Chapter 5
She was still on the floor at six in the morning when her phone rang. It was a number she didn’t recognize. She let it ring four times. Then she answered.
“Miss Carter.”
His voice. Of course, it was his voice.
“It’s six in the morning, Mr. Moratini.”
“You’re awake.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the lights in your kitchen have been on for the last ten hours.”
Lena’s eyes flew to her window. “Are you watching me right now?”
“I’m not. But someone is.”
“Stop it.”
“I’m being honest with you, Miss Carter. You said honesty mattered to you. I’m trying to give it to you.”
“You think this is honesty? You think telling me you have a man with binoculars staring into my apartment is honest?”
“I think pretending I don’t would be a worse betrayal.”
She wanted to throw the phone across the room. She gripped it tighter instead. “Why are you calling me, Mr. Moratini?”
“Because you have a question.”
“I have a hundred questions.”
“You have one that matters.”
Lena was silent for a long moment. He was right. Damn him. He was right.
“Section Eleven,” she said finally. “Paragraph three. You wrote that the contract becomes void if you ever compel intimacy through coercion or force.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
He didn’t answer immediately. She could hear him breathing — slow, steady, the breathing of a man who had all the time in the world.
“Because I’m not a rapist, Miss Carter.”
“You’re a blackmailer.”
“I’m a man who knows the difference between submission and surrender. Submission is what you do when you have no choice. Surrender is what you do when you choose to stop fighting.” His voice dropped lower. “I don’t want your submission, Miss Carter. I never did. I want your surrender.”
“What’s the difference, in practice?”
“In practice, it means I will never lay a finger on you against your will. Not once. Not ever. The contract obligates you to be my companion in public. To be photographed with me. To attend events. To sleep in the apartment I provide. It does not, anywhere, obligate you to share my bed.”
Lena’s heart stopped. “What?”
“Read it again, Miss Carter. The word ‘intimacy’ appears once. The word ‘sex’ does not appear at all. The word ‘consummation’ does not appear at all. You will live in my building. You will appear on my arm. You will play the role I require in public. But what happens behind closed doors is, and always will be, your choice.”
“That’s—” She was shaking again. “That’s not what you implied yesterday.”
“I implied what I needed to imply to make you read the contract. You manipulated me—”
“I gave you fear. Now I’m giving you the truth.”
“Why?”
“Because I want you to come to me, Miss Carter. Eventually. On your own. Without the leverage, without the contract, without the fear. I want you to walk into my bedroom one night, three months from now or three years from now, and I want it to be because you decided. Not because I made you.”
“Then why the contract at all?”
“Because if I gave you a choice this morning — a real choice, a clean choice — you would have walked out. You would have gone home. You would have cried. You would have decided I was a monster, and I would never have seen you again.” His voice was almost soft. “I needed time, Miss Carter.”
“The contract buys you time to do what?”
“To make you fall in love with me.”
Lena laughed. She couldn’t help it. It came out broken, half-hysterical. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am entirely serious.”
“You think I’m going to fall in love with the man who blackmailed me into signing a three-year contract, with a velvet box and a photograph of me sleeping in my own bed?”
“I think you’ll fall in love with the man you discover behind all of that.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“Then in three years, you will walk away with a fully paid-off mortgage, a vice president title, a bank account that will never need replenishing, and the freedom to never see my face again. I will not stop you. I will not pursue you. I will not call. That too is in the contract. Section Nineteen, paragraph two.”
“You’re insane.”
“I’m in love with you, Miss Carter. There’s a difference.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know you better than anyone alive.”
“That’s not love. That’s surveillance.”
“It’s both.”
The honesty of that answer — the absolute, unflinching honesty of it — shut her up. She sat on her kitchen floor, the legal pad in her lap, the rising sun bleeding gray light through her window, and she realized something that terrified her more than anything else he had said. He wasn’t lying. He genuinely believed every word of it.
Ronan Moratini was not a man playing a game. He was a man who had decided two years ago, at a charity gala, that Lena Carter was the only woman he would ever want. And he was now executing that decision with the same ruthless, methodical precision he used to acquire skyscrapers. She was not his target. She was his project. And in some twisted, impossible, deeply broken corner of his mind, he believed he was doing this for her.
“I need to ask you something,” she said quietly.
“Anything.”
“The photograph. Was that a threat?”
“No.”
“Then what was it?”
He was silent for a long moment. “It was a confession.”
“A confession?”
“I had it taken three nights ago, Miss Carter. I have looked at it every morning since. I included it in the envelope because I wanted you to know what I am. I wanted you to know what I’m capable of. I wanted you to know that I have already crossed lines I cannot uncross.” His voice was rough. “Now, if you sign this contract, you are signing it knowing exactly who I am. Not the businessman. Not the negotiator. The man. The full, ugly, unredeemed man. I will not lie to you about him. I will not pretend he isn’t there. He is the price.”
Lena’s throat closed. “And if I don’t sign?”
“Then I will burn the photograph tonight. You will never hear from me again. Your mother’s mortgage will be paid off anonymously by a charity in two weeks. Your brother will receive a full-ride scholarship to Cornell next month, from a foundation he has never heard of. And you, Miss Carter, will go on with your life in this apartment, in this city, never knowing how close you came.”
The world stopped. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“You’re saying— you’re saying if I refuse, you’ll just— you’ll just let me go?”
“I’m saying I love you, Miss Carter. And love that requires a hostage isn’t love. It’s something else.”
“Then why?” She was crying now, and she didn’t know when she had started. “Then why the threats yesterday? Why the mortgage? Why any of it?”
“Because I had to know.”
“Know what?”
“Know if you were the woman I thought you were. If you had walked out of that boardroom yesterday, Miss Carter — if you had told me to go to hell, if you had spit in my face, if you had refused to even look at the contract — I would have known. I would have known you were stronger than I was. I would have let you go.” He paused. “But you didn’t walk out. You sat down. You read the file. You came home. You opened the envelope. And right now, at six in the morning, you are sitting on your kitchen floor with a legal pad and a question you can’t answer.”
“How do you—”
“I told you. Someone is watching.”
She wanted to scream. “That’s not love, Mr. Moratini. That’s—”
“I know. I know exactly what it is. I am not a man who lies to himself, Miss Carter. I am offering you a cage. A beautiful one. A gilded one. A cage where you will be safer and richer and more powerful than you have ever been.” His voice was barely above a whisper now. “But a cage. And you have until Friday at nine o’clock to decide if you want to step inside.”
She hung up. She didn’t think about it. She didn’t decide to. Her hand just moved on its own, and the call ended, and the silence of her apartment crashed down around her like a building collapsing.
She put her head between her knees and tried to breathe. She thought about her mother. She thought about her brother. She thought about the eighty-four thousand dollars in student loans and the eleven hundred and seventy-two dollars in her savings account. She thought about Ronan Moratini saying I love you like it was a fact instead of a feeling. She thought about the part of herself — the small, traitorous, terrifying part — that had felt something dangerously close to flattered when he said it.
And then, because she was Lena Carter, and she had been clawing her way out of corners since she was nine years old, she stood up. She wiped her face. She washed her hands. She made coffee.
And she made a decision.
May you like
She wasn’t going to sign the contract. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But she wasn’t going to walk away either. She was going to do something neither of them had planned for.
She was going to play.
