JarethStorm
The day my ex-boyfriend gets married, I sit in the very last pew of a small town church with a brand-new ring on my finger.
Not his. Someone else's.
Twenty-four hours earlier, I walked into a Manhattan law firm broke, blacklisted and one signature away from losing everything I care about.
Adrian Hale - tech billionaire, boardroom legend, the kind of man you only see on magazine covers - offered me a contract marriage: his last-minute wife in exchange for the one thing I desperately needed.
I thought it was going to be a quiet, legal arrangement. No romance, no drama, no one ever had to know.
Until the pastor says, "If anyone objects to this marriage, speak now," and Adrian stands up beside me in the back row.
"I have an objection," he says calmly. "Because in the state of New York, this woman is already my legal wife."
The church explodes. My ex goes pale. And I realize two things at once:
1) Adrian Hale is playing a game I don't understand.
2) I just became his sharpest weapon - or his easiest sacrifice.
This is a story about a contract that wasn't supposed to hurt, a marriage that wasn't supposed to feel real, and a woman who's done being the weakest person in the room.