Chapter 2 The Price of Staying Alive

The eviction notice was taped to Emma's door at 7:14 a.m., which meant her landlord had timed it deliberately - early enough that she'd see it before her shift, late enough that she wouldn't have time to call and argue before she had to be at the hospital.

She peeled it off without reading it twice. She already knew what it said. Thirty days, or the locks changed.

"Em?" Jake's voice came from the couch that had been his bed for the past four months, thin and rough with sleep and something the doctors hadn't found a name for yet. "That the landlord again?"

"Just junk mail." Emma folded the notice into her coat pocket, where it sat like a stone. "How are you feeling?"

"Better." He always said better. It was the one lie between them they'd both agreed to keep telling, because the alternative - the real number the specialist had quoted for the treatment that might actually work, might not just manage but *fix* whatever was eating away at her brother's nervous system - was $180,000 Emma didn't have and couldn't borrow.

She'd already sold what there was to sell. Her car. Her mother's ring. Eleven months of overtime shifts that left her hands shaking too hard some mornings to start an IV on the first try. The math still didn't move. Every time she got close, another bill arrived to push the number back out of reach, like the debt itself was alive and evading her.

"You look tired," Jake said, and there was guilt in it, the particular guilt of a nineteen-year-old who understood exactly what his sister was sacrificing and had no way to stop it. "You don't have to keep doing doubles."

"I like doubles." She kissed his forehead, grabbed her bag, and left before he could see her face do something that would worry him more than the truth already did.

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The card was waiting for her in the nurses' locker room, tucked into the vent of her locker where no one should have been able to reach. Cream-colored, heavy stock, no name - just an address on the Upper East Side and a time. 6 p.m. Tonight.

Emma turned it over twice, looking for a joke, a mistake, anything that made more sense than a stranger knowing which locker was hers.

"Everything okay?" Priya asked, shrugging into her scrub top at the next locker.

"I don't know yet." Emma slid the card into her pocket, next to the eviction notice, two pieces of paper that had no business sharing space and somehow did anyway.

She almost didn't go. She told herself three separate times on the subway ride home that this was exactly the kind of thing that got desperate women hurt - an anonymous card, an unlisted address, a summons from someone who already knew where she worked and where she kept her things. But desperate was precisely what she was, and desperate people didn't have the luxury of caution.

The address turned out to be a law office, glass and steel forty floors up, the kind of place that didn't have a sign in the lobby because everyone who belonged there already knew where they were going. A woman in a charcoal suit met her at reception without asking her name.

"Ms. Carter. This way."

The office they led her to was empty except for a folder on the table and a single chair angled toward it, like whoever had arranged this expected her to sit down and not ask questions first. Emma sat anyway, but she did ask.

"Who set this up?"

"A client who wishes to remain unnamed for now." The woman - she never gave a name either - slid the folder across the table. "You're free to decline. But I'd read the terms before you do."

Emma opened it.

*Marriage Contract. Duration: twelve months. Compensation: $250,000, disbursed in full upon signing, with an additional $250,000 upon completion of the contract term.*

Her hand went still on the page. Half a million dollars was not a number that existed in Emma Carter's life. It was Jake's treatment, three times over. It was the apartment, the debt, the years of overtime she'd never have to work again - all of it, solved, on a single page in a folder she hadn't asked for.

"This is real," she said, because it needed to be said out loud to feel true.

"Very." The woman folded her hands. "My client requires a wife for one year. Public appearances, a shared residence, the appropriate paperwork. No physical obligations beyond what you're comfortable with. No questions about his business. In exchange, you receive the funds outlined and his family leaves you and yours alone once the year concludes."

"Why me?"

"That's not information I'm authorized to share."

Emma turned the page, looking for a name, a photograph, anything that would tell her who exactly she'd be tying her life to for the next year. There was nothing. Just a signature line, blank, waiting.

*Adrian Black.*

The name meant nothing to her. She said it out loud anyway, testing the shape of it, the way she might test a diagnosis she wasn't sure she believed yet.

"You'll meet him tonight, if you accept," the woman said. "He'll explain what he requires of you directly. After that, the terms are binding for both parties."

Emma thought of the eviction notice folded in her coat pocket. She thought of Jake on the couch, promising he was better. She thought, unbidden, of a stranger's hand closing around her wrist in the dark of Trauma Bay Two, three nights ago, a voice rasping words she still hadn't told anyone - *protect the future king* - words that had followed her home and sat at the edge of every quiet moment since, refusing to make sense.

She picked up the pen.

"I need it in writing that my brother's medical debt is covered separately, effective immediately, regardless of what happens after."

Something shifted in the lawyer's expression - not quite surprise, but close to it, like she hadn't expected Emma to negotiate rather than simply sign. "I'll have that added."

Emma signed her name beneath the blank line where his would eventually go.

"When do I meet him?"

"Now, actually." The woman rose, smoothing her jacket, and nodded toward the door that had opened behind Emma without a sound. "He's early. He does that when he's uneasy about something."

Emma turned in her chair, already composing the calm, professional greeting she'd rehearsed on the subway - and every word of it died in her throat.

The man standing in the doorway, dressed now, upright, very much alive, was the same man who had bled out under her hands three nights ago in the dark.

"Ms. Carter." His voice was steady, controlled, nothing like the rasp she remembered - and yet unmistakably the same voice that had begged her, in the dark, not to let them find him. His gray eyes found hers and something moved behind them, quick and startled, gone before she could name it. "I believe we've already met."

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*End of Chapter 2.*