Caleb leaned in, his breath warm against my ear.
“Smile, Amelia,” he whispered. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
I looked at him. At the handsome face I had once believed was safety. At the man who had slapped me in the bridal suite twenty minutes earlier because I refused to sign the prenuptial amendment his mother had brought in at the last second.
It had not been a prenup.
It had been a surrender.
My shares in ValeTech. My late father’s voting rights. My grandmother’s estate. All transferred into a marital trust controlled by Caleb’s family.
“You marry him,” Evelyn had said, sliding the papers across the vanity, “or the photos leak tonight.”
She meant the edited photos. The fake affidavit. The forged emails. The scandal designed to destroy my position before Monday’s board vote.
Caleb had smiled then too.
They thought I was cornered.
They thought grief had made me soft. My father had died six months earlier, leaving me his company and a board full of wolves. Caleb had entered my life with flowers, sympathy, and perfect timing.
But my father had taught me one rule before he passed away.
“When men rush you to sign, Amelia, read what they’re afraid you already know.”
So I had read.
I had watched.
