Chapter 10

The Fiancée Who Was Never Fake:

Roman told me everything on a Tuesday. Sitting across from me at my own kitchen table, the same table where I signed a contract two months back that I genuinely thought, at the time, was the strangest thing that would ever happen to me.

I know better now.

Laid it all out. The fraud. The trust documents. My mother finding something nobody was supposed to find and refusing to just look away from it, the way I probably would’ve too, the way anybody with a conscience and no clue what they were walking into might have. The blackmail case built backward from a conclusion Eleanor had already decided on ahead of time. The relocation. The new name. Everything he and Julian had spent four days piecing together in that archive room, laid out across my table like a map of a whole other life I never knew I’d been living.

“So I’m the daughter of a woman your family destroyed,” I said, once he finished. The voice sounded strange to my own ears. Flat. The only way I could get the words out without falling apart completely. “To protect money. That’s it. That’s the whole reason.”

“Yes.”

“And you knew. When you offered me that contract in the hallway.”

“No.” Fast, firm, same as before, except this time I could hear what it cost him saying it again, knowing exactly how thin it must’ve sounded by now. “Told you the truth, Ivy. Didn’t know until the background check flagged something odd, and even then didn’t know the full shape of it until a few days ago. Know that doesn’t fix how it looks from where you’re sitting.”

“It doesn’t.”

“I know.”

I stood up, because sitting still felt impossible right then, paced my own tiny kitchen while he watched me from the table, patient in a way that somehow made it worse, like he was leaving me room to be furious because he knew he’d earned every bit of it.

“My whole life.” Keep walking. “My whole life I thought my mom just died young. That’s the story I got. Turns out she was erased. On purpose. By people with enough money to make a whole human being disappear and rewrite the reason why.”

“Ivy—”

“And now what. I’m supposed to marry into that family? Sit at Eleanor’s table for the rest of my life knowing she’s the reason I grew up without a mother?”

“Nobody’s asking that of you.”

“Your family will. The second this gets out, and it will, your family’s going to want it buried so fast it’ll make what happened to my mom look gentle.”

Didn’t argue that. We both knew I was right, and something about him not arguing, not trying to smooth over a truth that clearly wasn’t smooth, made me trust him more right then than any reassurance could’ve.

His phone rang before either of us said anything else. Looked at the screen, jaw going tight, answered it on speaker without asking if that was okay, which told me whatever this was, he wanted me hearing it straight instead of secondhand later.

“Grandmother.”

“It’s confirmed, then.” Eleanor’s voice, thin, controlled, coming through the tiny speaker into my kitchen like something let in that shouldn’t have been. “Got a call this morning. Someone’s got a story ready for the press, Roman. Full history. Marguerite Hart, the fraud, the settlement, all of it, ready to run within the week unless we act.”

“Who called you?”

“Does it matter? What matters is containment. You end the engagement, publicly, cleanly, now, before this destroys three generations of what this family built.”

Watched Roman’s face while she talked. I watched something harden in his jaw I’d only seen once before, that night at the gala, Desmond Rourke putting a hand somewhere it didn’t belong.

“No,” he said.

“Roman—”

“Said no, Grandmother. Not ending anything. If this story runs, it runs, and we deal with it honestly for once instead of burying another woman to protect money that was never legitimately ours to begin with.”

Silence on the line ran long enough I thought it’d dropped.

“You understand what you’re choosing,” Eleanor said finally. Very quiet now. “The company. Your inheritance. Everything I’ve spent my life building for this family.”

“Understand exactly what I’m choosing.” Looked at me while he said it, held my eyes across my own kitchen like the rest of the call stopped mattering entirely. “I’m choosing her. Whatever it costs. Choosing her over a legacy built on something we never should’ve buried in the first place.”

Hung up before she could say anything back.

The kitchen went quiet except my own breathing, uneven, and I just stood there staring at him. This man who’d just given up, out loud, on a company and a fortune and a family name for a woman he’d known for two months. Something in my chest that had been braced this whole time finally, carefully, let go.

“I’ve fallen for you too,” I said, before I could talk myself out of it. “I have. Somewhere in all this I stopped being able to tell the arrangement apart from something real, and I think I’ve known it for weeks and been too scared to actually say it.”

“Ivy—”

“But I can’t pretend the rest of it just isn’t there. My mother. What your family did. Can’t fall into you and forget this whole thing started with your family erasing a woman to protect their money.”

“Don’t need you to forget it.” Crossed the kitchen, stood close, close enough I could feel the warmth of him, close enough neither of us was performing for anybody. “Need you to know I’m choosing you knowing all of it. Not despite it. Because of it. Whatever my family did, I want to spend however long it takes making it right. And I want to do that with you next to me. Not as a fake fiancée anymore. As someone I actually love.”

Let him kiss me then, and this time neither of us pulled back first, and for one long quiet minute in my too small kitchen, none of it, the fortune, the fraud, the fake contract that had somehow turned into the realest thing in my whole life, mattered at all.

The knock came an hour later. Hard. Urgent. Nothing like a neighbor’s polite knuckles or a delivery guy.

Roman got to the door before I could, some instinct already braced for trouble the second the knock landed wrong, and I heard him say something sharp, a warning, right before the door burst the rest of the way open and two men in dark jackets and ski masks shoved past him into my apartment.

I didn’t have time to scream before a hand closed around my arm.

“Ivy!” Roman’s voice somewhere behind me, furious and scared in a way I’d never once heard out of him, then the sound of a struggle, something breaking, a body hitting the floor that I prayed wasn’t his.

The last thing I saw clearly, before a cloth pressed over my mouth and the whole room went soft and swimming at the edges, was Roman’s face, blood at his temple, reaching for me across a distance that suddenly felt impossibly, terrifyingly far.

Then nothing.