Chapter 3 THE ACCIDENT

"What accident?"

Amelia's voice cut through the office like a blade through paper. Damian didn't move. For a man who'd controlled every second of this conversation, he looked, for the first time, like something had been kicked loose inside him.

Into the phone, low and clipped: "I'll call you back." He killed the call without waiting for a response and dropped the phone face-down on the desk, as if hiding it might undo the last thirty seconds.

"Damian." She hadn't planned to use his first name. It came out anyway. "What accident?"

"It's not relevant to our arrangement."

"You just told your grandfather I don't know about it yet. That makes it relevant."

He exhaled through his nose, and she watched him weigh his options: lie, deflect, or hand her something true and gamble on the cost.

"There was an incident," he said finally, "eight months ago. Involving my father's company records. Before he died."

"Your father is dead?"

"Two years ago. Car accident, according to the official report." His jaw locked. "Six months ago I found discrepancies in his financial files that don't match a man who simply lost control of his car on a wet road."

"You think someone—"

"I don't think anything. I have questions nobody in this company wants me asking." He pocketed the phone like he could bury the conversation with it. "The first woman I approached with this contract found one of those files. By accident. She didn't understand what she was looking at, and it nearly cost her anyway."

Amelia's stomach dropped. "Cost her how? Hurt by who?"

"I don't know yet. That's the problem."

"And you're telling me this after I signed."

"I'm telling you," Damian said, voice low, "because you caught three words on a phone call, and I'd rather you understand them than spend a year imagining something worse."

"Something worse than my husband's father possibly being murdered, and a woman getting hurt for finding out?" Her laugh came out jagged. "Enlighten me."

He didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had dropped to something quieter, almost an apology he didn't know how to finish. "Worse would be you finding out alone. Unprepared. The way she did."

The office went silent except for the building's hum and, drifting up faintly from Jefferson Avenue below, the grind of a city bus pulling away from its stop.

Amelia sank back into the chair, the contract still lying between them. "You should have told me this before I signed anything."

"Would you still have signed it?"

She opened her mouth to say no. Nothing came out.

Because the truth — the humiliating truth — was that she would have. Nineteen days. Her mother's hospital bills. The house on Chalmers Street her grandfather had built with his own hands, the same bank now sending letters threatening to strip it from his granddaughter. Fifteen million dollars didn't stop being fifteen million dollars just because the man offering it came with a family full of buried questions.

"No," she said anyway, because it was easier than the truth. "I wouldn't have."

Damian's face didn't change, but his eyes told her he clocked exactly how big that lie was.

---

They didn't discuss it further. Damian summoned his driver, set his lawyers in motion to quietly clear her family's debts before the ink had fully set, and informed her — with the same clipped efficiency he brought to everything — that she'd move into the Blackwood estate within the week.

"A week?" Amelia demanded, watching the elevator floor numbers drop.

"I'm mentioning it now."

"You have a gift for terrible timing."

"So I've been told." For half a second, something flickered at the corner of his mouth — not quite humor, but close enough to remind her a person might exist under all that ice. It vanished just as fast.

The doors opened onto the lobby, and Amelia planted herself three steps from the revolving doors before a voice stopped her cold.

"Damian, darling, you didn't tell me you had company."

She turned. A woman stood near the security desk in something that cost more than Amelia's annual rent, dark hair falling in waves that took a stylist two hours to fake, looking effortless. Beautiful in the deliberate, weaponized way that made other women straighten their spines on instinct.

"Victoria." Damian's voice flattened — not cold like it was with Amelia, but braced, like a man absorbing a hit before it landed. "I didn't know you were in the building."

"Meeting on thirty." Victoria's gaze tracked over Amelia — the secondhand coat, the scuffed boots, the exhaustion she hadn't managed to hide. Amelia felt the inspection land like a hand shoving her backward. "And who is this?"

"Amelia Hart," Damian said. "My fiancée."

The word dropped into the lobby and shattered.

Victoria's smile held, but something behind her eyes turned to ice. "Your fiancée." She tested the word like she was checking whether it would bear weight. "Fast, even for you, Damian. Last I heard, you swore you'd never marry again after—"

"Victoria."

"—after what happened to the last one," she finished anyway, eyes cutting to Amelia with something too calculated to be pity. "Has he told you about her yet, sweetheart? Or are you still in the phase where he only shows you the parts of himself he wants you to see?"

Amelia's pulse spiked. "I don't think that's your business."

"Everything about Damian is my business." Victoria's smile sharpened. "We were engaged for two years. I know exactly what he leaves out when he talks."

"That's enough." Damian's voice dropped into something dangerous, a warning that made Amelia's own spine go tight even though it wasn't aimed at her.

"Is it?" Victoria closed the distance, close enough that Amelia caught the cutting sweetness of her perfume. "Congratulations on your engagement, Miss Hart. Truly." Her eyes flicked back to Damian, and for one second the mask slipped just enough to show what was underneath. "I hope you enjoy finding out what really happened the night his father died."

She turned and strode toward the doors, and Amelia stood frozen beside a man who no longer looked like the Ice King — he looked like someone watching the walls of his carefully built life start to give way in front of a stranger.

"Damian." Amelia's voice shook. "What does she know that I don't?"

He didn't answer.

Because across the lobby, Victoria had stopped beneath the revolving restaurant sign, phone already at her ear, and her voice carried back clean enough for Amelia to catch every word:

"It's me. He's engaged — already. Call Richard. Tell him we move the board vote to Thursday, before she has time to talk to Alexander. If she gets to the old man first, we lose everything."