Chapter 2: Terms of Surrender
Magnolia sat.
Not because he told her to. Not because she wanted to. But because standing any longer in that glass coffin of an office, under his stare, felt like her bones would snap in half.
The chair was too firm. The room too cold. The man across from her her mate too changed.
Rhett Callahan leaned back against his desk with the confidence of someone who’d never once been told "no." The soft creak of Italian leather under his tailored suit was the only sound between them. His presence was suffocating charisma sharpened into a weapon. There was nothing of the boy she remembered in the man who stood before her now.
He picked up a folder from his desk matte black, thick, precise and slid it across the table toward her.
"I assume you know how to read contracts."
Magnolia’s eyes didn’t leave his. "Is this why you summoned me after ten years? To insult my intelligence?"
He said nothing. His gaze was unreadable, but there was something else beneath it bitterness, old and decaying.
She opened the folder.
It was a marriage contract.
Her fingers froze mid-flip, the words swimming across the page like ice through her veins.