Chapter 3
THREE
SAGE
I bring a folder to my own kidnapping.
That’s not technically what this is, but the boundary house sits far away from the main houses, against the tree line that nobody would hear me scream, and Dawson Sullivan opens the door before I’ve finished parking, which means he was watching for my car, which also means he’s been standing at that window doing exactly what I’ve been doing the whole drive out here: rehearsing.
The evening air has teeth in it, that first real bite of cool that shows up once the sun drops behind the ridge, and I’m glad for the light jacket I grabbed off the hook on my way out the door, not for the warmth, or not only for the warmth.
I keep it zipped instead of shrugging it off.
I take the chair nearest the door. I do not, under any circumstances, let this table feel smaller than it is.
“No suitcase,” he says, leaning in the doorway like he owns it, which he does, technically, along with everything else in this valley that isn’t nailed down with a Blackwater name on the deed.
“I was told brides usually pack.” His eyes cut past me to the black Range Rover parked crooked in the drive, the skull stenciled on the door, Blackwater Ranch lettered beneath it, like he’s memorizing it for later.
“I’m not moving in today. I’m negotiating.” I set the folder on the table between us, square with the edge, Gideon’s rule for opening every meeting that matters. “You get all of me the day the county clerk says so. Today you get paperwork.”
“Direct. I respect it.” He shuts the door and the sound of it echoes heavier than a door should. “You want a drink?”
“I want you to sit down and read this.”
“I asked if you wanted a drink.”
“And I answered a different question, which is a skill I learned from watching your father dodge a subpoena.” I slide the folder an inch closer to him. “Sit.”
He doesn’t sit. He crosses the room instead, taking his time about it, and for a second I think he’s going to make this about proximity, tack room all over again, and my whole body goes tight and ready for it, and then he just pulls out the chair across from me and drops into it like a man settling in for a show he’s already decided he’ll enjoy.
“Fine,” he says. “Impress me.”
I open the folder.
“Separate bedrooms.” I don’t look up. “Nonnegotiable.”
“Agreed.”
“No sexual expectation, implied or otherwise, for any reason, including but not limited to alcohol, proximity, or the general ambient tension of living in the same house.”
“Ambient tension.” He says it slow, like he’s tasting it. “That’s very carefully worded for something you claim isn’t happening.”
“It’s a contract, Dawson. Everything in it is carefully worded. That’s the entire point of a contract.”
“Agreed anyway.”
I flip the page, and the tight coil in me that was braced for a fight starts leaning forward looking for one that isn’t coming.
“No pregnancy clause. None. I’m not producing an heir for either family’s peace treaty.”
“Agreed.” He says it fast this time, almost bored, like I’ve handed him a lease renewal.
“Independent finances. My money stays mine. Anything I earn during this marriage stays mine. No joint accounts, no Sullivan credit cards, no situation where I have to ask you for cash to buy groceries.”
“You think I’d make you ask me for grocery money?”
“I think your family’s had generations to figure out how to make a woman feel small enough to stay put, and I’m not volunteering to be case study number one.”
That hits somewhere. I watch it go in, a flicker behind his eyes, there and then not, and for a second the bored, unbothered version of Dawson steps aside and the boy I knew at twenty looks at me instead.
“Agreed,” he says, quieter now.
“Full authority over my own schedule and my own work. I still run point on Blackwater’s legislative contracts. That doesn’t stop because I have a new last name.”
“Agreed.”
“Full threat disclosure. Anything that touches my safety, I hear it from you directly, the day it happens, not filtered through your father or mine deciding what I can handle.”
His jaw moves. Barely. If I didn’t know this man’s face better than I know my own signature, I’d have missed it entirely.
“Agreed,” he says, fast, too fast, the word coming out clipped at the edges like he bit down on whatever was underneath it before I could hear it.
“No unilateral decisions.” I keep my voice level, because if I let it shake even once he’ll hear everything underneath it. “Concerning my safety, my schedule, my money, my body, or my future. You don’t get to decide what’s best for me and inform me later. You ask. Every time.”
The room goes very still.
He doesn’t answer right away, and the silence stretches long enough that I look up from the folder to check whether he heard me, and he’s watching me with an expression I don’t have a word for, something between recognition and grief, gone almost before I catch it, replaced by the practiced calm he wears for everyone who isn’t supposed to see underneath.
“Agreed,” he says finally. Just that. No joke this time.
I make myself keep going, because stopping means sitting inside that silence, and I already know what’s buried under it, and I am not digging up eight-year-old graves at a negotiating table.
“Clean exit. When the McKenna crisis resolves, whenever that is, either of us can end this without penalty. No custody of assets beyond what we each brought in. No lawyers billing by the hour to fight over who gets the good coffee maker.”
“Fair.” He almost smiles at that one, the first real crack in the composure since I walked in. “You’ve thought about the coffee maker.”
“I’ve thought about everything, Dawson. That’s the whole point of the folder.”
“So I see.” He leans back in his chair, arms crossed, and studies me like a contract clause he’s about to gut. “You’re very thorough for someone who claims this is just paperwork.”
“Thorough keeps people safe.”
“Thorough keeps you safe. There’s a difference.” He says it without heat, which somehow makes it worse than if he’d thrown it. “You built a wall out of clauses, Sage. It’s a good wall. I’m just telling you I can see the studs.”
“Then you understand why I built it.”
“I understand it better than you think.” He uncrosses his arms and reaches for the folder, turning it toward himself, scanning the last page with the same closed, unreadable focus he probably uses on freight contracts worth more than my house.
“This is good work. It’s smart. It protects you from every version of me my father would want you to marry. ”
“That’s the goal.”
“There’s just one thing missing.”
Here it is. I brace for it, whatever it is, some clause about access to Blackwater land or advance notice before I leave the property or a hundred other small erosions dressed up as reasonable requests.
“The Corridor easement.” He says it plainly, like he’s reading me a weather report. “You buried it. I answered with freight rates that are bleeding your family a fortune. Both fathers agreed this marriage ends the war publicly. It doesn’t end anything privately unless we actually settle it.”
“That’s a business dispute. It has nothing to do with our marriage.”
“It has everything to do with our marriage. We’re about to live under the same roof for as long as the McKenna threat runs, Sage.
I’m not spending the next however-many months pretending the thing that started all of this doesn’t exist just because your contract doesn’t mention it.
” He taps the page, once, decisive. “New clause. The Corridor easement gets renegotiated. By us. In this house. No fathers in the room, no lawyers feeding us lines, just you and me deciding what’s fair instead of what wins. ”
I sit with that for a second, turning it over, looking for the trap, because there’s always a trap with a Sullivan, and I can’t find one, which somehow makes it worse.
“You’re turning my war into an asset.”
“I’m turning your war into a conversation.
” He watches me while I fail to find a hole in it.
“You gutted my road because it was the smartest legal move available to you and you didn’t flinch once doing it.
I respect that more than you seem to think I do.
I’m asking for a real seat across the table from the person who beat me.
That’s not an ambush, Sage. That’s the only kind of fight I’ve ever actually wanted with you. ”
I hate that it works on me. I hate that some traitorous, exhausted part of me is impressed, actually impressed, that he took the one thing I used against him and turned it into the one clause that makes this whole arrangement feel less like a sentence and more like something I might survive with my spine intact.
“Fine,” I say. “It’s in.”
“Good.” He slides the folder back across the table, and our fingers don’t touch, and I notice that they don’t touch, which is humiliating all on its own.
“You agreed to all of it,” I say, and I don’t mean for it to come out the way it does, rough and a little unsteady, but it’s too late to call it back. “Every clause. Fast. Like none of it touched you at all.”
“Would you rather I fought you on it?”
“I’d rather understand why you didn’t.”
He goes quiet, and for a second I think he’s going to give me the diplomatic answer, the safe one, the one that keeps this whole conversation where a Sullivan wants it.
Instead he leans forward, forearms on the table, close enough now that I can see his eyes go from that careful boardroom blue-grey to something darker, something closer to slate, the color they turn when he stops performing.
“Because agreeing to protect you isn’t a sacrifice, Sage. It’s the only thing on that entire list I actually wanted to say yes to.”
The room shrinks by half.
“How very noble of you.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“You contain a business degree and a body count.”
“Same thing, some weeks.”