract. Her name, written clearly in an elegant font at the top, as if the world had already stamped its approval on a life she hadn't chosen.
"You need a wife?" The question sounded absurd in the rain.
Adrian's eyes didn't flicker. "For one year."
Shock and incredulity warred across her face. "You expect me to—why would I—what do you mean?"
"In return," he said, "you will receive one year of financial security, a residence under my protection, and a monthly stipend sufficient to clear all your debts. You will not be required to reveal personal matters to the public or to my company unless explicitly permitted. You will follow the conditions in the contract."
"Protection from what?" Aisha asked, though every instinct in her body shouted that asking was dangerous.
He looked at her then, and for the first time the storm in his eyes seemed almost human — but only for a fraction of a second. "From people who will not hesitate to use you to reach me."
She swallowed. It was a sentence that meant less and more than she wanted to understand.
"Why me?" she repeated, desperate for concrete reasons, for logic she could hold.
Adrian's jaw tightened. He stepped closer, the rain dripping from his umbrella and yet somehow not touching him. "You are exactly the type I have been looking for."
"You don't even know me." Her voice betrayed the mixture of fear and a sudden, ridiculous hope. A contract sounded like salvation and a trap in equal measures.
He bent his head a fraction and his voice dropped until it was almost a whisper. "I know enough." There was a coldness there that could have been cruelty if not for the barely-contained intensity beneath it. "You will sign, Aisha. Or you will walk away and return to whatever ruins you have left."
Her options felt like coins on a table where the dealer had already stacked the deck.
The rain thickened. A taxi splashed through a puddle nearby, and for a moment the world felt ordinary again — until Adrian's next words cut across it.
"Marry me."
The contract in her hands suddenly weighed like a life sentence. The word "marry" echoed, amplified by the rain and the hollow of her own breath. She could hear the landlord's message. She could feel the cold of the city through her shoes.
"I don't—" she began, but the folder closed, and Adrian's expression made the rest of the sentence pointless.
"Sign," he said.
Aisha looked at the page, then at the man who spoke with the authority of a man who could buy and sell her world. Somewhere inside, a tiny, stubborn part of her—hungry, tired, pragmatic—whispered that this might be the only way out.
Her pen hovered over the line as the rain blurred the letters. Outside, life rushed by indifferent to the small, quiet decision she was about to make.
If she signed, she would gain shelter, money, security. If she signed, she would bind herself to a man with secrets and power that could swallow her whole. If she refused, she would face the slow, certain erosion of everything she had left.
Her hand trembled. The pen touched paper.
The ink bloomed.
She had just married a stranger.
And Adrian Black watched her with the expression of a man who had finally found the missing piece—yet kept the truest part of his past locked away, like a blade waiting to be drawn.
The rain washed the city clean, but nothing could wash away the contract now etched between them.