Chapter 3
Nico
Terms
* * *
I've arranged my office the way I arrange everything: to my advantage.
Desk positioned so the window is behind me — anyone sitting across has to squint into the afternoon light while I sit in comfortable shadow.
The chair I've set out for her is leather, expensive, and exactly two inches lower than mine.
Subtle. Effective. I've closed deals worth eight figures from this side of this desk, and the men on the other side never realized the furniture was doing half my work.
I check the sight lines. Water on the table — glass, not plastic, because details speak. No files visible, nothing she can read upside down. The room says power without saying a word.
Lex offered to stay. I told him no. This negotiation doesn't need muscle.
It needs precision, and Siobhan O'Brien strikes me as the kind of woman who'd resent an audience.
He looked at me the way he does when he thinks I'm making a mistake, which is to say he looked at me the same way he always does, silent and watchful, and then left without arguing.
Lex trusts my judgment. I'm not sure I trust it right now.
Because the truth is, I don't negotiate marriages.
I negotiate shipping routes, territory lines, the price of silence.
Those have clear metrics of profit, loss, leverage gained.
What's the metric for a wife? What's the ROI on sharing your home with a woman who looks at you like she's already figured out three things you haven't told her?
I'm reviewing the alliance contracts when I catch myself adjusting my cuffs for the third time. I stop. My hands go flat on the desk.
This is a negotiation. Nothing more.
She's four minutes early. The door opens without a knock, and she just walks in, takes three steps, and sits in the chair across from me like she owns it. Crosses her legs. Folds her hands in her lap. Waits.
She doesn't fill the silence with nervous chatter. Doesn't compliment the office, doesn't fidget, doesn't look away. Most people in this room break within thirty seconds. They start talking, start justifying their presence, start shrinking. She's been here for a full minute and she looks bored.
Dangerous. This woman is dangerous.
"You're early," I say.
"You're stalling."
I almost smile. Almost.
"Why me?" She doesn't ease into it. No pleasantries, no warm-up. Just the question, direct and clean. I've had men with thirty years of negotiating experience spend twenty minutes circling before they got to the point. She's been in this chair for ninety seconds.
"The alliance requires a union between Greek and Irish leadership. Your family controls the unions, the docks, three hundred men in Southie. Strategically—"
"Bullshit."
The word hangs between us. She doesn't blink. Doesn't soften it with a smile or qualify it with an apology. Just lets it sit there, sharp-edged and honest, and watches me decide what to do with it.
"A dozen women fit that strategic description. Cormac could have married a Greek woman. Declan could have married anyone — God knows he's slept with half of Boston. Why me, specifically? Why the sister instead of the brothers?"
She's good. She's already worked the angles I hoped she wouldn't see.
She's not asking out of insecurity — she's asking because the answer tells her what kind of man she's about to marry.
Whether I'll lie to her face or respect her enough to offer the truth.
It's a test. I recognize it because I use the same one.
"Because you're the only one in that room who wasn't afraid."
She considers this. Turns it over the way a jeweler turns a stone, testing for weight, for flaws, for the light that passes through and the light that doesn't. "That's not the whole answer."
"It's the answer you're getting."
A beat. She accepts it, not because she's satisfied but because she's smart enough to know when pushing yields diminishing returns. She'll come back to it later. I can see her putting it away — not forgetting, never forgetting, just setting it aside for a moment when the leverage shifts.
"Fine. My terms." She straightens in the chair, not adjusting for comfort but shifting into a posture I recognize.
I've seen it in boardrooms, in back rooms, across tables where the stakes were measured in lives.
She's done this before. Not marriage negotiations, but something close enough.
She learned to negotiate from men who don't lose.
"I'm listening."
"My own money. A separate account in my name that you can't touch, freeze, or monitor. Funded before the wedding. I won't be financially dependent on a man I met last week."
"Agreed."
She blinks — she expected resistance. The faintest crack in her composure, repaired instantly. Good. Keep her off-balance.
"Freedom to see my family. No restrictions on when, where, or how often. My brothers are not your leverage."
"Agreed, with one condition. You take security when you travel to Southie. Viktor Reznikov knows who you are now. The streets aren't safe."
She chews on that. I can see her testing it for hidden clauses, for the way men use protection as a synonym for control. She's had practice spotting the difference. "Fine. Security. Not surveillance."
"Understood."
"I'm not a prisoner in your penthouse. I come and go. I have a life, work, obligations. I don't sit in a tower waiting for you to come home."
"You'll live with me. That's non-negotiable — appearances matter, and a wife who keeps a separate address undermines the alliance before it starts. But within the penthouse, your time is your own."
"Separate bedrooms." She says it flat, factual, daring me to argue. "Until I decide otherwise."
The words until I decide land somewhere low in my gut. Not until we decide. Not until it happens naturally. Until she decides. She's claiming the power before I can offer it.
"Separate bedrooms," I agree. "For now."
Two words. She hears them. Her eyes narrow slightly, not anger, but recognition. She knows what for now means. It means I'm patient. It means I'm certain.
"And you?" she asks. "What do you want?"
"In public, you're my wife. Completely. No distance, no awkwardness, no visible cracks.
The alliance holds because people believe this marriage is real.
We stand together at events. You sit beside me at dinners.
When I touch you" — the word touch does something to the air between us and we both feel it — "you lean in, not away. "
"Easy enough. I'm a good actress."
"I've noticed." I pause. Let the silence carry weight. "An heir. Eventually. Not immediately — I'm not a medieval lord demanding a wedding night consummation. But eventually, this marriage produces children. That's the expectation from both families."
Something crosses her face. It’s quick, complicated, gone.
Not rejection. Something more layered, more private.
The word heir settles between us like a third presence in the room, clinical, transactional, reducing whatever happens between our bodies to a line item on a contract.
A calculation I can't follow because it involves a future she's already thinking about in ways I haven't considered. "Eventually."
"Eventually."
She's quiet for a moment. I watch her calculate.
She's weighing everything I've said against everything I haven't, measuring what she's gaining against what she's giving up, marking what she can renegotiate later when she has more leverage.
She thinks like I do. Something tightens in my chest that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the way her mind works — fast, precise, fearless.
"Anything else?" she asks.
I should say no. I should let her leave, sign the contracts, and maintain the professional distance that keeps this transaction clean and my hands steady and my mind where it belongs — on the war, on Viktor, on the empire that doesn't run itself.
Instead, I stand. Move around the desk. She tracks me — not with fear but with the hyperawareness of someone who catalogs exits and angles the same way I do. I stop two feet from her chair. Close enough to see the pulse in her throat, hammering despite the voice that hasn't wavered once.
"You're not afraid of me."
"Should I be?"
"Most people are."
"I'm not most people."
"No." I reach out. Slowly — giving her time, giving her the option to pull back.
My fingers find a strand of hair that's fallen across her cheekbone.
I tuck it behind her ear. Her skin is warm.
Warmer than I expected, and the shock of it travels from my fingertips to my wrist to somewhere behind my sternum that I thought I'd sealed shut fifteen years ago.
She holds perfectly still, and I can feel the effort it costs her, the deliberate choice not to flinch, not to lean in.
Both instincts pulling at once. "You're not. "
I step back. My hand drops. We're both breathing harder than the moment warrants, and we both know it.
"We have a deal, Miss O'Brien."
"Siobhan."
"Siobhan," I repeat. The syllables feel different in my mouth than any name I've said before. She feels it, too. I see it in the way her shoulders shift, the micro-movement of someone absorbing an impact they didn't expect.
"Two days," she says, standing. "Then I marry a stranger."
"Friday. Yes."
"Then you'd better not be a stranger by Friday." She walks toward the door. Stops. Looks back over her shoulder — the first time she's done that. "For the record? I'm not afraid of you. But I'm not stupid either. If you break your word on any of this, I won't need my brothers to handle it."
She leaves. The door clicks shut.
I stand in the middle of my office, the room I've controlled every variable in, every angle and shadow and sight line, and realize that for the first time in fifteen years, I've just negotiated with someone who might be better at it than I am.
My hand still feels warm where I touched her skin.
I go back to my desk. Pull up the alliance contracts. The words blur. I read the same clause three times and retain nothing.
All I can think about is the way she said until I decide otherwise…like she already knew the door between their bedrooms wouldn't stay closed forever. Like she was already deciding.
I stare at the chair she sat in. It still holds the impression of her — a dip in the leather, a faint trace of something that might be her shampoo or might be my imagination.
In two days I marry Siobhan O'Brien. In two days, she moves into my home, sleeps behind a door I won't open, and begins a life I designed as strategy.
Except my hands are still unsteady. And the room still smells like her. And the chair she sat in without invitation feels, for the first time, like it belongs to someone.
Strategy. Nothing more.
I'm lying again.