Isabella's POV
The car slows. Through the window, Whitmore Tower rises against the gray afternoon sky, and below its entrance the crowd of reporters is already thick, cameras raised, lights spooling up. Alexander's hand leaves my thigh as he moves toward the door, and I watch the shift happen in him — the civilian posture folding away, something larger and more public taking its place.
He steps out. Flashbulbs ignite.
He turns back, and his hand comes out to me — open, steady, not a question.
"Welcome to my world, Isabella," he says, his voice low under the crowd noise. "Try to keep up."
I take his hand, step out into the light — and behind the first camera bank, at the edge of the crowd where he clearly wasn't supposed to be, I see Ethan Park staring at me with an expression I've never once seen on his face.
Fear.
******
The flashbulbs hit me all at once — a wall of white light and noise that feels physical, like walking into something solid — and for half a second my body wants to stop, wants to turn around, wants to get back in the car and keep driving until the city runs out.
Alexander's hand tightens around mine, and I keep walking.
The podium is already set up at the base of Whitmore Tower's entrance steps, a bank of microphones bristling from it like something important is about to be said. Something important is about to be said. Two hundred reporters have packed themselves behind the press line, and every single one of them is shouting.
Alexander steps up to the microphones without hurrying, and the noise drops — not completely, but enough. He has that effect, I'm noticing. Rooms adjust to him.
"My name is Alexander Whitmore," he says, his voice clear and unhurried in the sudden quiet. "And effective this weekend, my fiancée Isabella Sinclair and I will be honoring our families' contract — a formal agreement entered into before either of us was born, binding the Sinclair and Whitmore families together in marriage." He pauses, letting that sit. "We wanted you to hear it from us first."
The noise explodes back at twice the volume.
His arm moves around my waist, settling there with a certainty that tells every camera in that crowd exactly what it's supposed to see, and I feel the warmth of it through the silk of the emerald dress and remind myself to breathe.
Sell it, I tell myself. Sell the shape of it.
"Miss Sinclair!" A reporter near the front, microphone shoved forward. "You were engaged to Ethan Park as recently as yesterday. What changed?"
I find the camera above the reporter's head — the one that will frame me best — and I let myself smile, slow and sure. "I was," I say. "And then I discovered I was already engaged to someone far better." I let the pause do the work. "Funny how that works."
A beat of silence. Then laughter ripples through the crowd, and I feel Alexander's arm tighten — just once, just briefly — in a way that might be approval.
"Mr. Whitmore!" Another voice, somewhere to the left. "Isn't this just revenge? A woman scorned using a convenient contract?"
I feel Alexander shift beside me, and I glance up at him. His expression is the same — controlled, neutral — but something behind his eyes has gone very still in the way of someone choosing their words carefully because they mean every one of them.
"This is about claiming what's mine," he says, and the quiet of his voice makes it carry further than a shout would. "Isabella and I have been bound since birth. Nothing and no one will change that." He looks at me then, and his eyes hold something that the cameras will read as devotion and I read as a promise. "They just delayed what was always going to happen."
Every camera in that crowd finds my face at the same moment. I know because I can feel it — the weight of two hundred lenses — and I hold absolutely still and let them look.
I've spent six years making myself smaller. Standing a half-step behind Ethan at every event, laughing at the right moments, never outshining, never demanding to be seen.
I let them see me now.
"One more question — " a reporter starts.
"That's all for today," Alexander says pleasantly, and steers me toward the tower doors with the calm authority of someone who has never once in his life been told what to do by a journalist.
The doors close behind us, and the noise cuts off like a switch.
* * *
Backstage is a long corridor with gray walls and the antiseptic quiet of somewhere designed for function rather than comfort. I lean against the wall and breathe.
My hands are shaking.
"You added the bite," Alexander says. He's standing in front of me, studying my face with that systematic attention I still haven't gotten used to. "Funny how that works. That wasn't in the briefing."
"It felt right."
"It was right." He says it without praise in his voice — just a statement, the way he says everything. "Don't second-guess your instincts. They're better than the script."
I look at him. "Was any of what you said out there true? Or was all of it performance?"
A pause. He considers the question in that way of his, where you can almost see the decision being made.
"I don't perform," he says finally. "I chose my words carefully. That's not the same thing."
Before I can ask him what exactly the difference is, his phone rings. He glances at it and answers, and I hear the assistant's voice clear enough to catch every word — fast, tight, the sound of someone delivering news they're not sure how to frame.
"Sir. Ethan Park just arrived at Whitmore Tower. He's demanding to see Miss Sinclair."
I go very still.
Alexander's expression doesn't change. Not one muscle, not a flicker. "Have security remove him," he says. "And if he comes back, have him arrested for trespassing." He hangs up, and then he looks at me with that steady gray gaze, and his voice drops to something quieter, something that is just for this corridor. "They'll all come crawling back. Are you ready for that?"
I think of Ethan's face in the crowd — the fear I'd never seen on him before, the way it looked exactly like the moment a person realizes they've miscounted something important.
I think of what I said at the podium and the sound of laughter spreading through two hundred reporters.
"God, I hope so," I say.