Married To My Enemy's Spy

The gold tip of the Montblanc pen hovered above the signature line, a quiet guillotine.

Sign it, Aria. Save the board. Save the name.

The boardroom of Hale Enterprises was filled with the scent of high-quality cedar and the bitter, metallic tang of desperation. Across the walnut table sat the devil himself. Luca Veridian did not look like a man about to enter a loveless marriage; he looked like a predator watching a cornered bird ponder how it wanted to be devoured.

"The clock is ticking, Aria," Luca said. His voice was a low, musical rasp that scraped against her raw nerves like sandpaper on silk. "Each passing moment, your stock value sinks to another point. By lunchtime, you'll be presiding over a graveyard."

Aria raised her eyes, meeting the sharp, slate-gray gaze of her adversary. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? To pick the bones clean?"

"I'm the one extending you an olive branch," he retorted, leaning back in his chair. He straightened his cufflink, a black obsidian stone set in white gold. "A merger. A stable future. The Veridian-Hale conglomerate. It's what our fathers had planned."

It was what her father used to use to destroy my mother, she thought, feeling the beat of her pulse in her throat.

She thought of that night, of the fires in the Hale labs, of the whispers of sabotage. She thought of how her own mother looked, defeated and gray, as the Veridian lawyers took away everything she owned. And now, twenty years later, the Hales were the ones teetering on the edge, and the Veridians were the ones who came to their rescue. "One year," Aria whispered, her voice like ice. "Then we walk away. No strings. No shared assets."

"Read the fine print, darling. We share living space. We share a public face. We're in this together. Might as well get comfortable."

She held the pen, feeling the white of her knuckles. She hated the way he used the word darling, like he used it as an insult, like he used it to cut. She hated the way he filled the room, the way it felt like it shrunk around him. She hated everything about it. She dipped the pen in the ink, feeling it bleed onto the paper. Aria Hale-Veridian. She felt like she was being branded.

There," she spat, moving across the table and dropping the document in front of him. "I've sold my soul. I hope the commission was worth it."

Luca stood up, his towering height casting a long shadow on her. He picked up the document, his eyes perusing her signature with a look that gave her chills. For a brief moment, his expression wavered. Not triumph. Not victory. Not hunger. Not even lust. Determination?

"Pack your bags, Aria," he said, stuffing the document into his leather folder. "A car will be waiting for you at your penthouse by six. We have a gala to attend this evening. Our first performance."

He turned to leave but halted at the doorway. He didn't turn back. "And Aria? Don't bother bringing your knives, those little cutting remarks you use on me. In my house, we use real steel."

And with that, he closed the door behind him. Aria took a breath she knew she had been holding. Her hands shook. She reached into her handbag and pulled out a small device.

You think you've won, Luca, she thought, her eyes narrowing. But I'm not just moving into your house. I'm moving into your vault. I'm going to find out what your family did to mine, and I'm going to burn the Veridian name to the ground from the inside out.

She had no idea the camera lens was hidden inside the smoke detector.

In the back of his Maybach, Luca opened his laptop. A live feed of the Hale boardroom was displayed on the screen. He watched as Aria stared at the door with an expression of pure, unadulterated loathing.

He did not smile. Instead, he opened another file, another folder labeled Hale Crimes Financial.

"She's in," he muttered to the empty car. "Begin the deep dive. Every transaction, every account. If she's the one writing the checks for the laundering, I want her in handcuffs before the year is up."

His phone vibrated. A message from an unknown number: Is the lamb in the slaughterhouse?

Luca gazed at Aria's face on the screen. She was fragile and fierce, a queen in the ruins of her palace.

He typed out a response: The door is locked.

The boardroom of De Luca International rested on the sixtieth-fourth floor and was enclosed within a glass wall cage that hovered over a city that appeared like a gigantic electronic circuit board. Within the room, the temperature was kept at the exact, chilly level of sixty-five degrees.

De Luca was not sitting at the head of the table. Instead, he stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows, with his back to the twelve board members controlling the city's rhythm and beats. The silence he projected carried more weight than the humidity of the impending storm.

"The Veritas merger is on your desk, Luca," Marcus Thorne announced nervously. "It's the last missing part. If we accept it, we will take in their shipping routes, and Sterling's history becomes merely a reference."

Luca remained unmoving and gazed out into the cityscape while another flash of lighting illuminated the buildings. He was a man whose presence filled any space with an aura of a predator, with his finely tailored charcoal wool suit and impeccable posture.

"Arthur Sterling's history, as you call it," Luca said quietly after some time. The low, raspy melody of his voice forced others to stop whatever they were doing in order to hear what he had to say. "This means only one thing: the carcass of a fallen animal."

"One can still get something useful out of them," another board member whispered, his pallor increasing.

Luca turned towards him slowly, his eyes as dark and icy as a winter sea. He approached the table where the contracts lay in neat piles. With each step, the rhythmic clicking of his shoes against the black, obsidian floor could be heard.

"The representatives of the Veritas clan believe that they can use Arthur Sterling's passing to their advantage. It's not true."

He extended his hand in order to sign the papers but suddenly pushed all the documents off the table, letting them crash noisily on the floor.

"Luca!" Thorne exclaimed.

"The contract is nullified," Luca said calmly, with the same amount of coldness contained within his tone of voice. "I refuse to merge with weaklings. I tear them apart."

"But their infrastructure"

But we'll get them when they go into receivership, interrupted Luca, bending closer and filling the air with the smell of mint. With hands laid out flat, he pinned the room with a look that was both commanding and threatening. I want them desperate, I want them craving a hero who never shows up.

With the precision of a surgeon, he readjusted his tie, cool in his detachment, cutting through the racket with ease. But he didn't think about the way or profit, but about the girl in the rain with resolve in her backbone and promises in her eyes.

Veritas Family would fall apart, he muttered, more to himself than to the others trembling at his feet. And it would start with her.

The silence was broken only by the ticking of a clock that seemed to count down the minutes to my doom.

I stood in the middle of my father's office, the De Luca file opened on top of his mahogany desk. The rage was now solidified. It wasn't a raging inferno; it was a precious stone, hard and translucent enough to cut right through whatever lay ahead.

Aconitine. Not a heart attack but murder. My father wasn't killed by an errant coronary artery; he was poisoned by the man who wanted the power he held.

I studied the photograph of Luca De Luca that was attached to the last page of the file. The picture depicted a man of exquisite beauty in a way that felt menacing. Perfect jawline, piercing eyes, and the title of being the most ruthless individual in the tri-state area.

I couldn't stand against him in court. It would be an utter loss. I wouldn't prevail against him in corporate strategy either; he'd eat me alive. He expected me to run away. He expected me to give up.

"You're overthinking things, Arya."

I didn't look up. The image in the window was not my own. I was too old and cold for myself. "I'm not overthinking, Elias. I'm figuring out the price of admission."

Elias was leaning against the door, shadowed in the corner of the room. "Admission to what? His kingdom? That's just a meat grinder."

"Then I have to be the butcher," I replied softly.

I thought about all the variables involved. Luca wanted the Veritas assets. He wanted the shipping ports. More than that, he wanted absolute power. He was a man who planned long-term, and in the world we lived in, there was only one legal avenue to merge two empires without firing a single bullet.

I grabbed a pen. No letter was written; a term sheet was drafted.

Duration: Two years.

Assets: Transfer of all Sterling shipping routes upon completion.

Clause: Access to all De Luca company servers.

It was a suicide mission, packaged in an investment strategy. I would allow him to have me every night and every day until I found the proof to bring him down from the inside out. I would be his trophy catch, and his last mistake.

"Are you serious?" Elias demanded, stepping forward when he read the title on the page. "He will know what you're doing."

"I don't care," I answered, calm but my heart cold as stone. "He sees me as a prize. He doesn't know that I am a Trojan horse."

I glanced at the clock. Midnight. Below me, in the darkness, Luca De Luca was rejoicing in his defeat of my father, thinking that he had ended the lineage of the Veritas family.

But he did not know what I was planning.

"What are you going to do?" Elias asked, horror coloring his voice.

I grabbed the folder and tucked it under my arm. I could feel the bizarre sense of peace settling over me. No grief here anymore; only the plan. I would infiltrate the enemy's camp, and fool him into believing he had already won.

Until it was too late.

"I'm marrying Luca De Luca."