The Heir's Blackmail Bride

Chapter One

Elena

The email said consultation regarding the Belmere property , and that was the only reason Elena Marchetti put on her good blazer and took the subway instead of walking, because for once she wanted to arrive somewhere without her hair doing whatever it wanted in the wind coming off the East River.

She should have known better. Ten years in this business had taught her that anything involving the Belmere came wrapped in something she wouldn't like, the way a pill comes wrapped in a piece of cheese for a dog too smart to take it plain.

But the subject line had used the word consultation , and consultation meant someone finally wanted her professional opinion on a building that used to be her family's, and she was tired enough, hungry enough for that particular kind of validation, that she'd let herself believe it.

She'd read the email four times on the train, trying to parse the signature block for information it didn't contain.

It had come from a general inbox, [email protected] , no name attached, just a request that she make herself available at ten o'clock at their Park Avenue headquarters to discuss matters pertaining to the Belmere Hotel restoration initiative.

She'd told herself, three of the four times she read it, that it probably meant nothing more than a courtesy request, the kind of thing a company did when it wanted a local preservation architect's name attached to a press release for credibility it hadn't earned.

She'd told herself that and had not, if she was honest, believed a word of it, because nothing involving that building had ever once in ten years turned out to be a courtesy.

Her father used to say the Belmere had good bones, the kind you couldn't fake with a renovation budget, the kind that told you a building had been built by someone who intended it to outlive him.

He'd said it standing in the lobby the week before the sale went through, running his hand along the marble baseboard like he was saying goodbye to a person, and Elena, seventeen and furious in the specific, helpless way only teenagers can manage, had wanted to scream at him that the bones didn't matter if the family that built them was about to lose everything attached to them.

She hadn't said it. She'd stood next to him and let him have his goodbye, because even then some part of her had understood it was the last one he'd get to have with dignity, before the lawyers and the press and the slow, grinding two years that followed and ended with his heart simply stopping one Tuesday morning while he read the newspaper at their kitchen table, as if it, too, had finally run out of reasons to keep going.

She'd built a career since then on not needing anyone to hand her a building back.

She restored other people's histories for a living, meticulous work, permits and load calculations and historic preservation boards that fought her on every window casement, and she was good at it, good enough that clients requested her by name now instead of her firm's, good enough that she'd almost, almost stopped flinching every time the word Belmere came up in a professional context. Almost.

Castellan International's lobby did not believe in modesty.

Forty feet of ceiling, marble the color of a storm coming in, and a security desk staffed by two men who looked like they'd been recruited from a Secret Service detail rather than a temp agency.

Elena gave her name, watched the taller one's eyes flick down to a screen and then back up to her face with a fraction more attention than routine required, and told herself it meant nothing.

The elevator took her to the forty-first floor without asking for a card, which meant someone had cleared her through in advance. That detail sat wrong in her stomach the whole ride up.

The assistant waiting for her at the top had a warm, competent face and eyes that didn't quite meet Elena's the way people's eyes don't meet you when they know something you don't. She introduced herself as Priya, offered water Elena didn't want, and walked her down a hallway lined with black and white photographs of hotels Elena recognized from professional envy alone, the Belmere among them, its old lobby captured mid-renovation sometime in the nineties, back when it had still belonged to somebody who loved it.

"You do restoration work, don't you," Priya said, glancing sideways as they walked, the question pitched somewhere between small talk and genuine curiosity. "I looked you up before you got here. The Ashford project. That was yours."

"It was." Elena kept her eyes on the photographs rather than the woman beside her, unwilling to be disarmed by professional flattery three minutes before whatever this actually was. "Restoring the ballroom ceiling took longer than the rest of the building combined."

"It shows. It's beautiful work." Priya said it like she meant it, which made Elena like her against her own better judgment, and then added, more quietly, in a tone that made Elena's stomach drop half a floor before they'd even reached the office, "I hope today goes the way you're expecting it to."

"What does that mean?"

But they'd already arrived, and Priya's expression had smoothed back into professional neutrality, the kind Elena recognized from a hundred client meetings where an assistant knew exactly how bad the news inside a conference room was going to be and had decided, correctly, that it wasn't her place to soften it in the hallway.

"He's ready for you," Priya said, and opened a door onto a corner office with floor to ceiling windows and a man standing at them with his back to her, hands in his pockets, looking down at the city like it owed him something and hadn't paid yet.

She knew who he was before he turned around. Everyone in her industry knew who Damon Castellan was. You couldn't work in historic hospitality for more than a year without learning his name the way you learn the name of a storm that already took your house.

"Ms. Marchetti," he said, and turned. "Thank you for coming."

He was better looking in person than in the business press photos, which she resented immediately, because it would have been easier to hate a man who photographed exactly as hard and flat as she needed him to be.

In person he had a kind of stillness that made the room feel smaller, dark hair cut with the precision of someone who paid an obscene amount for a fifteen minute appointment, a gray suit that fit him the way suits only fit men who'd never once had to buy off a rack.

He didn't smile. She noted that and filed it away as either honesty or strategy, and hadn't decided which by the time he gestured her toward the chair across from his desk.

"I was told this was about the Belmere," she said, staying on her feet a beat longer than was polite, because sitting first felt like conceding something.

"It is." He sat, which meant she had to, finally, or look ridiculous standing there. "Among other things."

"What other things?"

He didn't answer right away. He opened a drawer, took out a slim manila folder, and set it on the desk between them without pushing it toward her, which she understood immediately was deliberate. He wanted her to have to reach for it.

"Your brother," he said, "has an interesting relationship with his invoicing software."

The room did something strange, a kind of narrowing, like the windows had gotten smaller and the ceiling had come down six inches.

Elena kept her face still through sheer force of will, a skill she'd developed at seventeen standing in a lawyer's office while her father signed away the last thing that made him who he was, and she'd used it every day since without ever once being grateful for the practice until this exact moment.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

"I think you do." His voice didn't change register at all, which somehow made it worse than if he'd sounded cruel.

Cruel she could have fought. This was worse, this was a man reading a fact off a page the way he'd read a stock price.

"Nico Marchetti falsified three client invoices for your mother's firm over the past eight months, routing overbilled funds into an account he used to cover a gambling debt.

The client in question is a Castellan International subsidiary.

My legal team found the discrepancy during a routine audit six weeks ago. "

"That's not," she started, and stopped, because she could feel the lie forming and knew it wouldn't survive contact with whatever was in that folder.

"It's federal wire fraud," he said, still flat, still terrible.

"Interstate commerce, electronic invoicing, a paper trail three forensic accountants have already signed off on.

If this goes to the U.S. Attorney's office, and it will, unless something changes, your brother is looking at somewhere between eighteen months and four years, depending on how aggressively the prosecutor wants to make an example of him.

Your mother's firm loses its bonding insurance the moment charges are filed, which means it loses every contract it currently holds within thirty days.

You know that industry better than I do. You know what that means for her."

Elena's hands were flat on her knees under the desk, out of his sightline, because she needed somewhere to put the shaking that had started in her fingers and was working its way up her arms. She thought of Nico at nineteen, then at twenty-two, then last month at the kitchen table not meeting her eyes while their mother asked why the Hendersons' final payment hadn't cleared yet.

She thought about her mother's hands, permanently swollen at the knuckles from thirty years of climbing scaffolding, and what it would do to those hands to watch her son go to prison for trying, in his stupid, desperate, twenty-six-year-old way, to save the only thing their family had left.