Chapter 4 THE WEDDING THAT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO MATTER

Amelia didn't sleep that night.

She lay awake in her childhood bedroom, staring at the water stain spreading across the ceiling since March, and replayed Victoria's voice until the words lost meaning and became just sound. Call Richard. Move the board vote. If she gets to the old man first, we lose everything.

She didn't know who Richard was. She could guess who "the old man" meant. What she knew for certain was that she'd married into a war nobody had told her existed, and the contract in her bag hadn't come with a map of the battlefield.

By six a.m., she'd made a decision. She wasn't waiting for Damian to decide what she deserved to know.

The Blackwood estate sat behind iron gates in Grosse Pointe Shores, close enough to Lake St. Clair that Amelia caught the smell of the water the second she stepped out of the car. She'd braced herself for marble and cold perfection. What she got, standing in the foyer at seven-thirty with her one suitcase and her nerves scraped raw, was an elderly man in a cardigan sitting at the base of the staircase, feeding toast crusts to a golden retriever like he had nowhere else to be.

"You must be Amelia." His voice was rougher than she'd expected, worn like old rope, but his eyes tracked her with a sharpness his grandson hadn't quite matched after eighty years of learning to see through people. "Alexander Blackwood. Damian's grandfather."

Her pulse jumped. "You're the reason for all of this."

"I'm the reason for the contract." He set down the toast, and the dog gave him a betrayed look before wandering off. "I'm not the reason for whatever's actually happening between the two of you. My grandson did that entirely on his own — though I doubt he'd admit it."

"Nothing's happening between us. We met yesterday."

Alexander studied her, the same cataloguing look Damian had used in the office, except warmer. "I've read fifteen years of profit reports from that boy. I've never once heard him call a woman his fiancée in a lobby full of witnesses unless he meant for it to land."

Amelia's throat tightened. "Mr. Blackwood, I need to ask you something, and I need the truth."

"Try me."

"Who is Richard, and what board vote is happening Thursday?"

A collar jingled somewhere down the hall. Alexander's face didn't move, but something behind his eyes locked shut.

"Where did you hear that name?"

"Victoria said it. On the phone yesterday, right after Damian introduced me as his fiancée." Amelia's voice picked up speed, fear sharpening into something harder. "She said if I reached you first, they'd lose everything. I want to know what that means before I carry one box into this house."

Alexander pushed himself up from the stairs, joints protesting, and for the first time she caught the family resemblance — the same stillness Damian wore like armor, the same habit of weighing a problem before admitting it existed.

"Richard is my son," he said finally. "Damian's uncle. Thursday, the board votes on whether Damian keeps operational control of Blackwood Enterprises, or whether it transfers to a rotating executive committee."

"A committee Richard would run."

"A committee Richard would run," Alexander confirmed. "The marriage clause was never just tradition, Miss Hart. It was the only leverage I had left to keep this company out of my son's hands before Thursday. If Damian walked into that room still single, Richard would use it as proof he isn't stable enough to lead. Family man versus loose cannon. Old argument. Still works."

Amelia's stomach dropped. "So I'm not just a wife for the cameras. I'm a chess piece for a boardroom vote."

"You're insurance," Alexander said, not unkindly. "Whether you become something more is entirely up to the two of you."

Footsteps hit the stairs above them — fast, unmistakably Damian's. He appeared on the landing already dressed for the office, phone in hand, and stopped dead at the sight of Amelia standing in his grandfather's foyer.

"You're early," he said carefully.

"You're vague." Amelia snapped the word back at him. "I just learned more about my own marriage from your grandfather in five minutes than I learned from you all afternoon."

Something crossed Damian's face — not quite guilt, but close enough that she knew the hit had landed. "Grandfather—"

"She asked," Alexander said simply. "I'm too old to lie to a woman smart enough to ask the right question."

Damian came down the stairs slowly, and in the gray morning light Amelia caught the exhaustion he'd hidden so well in his office — dark circles, a tightness at his mouth that hadn't been there before Victoria's phone call.

"There's a board vote Thursday," he said, confirming what she already knew. "If it goes against me, Richard takes control of the company my father built. Everything my father died trying to protect goes to a man who's spent two years arguing I'm not fit to run it."

"Your father died protecting the company?"

His jaw locked. "I don't know what my father died doing. That's the problem. But I know Richard's had motive to want him gone for years, and I know Victoria's been feeding him information since the day we ended our engagement."

"So this whole thing—" Amelia's voice cracked. "The marriage, the money — it's not about your grandfather wanting you to settle down. It's about surviving Thursday."

"It's about both," Damian said. "But Thursday matters more than I told you.

Amelia held his gaze, watching the careful way he chose his words even now, even in his own foyer with his grandfather standing witness. She thought about Chalmers Street, her mother's hospital bills, the fifteen million dollars that had felt like salvation yesterday and now felt like a single piece on a board she couldn't fully see.

"I need you to promise me something."

"Name it."

"No more secrets that reach me through someone else in a lobby. If it touches my life, I hear it from you first. Always."

Damian held her gaze a beat too long, something shifting in his expression she couldn't quite name — respect, maybe, or the start of it. "Agreed."

"Good." She gripped her suitcase handle. "Then tell me exactly what I need to do Thursday to make sure Richard loses."

For the first time since she'd met him, something close to a real smile tugged at his mouth. "You're not what I expected, Miss Hart."

"Get used to it."

The moment shattered when Alexander's phone rang from his cardigan pocket — shrill, old-fashioned, loud enough to freeze all three of them. He answered, listened, and his hand tightened white-knuckled around the phone.

"Slow down," he said. "Say that again."

A long pause. Damian stepped closer, reading his grandfather's face the way Amelia had spent the last twenty-four hours learning to read Damian's.

Alexander lowered the phone, voice unsteady for the first time since Amelia met him.

Richard's been found unconscious in his office. Security thinks it's poison." His eyes lifted, first to Damian, then to Amelia. "And according to the timestamp, it happened four minutes after Victoria left this house last night.