Those words, infuriating as they were, began to work their way into Megan's thoughts whether she wanted them to or not. Because the awful part the part she hated admitting even inside her own mind was that her mother was not entirely wrong.Her family had made her.Not in the sense that they had given her talent, because that was her own. Not in the sense that they had stood in front of cameras and delivered performances for her, because that had also been hers alone. But the machinery behind her rise, the opportunities, the strategic positioning, the access, the management, the protection, the family agency that had put her in rooms others only dreamed of entering all of that had come from them. They had built the foundation on which her career now stood, and without that structure, everything ahead of her might become infinitely harder, perhaps impossible.She hated that truth. She hated the way it cornered her.Her career was not merely moving; it was surging. Every year had brought

He ended the call just as abruptly as he had begun it.Then he turned toward Marcus with unmistakable satisfaction and said, "The marriage certificate will be here any moment from now. The lawyer has been working on it already. Everything needs to be done as soon as possible."Megan stared at him in disbelief, the pace of it all was staggering.It was not merely fast; it was almost violent in its speed, as though her hesitation had never mattered, as though everyone around her had been moving toward this destination long before she had even realized she was on the road. She had not expected things to unfold like this. She had imagined pressure, argument, perhaps another long conversation, perhaps manipulation stretched over days. But this? This relentless forward motion, this machinery of decision already in progress, this sense that the paperwork had been prepared even before her answer had been spoken aloud it left her shaken in a way she had not anticipated.What exactly was Marcus

At that moment, without wasting even another second after her grandfather brought the meeting to its brutal conclusion, Megan stood there in a state of smoldering disbelief, every nerve in her body alive with anger, humiliation, and the bitter awareness that her entire life had shifted in the space of one suffocating conversation, and not in any direction she had chosen for herself. She was not happy—not even remotely. There was no hidden corner of acceptance inside her, no part of her quietly adjusting to the reality being forced upon her. She was deeply, completely, furiously unhappy with the suddenness of the change, with the cold efficiency of the decisions made around her, with the legal finality of what had just happened, and with the suffocating sense that everything was moving according to a script written by other people while she herself was expected to perform the role of obedience.She turned to face Marcus then, and there was a look in her eyes that carried more than anger

Her voice hardened again."And now you're taking him to James Junior's birthday? To that gathering? When you already know what kind of people are going to be there? And that fool actually decided to go with you?"Megan gave a bitter exhale that was almost a laugh but carried no humor at all."Exactly," she said. "All of them are going to be there. Every gossip-loving person with nothing better to do than monitor my life will be there too. Which means my career really might die before it even properly begins. And don't even imagine he'll have the sense to keep quiet or pretend to be something less threatening, like a bodyguard or some harmless escort. No. He won't do that. He won't stay in line. He won't understand what is at stake."Rebecca inhaled slowly, as though making a decision she had not wanted to make."Even though I wasn't supposed to go with you," she said, "at this point I am being forced to. You need someone there. You need someone to look out for you, someone to watch you

At that moment, Megan found herself staring at Marcus in a mixture of disbelief, irritation, and something dangerously close to astonishment, not because she was moved by anything he had said, not because his calm insistence had touched her heart in any meaningful way, but because she was genuinely surprised by how smoothly he spoke, by how naturally the words came from him, by how effortlessly he seemed able to stand there and say things that might have sounded comforting—might even have sounded profound to someone more naive, someone softer, someone willing to be persuaded by gentle tones and carefully chosen promises. But Megan was not that kind of person. She was not the sort of woman who melted because a man lowered his voice and wrapped nonsense in the language of devotion. She was not someone who heard mysterious confidence and mistook it for truth. If anything, the better he spoke, the more suspicious she became.Her eyes narrowed slightly, and then with a bitter edge to her vo