The Billionaire's Bargain Bride
Prologue His Selection
Damien Blackthorne watched Aria Vale’s life collapse across six silent screens.
On the first, she sat beside her mother’s hospital bed, smiling as though she hadn’t cried in the bathroom ten minutes earlier.
On the second, her landlord drafted the final eviction notice Damien’s attorney had instructed him to send.
The fourth showed the rejection of her emergency loan.
The fifth contained her personnel file from Bellamy’s Restaurant, where she was scheduled to lose her job at six that evening.
And on the final screen was a photograph taken three weeks ago: Aria leaving the hospital in the rain, her chin raised even as she opened an umbrella with two broken spokes.
Across his screens, she looked fragile.
She wasn’t. That was why he had chosen her.
“Everything is in place,” said Lucien Cross, Damien’s head of security. He stood on the far side of the dark office, careful not to look too closely at the monitors. “But I need to say this—she isn’t going to see it as a choice.”
Damien leaned back in his leather chair. Manhattan glittered beneath him, every window representing a tiny life that could be bought, broken, or erased by men with sufficient power.
“It is a choice.”
Lucien’s expression remained grim. “Between marrying you and watching her mother die.”
“People reveal themselves by what they are willing to sacrifice.”
“And if she refuses?”
Damien looked back at Aria’s photograph.
He had studied her routines, her debts, her history, and every person she loved.
He knew she took her coffee black. He knew she slept for only four hours a night.
He knew she rubbed the inside of her wrist when she lied and touched the small gold chain at her throat when she was afraid.
He knew she would refuse him at first. He also knew exactly how much pressure it would take to change her mind.
“She won’t,” Damien said.
Lucien glanced at the hospital monitor. “Her mother’s surgeon still believes Friday is the deadline.”
“Good.”
“The board meeting?”
“Move it forward.”
Lucien went still. “That gives her less than forty-eight hours.”
“Desperation is most useful when it runs on a clock.”
Damien closed the file on his desk. Inside was a contract bearing Aria’s full legal name, her future address, and the terms of a marriage she didn’t yet know she had been selected to enter.
There was only one blank space left: her signature.
By tomorrow night, he would have it. Once Aria Vale entered his home, no contract in the world would make him let her leave.