ELENA

The smell of antiseptic clings to my clothes like a bug I can’t shake off.

Machines hum around my mother’s bed, soft beeps counting down to a deadline I can’t see but I know are there. Her skin is the color of paper. Her eyelids flutter with her lashes trembling with dreams that must be easier than this reality. A single tear runs down from her eyes even in her sleep. The doctor speaks, but my brain only latches onto one sentence.

“We can stabilize her, Elena, but the new treatment plan is expensive.”

“How expensive?” My voice scrapes out of me.

He tells me and my chest tightens in response.

I nod like I have a plan. Like I’m not already behind on rent, skipping meals so I can keep the lights on at home and here and like I’m not standing in borrowed flats with a hole in the left sole.

I kiss my mother’s forehead. “I’ll fix this,” I whisper.

When I step into the corridor, my phone vibrates.

Unknown Number: Miss Hart, your presence is requested at Kane Tower. Immediately.

I blink. Kane Tower? As in the Kane Tower, seventy-two floors of dark glass and money, the home of the coldest man in the city?

Elena: Who is this?

Unknown Number: Mr. Kane’s office. A car is waiting at the east entrance of St. Augustine Hospital.

I don’t ask how they know where I am but I’m moving before fear can tell me not to.

The Kane Tower lobby might as well be a different planet with the marble floors and a chandelier that looks like a frozen galaxy. The receptionist doesn’t ask my name, she just hands me a visitor badge with ELENA HART already printed on it and points toward a bank of private elevators.

“Sixty-ninth floor,” she says.

The car is silent as it climbs, numbers lighting up like stars. I catch my reflection in the mirrored wall and pinch color into my cheeks. It doesn’t help. I look like the hospital, too bright and white, like a sterile wool, tired around the edges.

When the doors open, a woman in a fitted navy dress is waiting for me. She’s all sharp lines and cool perfume in the gown.

“Miss Hart.” She turns before I can answer. “Mr. Kane doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

We walk past glass-walled offices where people speak in low, urgent voices. At the end of the corridor, there are double doors in matte black with a fingerprint scanner winking green. The assistant opens them, gestures me in, and closes them behind me like she’s sealing a vault.

He’s by the window, his back turned with his hands in his pockets. The skyline burns gold and copper in the late afternoon and silhouettes of cranes and planes cut through it. The man is a silhouette too, tall and built like a mansion with his suit so tailored it looks like it grew out of him.

He doesn’t turn when he speaks. “You’re late.”

“I came from the hospital.”

“That isn’t an excuse,” he says, and faces me.

I’ve seen photos of Alexander Kane, of course. The internet has seen them. The papers call him ruthless. The investors call him visionary. The women call him something I don’t think is legal to say in public.

In person, he’s more precise than the picture. There’s not a strand of dark hair out of place with his cheekbones placed with defiance. His eyes have the color of winter glass, assessing, weighing and ready to discard.

“Sit.” He doesn’t point to a chair. He expects obedience.

I sit.

He returns to his desk and finally looks at me properly. For a beat, his gaze lingers, on my cheap blouse, the hair I scraped into a bun in a hospital bathroom, and my knuckles that I’ve chewed raw on several occasions. I brace for contempt.

Instead, he says nothing about them. His face is all glacier.

“You’re here because you need money,” he says. “And I have more than I can spend.”

My pulse trips. “I didn’t come here to beg.”

“Good. I don’t respond to begging.” He opens a drawer, takes out a folder, and slides it across the desk. The paper is heavy, cream and thick enough to act as an armor for a toy gun. Two words stare back at me in clean, black letters, MARRIAGE CONTRACT

My mouth goes dry. “Is this a joke?”

“I don’t make jokes.” He leans back, steepling his fingers. “I require a wife, for reasons that don’t concern you, and you require immediate financial support. You sign and we marry. Your mother’s bills will be paid. Everyone wins.”

A thousand questions riot in my chest. Why me? Why a stranger? Why now?

“Why me?” I ask the only one that matters.

He watches me like a predator would watch a prey. “You’re discreet and unremarkable enough to be ignored in the circles I move in, but not incompetent. Your file says you graduated top of your class.”

“My file?”

He doesn’t blink. “Everything in this building has a file.”

“How long have you been… watching me?” I ask with a small frown on my face.

He ignores that, opens the folder to reveal tidy clauses, subclauses and lines for signatures. “The terms: one year, publicly present, privately separate. No expectations of affection. No interference in my business. You will receive a monthly allowance and a lump sum upon dissolution. In return, you will be the wife I require.”

The word require lands like a weight in my throat. My mother’s face flashes in my mind, the way she had been finding it hard to breathe lately and the crazy number the doctor said. A number my bank app would definitely never see if I didn’t jump on this offer

“What about…” I swallow. “What about…”

“Intimacy?” The corner of his mouth doesn’t move. “That’s not required.”

Heat crawls up my neck anyway.

He taps a line with one fingertip. His hands are beautiful and impersonal, like a sculpture made of ice. A ring sits on the desk near his wrist, simple platinum, no stone, with the cold circle waiting, for my finger perhaps.

“You’ll sign an NDA,” he continues. “You cannot engage in any interviews, no memoirs, and absolutely no tearful videos. You will be photographed by our official employees and you will attend three events a month. Lastly, you will not embarrass me.”

The way he says it to me makes it clear, I am the variable and he is the constant.

“What do you get out of this?” I ask.

His eyes flicker to the window, then back. “Control.”

I open my mouth, close it. “There’s someone else, isn’t there?” The words slip out before I can stop them. A woman. A real fiancée. A past he’s fumbling to manage.

He doesn’t react. “Do you accept?”

My phone vibrates in my bag like a trapped insect but I don’t move to check it. I can hear my heartbeat and slow ticking of a clock that wasn’t even in the room, counting down to the moment a billing department will swipe my mother out of her bed because I failed to be enough.

“How fast can the money…” I’m not above begging, after all. “How fast can the hospital bills be paid?”

“An hour after we sign,” he says smoothly. “They’ll receive confirmation and a direct line for anything else they need.”

He already knows the hospital’s name. The floor where she stayed, the room, the nurses on rotation even. My stomach twists.

“Why me?” I ask again, softer.

This time, something almost like interest warms the glacier. “Because you’re the only person in this city who still says please to receptionists.”

I blink. “What?”

“Sit up,” he says. “Read.”

I read. My eyes skate over clauses that feel like a second language, but the words No Love are clear. They’re not in the contract, not literal, but they thread through everything. He’s offering rescue with razor wire wrapped around it.

At the bottom of the last page, there are two signature lines. His is already there, a decisive slash across Alexander Kane. It looks extremely intricate.

“Why is your signature already…”

He lifts a brow. “I plan ahead.”

I flip back a page and my breath catches. In the corner of one clause, a faint imprint, the ghost of a name. Mine. Elena Hart. It was not written or inked at all. Just a pressure mark, like a signature pressed hard on a stack of paper that bled through.

I look up sharply.

He follows my gaze, then slides the file away and replaces it with a fresh copy. “That’s a draft and this is the version you sign.”

I swallow the questions that rise. A draft with my name pressed into it. How many drafts have there been? How long has this deal been moving toward me?

The door clicks open. The assistant in navy enters soundlessly, sets a pen on the desk. “Mr. Kane.”

He nods and she leaves. The pen is heavy in my fingers and my phone vibrates again.

“Answer it,” he says.

I shake my head. “It can wait.”

“Answer it,” he repeats, ice-threaded, and the tone makes me thumb the screen on instinct.

It’s a text from Lisa, my best friend.

El, the hospital called. Your mom’s crashing. They need authorization for the new meds like…now. They won’t administer without financial guarantee. Where are you?

The room tilts. My lungs forget how to work.

Without a word, he slides a sleek, black credit card across the desk. “Put them on the line.”

“It’s…” My voice breaks. “They said they won’t…”

“Put them on the line.”

His knuckles don’t touch mine when he hands me the phone, but the space between our hands feels charged anyway. He hits speed dial on his own cell, murmurs something I don’t catch to someone called Bennett, then gestures for me to speak.

“Hello?” I choke out when the hospital answers on the second ring.

A voice I recognize from endless nights responds. “Ms. Hart?”

“It’s me. We…We have a guarant…”

“St. Augustine’s billing.” Another voice cuts through the call sounding curt.

Mr. Kane speaks before I can. “Alexander Kane. Approve anything under Mrs. Hart’s name and send confirmations to my office. If her attending needs clearance, let them have it.”

Silence. Then a flurry of yes, sirs.

My throat burns. “Thank you,” I whisper, to him or the universe, I don’t know.

He doesn’t accept my gratitude. He only gestures to the contract. “Sign.”

“Why… why are you doing this?” The question crawls out of me again, small and helpless and human.

His gaze moves to my mouth, then away. “Because I can.”

It should disgust me. It should make me run. Instead, it steadies me. Power never pretends to be anything but what it is anyways.

I pick up the pen.

“Read the final clause,” he says.

I do. In the event of pregnancy…

My heart stutters but his expression doesn’t change. The clause isn’t lurid, it’s clinical. There are provisions and protections stated there. A war plan for a future neither of us intends.

“Do you expect…”

“I expect you to follow the terms,” he says. “And I expect myself to do the same.”

Something flickers across his face but it is gone before I can name it. Pain? Memory? A ghost.

“Tell me one thing,” I say. “If I sign this, will you humiliate me?”

A beat. Two.

He leans forward, his elbows on the desk, and for the first time his voice lowers from arctic to something that carries heat in the spaces between words. “I don’t need to humiliate anyone to get what I want, Elena.”

It’s not a promise, but a softened threat.

“I want to add a condition,” I say, surprising us both. “You don’t move me like a piece on your board without telling me why. Just… if you’re going to throw me to the wolves, give me a head start.”

A muscle in his jaw twitches. “You think you can negotiate with me?”

“I think you want a wife who can stand up straight in a room full of your enemies.” My fingers don’t shake. “Let me.”

There it is again, that flicker. Of approval, maybe.

He picks up the pen and adds a line in neat, black print then initials it. In matters of public exposure directly affecting the spouse, reasonable notice shall be provided.

It’s nothing but somehow, it manages to be everything. It’s a trap dressed like a kindness or it’s a kindness that might fit like a trap. I can’t tell which but I sign anyway.