She woke with someone else's pillow in her mouth and the taste of whiskey on her tongue. His name was there too — Liam — like a bruise you couldn't ignore. For a second she thought she was still dreaming. Then the phone on the marble beside the bed went off, bright and loud and merciless.
Maya sat up. The room swam: floor-to-ceiling glass, a skyline she didn't own, a shirt she didn't remember unbuttoning. Her mouth tasted like his cologne and regret. A single notification blinked on the screen: BREAKING — LIAM VOSS, LATE-NIGHT SCANDAL. Under it, a photo: a grainy, compromising shot of her half-naked on an expensive duvet, someone else's cuff around her wrist. She thumbed the screen; her stomach dropped like a stone.
Flashbacks were fast and blunt. He'd moved with that precise, patronizing patience—hands at her hips, lips hard around syllables that sounded like promises he never meant. He'd shoved her against the wall in a laugh, fucking like he was closing a deal. She'd taken it—because she wanted it and because she didn't want to fight in that moment, because the music was loud and she was tired of shielding the part of her that wanted trouble. It had been messy and real and dumb as sin: his cock hard, her breath shallow, her nails leaving crescent moons in his shoulder when she came. No tears then. Just heat and a stupid, stupid relief.
Now the relief was a headline.
Maya dressed fast. Her hands fumbled for jeans, for a blazer that still carried his scent. Her phone buzzed again — Tess: Where are you? Tess: They're outside. Tess: Call me.
The gallery was already a battleground. Reporters clustered like flies at the front steps. Someone shouted a question and a shutter popped. Inside, board members circled each other with those small, vicious smiles people put on when money made them dangerous. The exhibit lights were too bright. The varnish smell of the restoration lab meant nothing here; this was loud and public and personal.
She could have run. She didn't. Pride is stupid that way, it makes you stand your ground even when the ground collapses. Maya stepped into the atrium and felt the air skid. Cameras angled, phones lifted; every face turned. Tess—hair a mess, eyes hard—pulled her aside, fingers cold on her elbow.
"They're saying you sold yourself," Tess said. No questions. Just the flat fact.
"Who says that?" Maya asked, but she knew. The headline. The smear. The quiet horror of becoming a story that could be edited and doctored until she vanished.
Before she could finish untangling the mess in her head, Liam Voss walked in like a man who never had to apologize for sunrise. He wore a suit that ate the light, and his silence landed first — precise and thick. The room opened around him. People made room, like a tide pulling back.
He didn't wait for a micro-interview. He moved straight toward her, eyes cool and measured. When he stopped in front of her his proximity felt like a quiet command.
"I'm sorry about the photo," he said. The apology was not an apology; it was a classification. A thing that happened and needed sorting.
"You should be," Maya said. The crowd hummed. She kept her voice low. "Who leaked it?"
He didn't answer. He didn't need to. Everyone around them bent forward, hungry for the sound of restitution. Liam's jaw tightened. He glanced at the senior board member watching from the other side of the room—an old man with a pained expression like a man who'd miscounted his reputation.
"If that photo ruins a takeover," Liam said, "they'll bury a lot more than my name. The gallery gets dragged as collateral." His voice was steady, the kind of low that made people believe bad things could be prevented with money and timing.
Maya's stomach rolled. The museum, her museum, was not safe. Grants would pull out, donors would close their checkbooks, the conservator she'd been apprenticed to could lose everything. It was petty and huge all at once.
"What can we do?" she asked.
He slid a document across the small glass table between them like it was a menu she could refuse. A contract. Six months. Public appearances. A staged marriage. The company would have cover for board meetings, investors would breathe, the scandal would cool. Sign and there would be damage control. Refuse, and the museum would likely be subpoenaed as implicated in impropriety tied to an employee.
Maya read three lines and felt the air sharpen. This was not about them; this was about leverage. She thought of the restoration lab with its humidifiers and careful brushes, the volunteers who would be told to leave, the kids who got school tours. She thought about pride — and rent, and about the way the city chewed people who had nothing to protect them.
"Six months?" Tess hissed beside her. "You can't—"
"Sign," Liam said. Short. A command shaped into a bargain. "Public contract. My lawyers will handle the rest. No legal entanglement for the museum. No questions. You walk away with your job."
"And you?" Maya asked. "What do you get out of pretending for half a year?"
"You get what I get," he said. "Control of the narrative."
He looked at her like he'd already accounted for her refusal and built a contingency. She wanted to walk out the glass doors and let whatever came scald them both. But the air had already been poisoned, not just by the photo but by the way the world would taste it for breakfast and never forget.
She heard the board chair whisper to someone about "exposure" and "risk management." The word risk felt clinical and murderous at once.
She signed. The pen felt strange in her hand, slick where her palm had sweated. The signature she gave him was a thing she'd never meant to give anyone. She wrote her name and felt like she'd handed over her scalp along with it.
They stamped it. A man in a gray suit — Marcus Hale, Liam's counsel — watched without blinking. He nodded, professional and distant. The room exhaled in a dozen different gratings: relief, calculation, predation.
Maya got up like she had not just traded herself for safety but had signed away the right to be naive. Tess grabbed her coat. "We need to make this look like a story about reading the room," Tess said. "Not some—" She swallowed. "Not what it looks like."
They trained their smiles and practiced the phrases but the real fight lived under the surface. The cameras kept coming. People smelled vulnerability and they kept circling.
Liam turned, ready to leave, and the assistant stepped forward. She was small, sharp, the kind of person who could remove oil without leaving a sheen. She bent and, while the crowd was distracted by a stray flashbulb, slid a folded envelope under the table. Her fingers were almost casual.
Maya saw the movement out of the corner of her eye. Her hand halted midway to her handbag. The assistant's eyes met hers for a fraction, then she looked away like nothing had happened.
Nobody else noticed.
Maya's fingers closed around the envelope before she'd decided to. It was warm from the body heat of being passed hand to hand. She unfolded it with a thumb that didn't know how to steady.
Inside was a single check. No name. No memo. Just an amount written in neat block letters and a signature she didn't recognize.
Her throat closed. She looked up at Liam. He'd already half-disappeared into the swirl of suits and flashes. Marcus met her gaze then. He didn't move. He didn't reach to snatch the check back.
Maya's hands trembled. The gallery suddenly seemed too small, too loud. For a second she tasted that night again — the cheap thrill and the stupid, terrible clarity that sometimes comes with the wrong kind of heat. Then the world snapped back: the contract on the table, the camera that had taken the photo, and an envelope that smelled like a life she didn't know she'd been babysitting.
She folded the check back and tucked it into her purse because there was nothing else to do. Outside, the shutters kept popping. Inside, the board murmured and re-formed. She had signed. She had traded a messy morning for a slow-burning story.
Somewhere, a child in a Polaroid wore a locket she recognized, and the first real edge of
panic finally cut through the shock.