The document was forty-seven pages long.

Celeste had read it three times. She knew every clause, every subclause, every quietly buried condition that the Solís lawyers had embedded in the language like landmines. She'd even highlighted the worst ones in red — and then calmly set the highlighter down and poured herself another glass of water, because she was not going to let anyone in this room see her hands shake.

The Varro family's conference room on the fourteenth floor had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city. On clear days, you could see the harbor. Today the sky was the color of old pewter, and Celeste thought that was probably appropriate.

"You've reviewed the terms?" Her grandfather's lawyer, a thin man named Cortés, was watching her with the particular expression of a man who expected her to argue and had pre-prepared his counterarguments.

"I have." She turned to page thirty-one and slid the document across the table with two fingers. "Clause 14B needs to be revised. It gives the Solís party unilateral authority to liquidate jointly held assets in the event of a dispute without my written consent. I want that changed to mutual consent with a seventy-two hour arbitration window."

Silence.

Cortés looked at her grandfather, Edmond Varro, who sat at the head of the table like a man pretending he wasn't unwell. He was better at pretending than most people. He'd had decades of practice.

"Celeste," her grandfather said, gentle in the way he got when he was steering her.

"It's a reasonable revision," she said. "Any competent opposing counsel would grant it."

"The Solís party's counsel is not known for being reasonable."

"Then we'll see how serious they are about this agreement." She folded her hands on the table. "Grandfather. I'm doing this. You don't have to manage me. I'm simply doing it with open eyes."

Edmond Varro looked at her for a long moment — and she saw something flicker behind his eyes that she didn't know how to name. Regret, maybe. Or the older, heavier cousin of it.

"All right," he said. "Cortés, note the revision."

She met Adrián Solís for the first time four days later, in a private dining room at the Alcázar Hotel.

She arrived three minutes early. He was already there.

He stood when she entered — not out of warmth, she understood immediately, but out of the kind of automatic social precision that powerful men performed like reflex. He was taller than she'd expected from his photographs. Photographs never quite captured the particular quality of stillness some people carried — the way a room seemed to reorganize itself around him without him moving at all.

"Ms. Varro." His voice was lower than she'd expected too. Measured. Like every word had been weighed before it left his mouth.

"Mr. Solís." She extended her hand and he shook it. Firm. Brief. Professional. His eyes were dark and entirely unreadable, and they moved over her face with an efficiency that reminded her of a security scan.

They sat. A server appeared and disappeared. Wine was poured.

"You requested a revision to clause 14B," he said.

No small talk, then. Good. She hated small talk.

"I did."

"My counsel advised against accepting it."

"I imagine they did. Did you accept it?"

Something shifted almost imperceptibly at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. More like the ghost of an acknowledgment. "It's been incorporated into the revised document."

She reached for her wine. "Then we agree on at least one thing."

"We agree on the contract," he said. "I wouldn't call that agreement so much as mutual interest in a workable arrangement."

"What would you call what we're doing here?"

He looked at her directly for the first time — not through her, not past her, but at her, with an attention that was almost uncomfortable in its completeness. "Negotiating the terms of a situation neither of us wanted, for reasons that benefit people other than ourselves."

Celeste set her glass down. "At least you're honest about it."

"I find dishonesty inefficient."

"Most dishonest people do," she said pleasantly, "right up until it isn't."

Another almost-not-quite-smile. He looked away first, toward the window, and she took the opportunity to breathe.

She had expected cold. She had expected arrogance — the particular brand of it that men like him wore like armor over armor. She had not expected someone who would simply say this arrangement benefits others, not us as an opening position, plainly and without performance.

She was going to have to recalibrate.

"The wedding is in six weeks," he said.

"I'm aware."

"There are terms beyond the legal document." He turned back to her. "My household functions in a particular way. I have no interest in disrupting it unnecessarily, and I assume you have no interest in being disrupted. So."

"So," she echoed.

"We are civil in public. United when it's required. In private — " he paused, just briefly " — you have your space and I have mine. I have no expectations beyond what the contract specifies."

Celeste studied him. "And if I have expectations beyond what the contract specifies?"

"Then I'd suggest you put them in writing. I respond better to documentation."

She laughed before she could stop herself — a short, genuine sound that she immediately regretted because it made his eyes sharpen slightly, and she had the distinct impression she'd given him information.

"Six weeks," she said, collecting herself.

"Six weeks," he agreed.

They ate dinner with the specific politeness of two people who have agreed not to draw weapons yet. She learned that he took his coffee black, that he knew exactly which questions to ask to seem engaged without revealing anything, and that he had a habit of going very still when he was thinking — the kind of stillness that made you hyper-aware of every small movement you were making yourself.

She walked out of that dinner knowing she was in trouble.

Not because she liked him.

But because she didn't know what she felt, and that was far more dangerous.

Outside, in the black car waiting at the curb, Adrián Solís sat in silence for thirty seconds before he spoke.

"She read the whole contract," he said.

His assistant, Vera, looked up from her tablet. "All forty-seven pages?"

"Every clause. She caught 14B." He looked out the window at the city sliding past. "She's sharper than the reports indicated."

"Is that a problem?"

Adrián considered the question with the same thoroughness he gave everything. Celeste Varro, with her composed hands and her quiet fury and her laugh that she'd tried to take back. Celeste Varro, who was the granddaughter of the man who had destroyed his family.

"Not a problem," he said finally. "A complication."

He didn't say what he was thinking, which was that complications were sometimes more interesting than problems.

He filed that thought away and looked at his phone instead. There was work to do.

There was always work to do.