The rain fell like shattered diamonds against the floor-to-ceiling windows of Blackwood Tower. Each drop traced a desperate path down the glass, mirroring the cold trails of panic sliding down Elara Vance's spine.
She stood on the sixty-seventh floor, staring at the city below. Manhattan sprawled like a circuit board of ambition and decay. From here, people were ants. Problems were small. Lives were negotiable. Hers, apparently, was about to be purchased.
Elara's fingers tightened around the strap of her leather bag. The same bag her father had given her for her eighteenth birthday, back when Vance Pharmaceuticals meant something other than scandal, bankruptcy, and a front-page obituary. That life felt like a fever dream now, replaced by the sterile smell of hospital corridors and the crushing weight of debt.
"Mr. Blackwood will see you now."
The voice belonged to a woman who looked carved from ice and ambition—sharp cheekbones, sharper suit, eyes that assessed Elara's thrift-store dress and worn boots with clinical disdain. Isabella, according to the platinum nameplate on the obsidian desk. Executive Assistant. Gatekeeper. Probably executioner.
"Thank you," Elara said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. She wouldn't let them see her break. Not yet.
The doors to Adrian Blackwood's office swung open silently. No knob. No handle. Just polished mahogany that parted like the Red Sea before Moses, if Moses were a billionaire predator and the promised land was a gilded slaughterhouse.
The office wasn't a room. It was a statement. A cathedral of wealth stretched before her—dark wood, leather that smelled of money and masculinity, a wall of books that had probably never been read but cost more than her mother's medical bills. At the far end, behind a desk the size of a coffin, sat the man who'd systematically destroyed her family.
Adrian Blackwood.
He wasn't looking at her. He was studying a tablet, his profile sharp enough to cut glass. Jet-black hair, perfectly styled but for one rebellious strand that fell across his forehead. A jawline that belonged on currency. A suit that probably cost more than her college tuition—what was left of it after the banks called in the Vance debts.
"Sit."
The word wasn't an invitation. It was a command, delivered without looking up. His voice was deeper than she remembered from the one time she'd seen him across a courtroom gallery—a rich, dark timber that vibrated in the hollow spaces of her ribs.
Elara approached the chair facing his desk. It was lower than his. Deliberately. She had to look up at him, a psychological trick she recognized from her father's business lessons. Always control the elevation, Lara. The person looking up feels subordinate.
She sat anyway. Her dress, a simple black shift she'd bought three years ago, felt suddenly threadbare. Inadequate. Like bringing a spoon to a gunfight.
"You're late." He finally looked up.
His eyes were the color of a winter sky before a storm—steel gray, with flecks of something colder. They swept over her in one dismissive glance, cataloging every flaw: the faint shadows under her eyes from nights at the hospital, the slight fray at the hem of her dress, the way her knuckles whitened where she gripped her bag.
"The subway was delayed," she said, hating how small her voice sounded in the cavernous room.
"I don't care." He set the tablet down and leaned back. The movement was fluid, predatory. A panther assessing prey. "You know why you're here."
"You summoned me," Elara said, lifting her chin. "You didn't say why."
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. It didn't reach his eyes. "Let's not pretend, Miss Vance. We're both too old for games. Your mother has stage three pancreatic cancer. The experimental treatment at Sloan Kettering is her only chance. It costs four hundred thousand dollars. You have exactly"—he glanced at a slim silver watch on his wrist—"seventy-two hours before they discharge her to hospice care."
The air left Elara's lungs in a sharp rush. She'd known he was ruthless. She hadn't known he'd done his homework on the exact number of hours she had left.
"How—"
"I own the wing," he said simply. "I own the research grant funding the trial. I own the clock ticking over your mother's hospital bed."
Each "I own" landed like a physical blow. Elara's stomach twisted. This man owned the very time her mother had left. He had dismantled her father's company, their home, their name, and now he was harvesting the wreckage.
"What do you want?" The question came out as a whisper.
Adrian didn't answer immediately. He stood, moving around the desk with a controlled grace that was somehow more threatening than if he'd slammed his fists on the wood. He stopped inches from her chair, close enough that she caught his scent—sandalwood and something darker, like ozone before lightning strikes.
"Your father cost me something precious," he said, his voice dropping to a low, intimate register. "He took what was mine. So I took everything that was his. The company. The patents. The legacy." He leaned down, bracing his hands on the arms of her chair, caging her in. "But there's one thing left."
His breath warmed her cheek. Elara froze. She could see the individual lashes framing those merciless eyes, the faint scar along his jawline, the pulse beating steadily in his throat.
"You," he breathed.
She recoiled, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. "What?"
He straightened, walked back to his desk, and opened a drawer. When he turned, he held a single sheet of paper. He slid it across the polished surface toward her.
"Sign this."
Elara's eyes dropped to the document. The words blurred, then snapped into horrifying focus.
PRENUPTIAL AND MARITAL AGREEMENT
The clauses were a roadmap to her own disappearance. Thirty-six months. Relinquishment of all assets. Absolute obedience. And at the bottom, the price of her soul: Husband agrees to cover all medical expenses for Mariam Vance.
"You're insane." The words escaped before she could stop them.
Adrian's smile was thin and cruel. "Probably. But I'm also the only person standing between your mother and a morphine drip until she dies in a county facility." He picked up a solid gold pen and held it out.
"Sign it, Elara. Or walk out that door and listen to her scream in pain for the next three months."
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