The day her life burned down was neither memorable nor cinematic. Siobhan woke up late, drank burnt coffee, and smeared foundation on last night's bruise—a cloudlike fingerprint pressed into the hollow under her jaw.
Megan, her cousin, was on the battered sofa cradling her phone in her lap, legs tucked under her like a fawn. "You're late again," Megan said without looking up.
"Just a few minutes," Siobhan said, checking her watch anyway and toeing on scuffed sneakers. "I'll make it up at lunch."
She didn't. The restaurant was running at a deficit, and the new manager, Ron, had the personality of bullhorn feedback. Every shift was a scramble. By three, Siobhan's hands shook from hunger and too much caffeine, but she had a few bucks in tips for baby formula and a dozen eggs.
Someday, she'd go back to school. Someday, she'd finish her medical training, rescue herself, and buy a place where the mold didn't crawl on the walls like rainforest kudzu. For now, survival was enough.
She stepped into the hallway and nearly tripped over a boy. Not just any boy—this one had an angular little face, black hair swirled into cowlicks, and eyes the color of drowned marbles. He grinned up at her. "You're my mom."
Siobhan froze, sleeve halfway up her arm. Megan burst out laughing from the doorway. "Relax, Shiv. This is Jayden. Bridget's kid."
Siobhan knelt. Jayden squinted, then poked the bruise under her jaw. "Did you get in a fight?"
"No," Siobhan lied gently, "I just fell."
He grinned wider, disbelieving. "Cool."
It struck her then. The kid didn't just have her eyes—he had a sprinters body, all elbows and knees, and a half-healed chip out of his front tooth. She'd read that twins could be separated at birth and still walk with the same peculiarities, crave the same random cereals. She'd thought it was pop science, a fairy tale for desperate mothers.
But this boy… He could be hers.
She heard a thump, and a second shape launched from the stairwell. This one was a girl, hair in pigtails, dress smudged with sidewalk chalk. She sized Siobhan up and said, "Mom, I'm hungry."
Before she could process any of it, a car horn blared outside, and Megan's eyes flickered with alarm. "Shit," she hissed. "That's him." She hustled the twins into Siobhan's arms, frantic. "Just—hold them. I'll text you."
Megan bolted, and Siobhan staggered as both kids latched around her waist, hot and real and almost perfect fits. Their hands clutched her sleeves with trained, white-knuckled expertise. She barely looked up in time to see the man coming—not OMEN, not ex-boyfriend, but a literal muscle in a tailored blue suit, walking fast, eyes dark and intent.
"Excuse me," he said, voice like a stone skipping over glass. "You have something of mine."
Megan had called the twins a favor, but now Siobhan understood. The kids were the favor. The danger clung to them like static. She read it in the man's clipped walk, his refusal to blink as he closed in.
She instinctively ducked into the stairwell, dragging the kids behind her. The man followed, impassive, relentless. At the third floor landing, he cornered her. The girl bit down on Siobhan's wrist. The boy stiffened, watching the man with blunt terror.
"Please," Siobhan said, heart stampeding in her chest. "Don't hurt us."
He didn't look at her. He looked at the twins. "Are you alright?"
The girl scowled. "We don't like you."
"Understood," the man said.
There was a silence, thick with every unspoken thing. Siobhan's heart battered at her ribs.
He finally turned to her. "Ms. Donovan. If I may take a moment of your time."
He knew her name. She tried to sputter a question, but couldn't.
The man pressed his hand to his chest, formal. "I believe you have met my children, Avery and Jayden. I'm Dominic Myles."
She almost laughed; the contrast was absurd. A corporal, corporate shark whose name made the local news at least monthly.
"They…" She couldn't finish. The facts didn't compute; her world was filled in grayscale and everything about these children radiated color. "They said I was their mom."
Dominic's jaw tensed, some quiet battle waging there. "They are mistaken. But their mother is gone, and you…" He looked at her, but not at her. "You are the closest thing they have."
It jarred something in Siobhan. Like a wound breaking open, deep and secret.
Dominic nodded, the movement precise but not unkind. "I propose a contract. You'll care for them—in exchange, your debts are settled. Your cousin Megan will be provided for. And you'll never have to run again."
Siobhan thought of the eviction notices stacked like snowdrifts, of the day jobs she'd cycled through, of her mother's last words. Never believe a man's promises.
She looked down at Avery and Jayden, who clung even tighter, the girl's blue eyes shimmering with hope, the boy already plotting their escape.
She looked up at Dominic, who waited, silent and cold as a new continent.
It was a ludicrous offer—an impossible fantasy. But she'd lived off faith before, and it hadn't killed her yet.
Siobhan curled her arms around the children. "Deal."
a cold, commanding man storms in, chasing after the children, fear blinds her. She fights him, convinced he's a heartless kidnapper, never realizing he is their father, running to protect what was stolen from him.
A shocking turn of events traps them in a contract marriage meant to secure the twins' future. Under one roof, tension simmers, desire burns, and every shared glance feels dangerous. The twins quietly play matchmaker, hiding the truth about their father's identity while love begins to blur the lines of the contract.
As buried secrets rise and her family's unforgivable sins come to light, she must choose—cling to the lies that kept her alive, or risk everything for the man she misjudged and the family she never knew she could have.
The contract didn't come with a ceremony—not the kind with white lace or flowers, anyway. It came on a Wednesday, in a law office that smelled like lemons and ink.
She wore her best shirt, the one with the missing button at the breastbone, covered with a safety pin and a prayer. Dominic's daughter Avery sat poised on the edge of a pleather couch, swinging her patent-leather shoes, her tiny face framed in war paint: a band of purple marker she'd swiped from the waiting room, one last act of resistance.
The twins watched Siobhan sign her name. Dominic watched, too, with the wariness of someone who's been lied to by experts. She tried to steady her hand, but the pen rattled on the line. Even the notary flinched.
Afterward, Dominic handed her a credit card with her name already embossed—Siobhan Myles, a title she wasn't entitled to, not really. "For their expenses," he said. "My assistant will follow up with accounts and appointments."
She didn't ask if she needed to sleep with him. That wasn't in the contract, either.
---
They moved into the Myles townhouse on a wet Friday, rain lashed sideways against the glass. The twins claimed the attic bedroom, shrieking and wild, dragging Siobhan up with them as if she were a prize they'd smuggled home from a fair. Dominic had ordered new bunk beds. The room smelled of sawdust, unopened boxes, and the faint sweetness of cinnamon toast. Siobhan's bed was in the guest suite, across two hallways and a gulf of unspoken rules.
The house was glassy and cold, too tall for its neighbors, and Siobhan never figured out how to work the heating. But it was also clean, and after the first week she stopped checking for rats out of habit. She got used to the rhythm of the place: Dominic's precision, his ritual of black coffee and the Wall Street Journal at six sharp, his children's coded language, their hunger for affection camouflaged in pranks and broken mug handles.
At night, when the twins were asleep, Siobhan roamed the halls, counting her steps or reading the spines in the home library. She picked through the pieces of Dominic's life, trying to find the crack. He lived as though being a father—and a husband, in public—were jobs he'd trained for but didn't trust himself to do unsupervised.
But he never touched her. Not even by accident.
---
The first time they appeared in public as a family was at a school open house. Siobhan wore her cousin's hand-me-down blazer and a necklace borrowed from the twins' dress-up trunk, two silver-plated birds locked in an endless dogfight. She steeled herself for the stares.
The other parents, a flotilla of perfect teeth and athleisure, clucked admiration at Dominic's devotion to his "beautiful family"—and eyed Siobhan with the curiosity reserved for reality TV heroines. Was she nanny or wife or the tragic middle ground? Siobhan didn't correct them. She held Avery's and Jayden's hands and let herself be shuttled from auditorium to classroom, smiling until her jaw ached.
In the art room, Siobhan paused in front of Avery's self-portrait: a girl, drawn wild, hair like fire, eyes the uncanny blue of open sky. The figure stood between two hulking shadows, each labelled in block letters. DAD. MOM. Siobhan's own likeness was too tall, too wide-hipped, the earrings wrong, but that didn't matter. Avery had drawn her in.
Dominic's reflection hovered in the window, unreadable. He didn't comment, just adjusted his tie and waited for her to finish.
Later, in the parking lot, Siobhan fumbled for her keys and found that her hands wouldn't stop shaking.
"Are you alright?" he asked, gentler than she'd expected.
"They all looked at me like I was your… pet project," she said. "Like I'm the before photo in a makeover show."
"They're idiots," Dominic said, stiff-lipped but sincere, "and they don't matter."
He offered her his hand. Not to hold, but to steady her—like an athlete passing a baton in a relay. She clung to it anyway, just for a second, because the night was cold and she didn't know how to say thank you.
---
A month in, the twins staged a silent rebellion. No one would fess up to it, but Siobhan suspected Avery was the ringleader. It started with tiny acts of sabotage: toothpaste in her shoes, a tarantula-shaped meatloaf at dinner, escalating to a full-tilt mutiny when Dominic tried to make them eat Brussels sprouts.
"Why don't you ever eat with us?" Avery asked, her fork jammed in her fist like a weapon.
Dominic paused, calculus turning behind his eyes. "You're mistaken," he said. "I'm here every night."
"You don't do FAMILY," Avery corrected, drawing invisible italics around the word.
Siobhan thought she saw him flinch. Jayden, more sensitive, shrank into his collar.
Siobhan put her fork down. "She means you only ever watch," she said, voice low. "Maybe you're scared you'll mess it up."
He looked at her, startled.
"You won't," she said, the words rolling out before she could catch them. "You just have to… show up. Even when you get it wrong."
Dominic nodded once, the way a man would memorize coordinates before a battle.
He filled his plate. He ate a single, revolting Brussels sprout with eye-watering determination. The twins hooted, scandalized and delighted. For the first time, all four of them laughed at the same moment.
It felt like someone had pulled the pin on a grenade and replaced it with a glitter bomb.
---
Siobhan lay in her new bed that night, staring at the ceiling. What had been a prison sentence was starting to feel like a home. She was almost angry at herself for it.
She thought of Jayden's chipped tooth, Avery's too-loud cackle, the way Dominic carried himself with a rigid grace, always tense with the possibility of disaster. She wondered if he'd ever truly let her in, and whether she'd survive if he did.
Down the hall, a glass shattered. A giggle echoed—Avery's. Then a lull, and the sound of Dominic's voice, low and soothing, telling a story she couldn't make out.
Siobhan closed her eyes and willed herself not to hope for anything more.
But the hope was there, bright and sharp. She clung to it, just for a little while longer.