Alex showed up at the casino the following evening looking like he hadn't slept in a week, which, given the circumstances, was probably accurate. I had the paperwork ready before he even sat down — not a real marriage license yet, just the framework Markus and I had put together overnight, the terms laid out clean enough that there'd be no room for either of us to claim confusion later.
"I'll do it," he said, before I could even open with anything. "Four years. You drop the theft, you cover whatever my sister needs covered, and at the end of it, I walk away clean. That's the deal."
"That's the deal," I confirmed.
"I want it in writing," he said. "Actual writing. Not just you telling me to trust you."
"Smart," I said, sliding the papers across the table. "I'd have been disappointed if you hadn't asked."
He read through every line twice before signing anything, which I respected more than I expected to. When he finally set the pen down, he looked up at me with an expression I hadn't seen from him yet — not fear, not the soft blush from the club, something steadier and harder underneath it.
"I need you to understand something," he said. "I'm doing this for my sister. Not for you. Not because of anything that happened at the club. The second this contract ends, I'm gone, and you don't get to act like any of this meant something it didn't."
"Understood," I said, and meant it, even as some small, irritating part of me filed the warning away like a challenge instead of a boundary.
"When do I meet your parents," he asked.
"Sunday," I said. "Dinner. Wear something that isn't a maid costume."
That earned me the first real glare he'd given me since walking in, and something about it — sharp, unimpressed, entirely unafraid despite everything I currently held over him — made the whole arrangement feel considerably less like a transaction than I'd planned for it to be.
"One more thing," I said, as he stood to leave. "My parents can't know any of this is fake. Not the theft, not the contract, none of it. As far as they're concerned, we met, fell for each other, and decided to get married. You're a good liar — I watched you do it for an entire evening at that club. This shouldn't be difficult for you."
"Funny," he said, pausing at the door, "calling me a good liar right after blackmailing me into a fake marriage."
He left before I could come up with a response that didn't sound exactly as defensive as it would have been, and I sat alone in that room for a long while afterward, looking at his signature on the contract, wondering exactly when this had stopped feeling like a solution to my parents' problem and started feeling like something considerably more complicated.