"Felicia, I need your help," he blurted. "Everything's gone all wrong, and I can't fix it. I need you, you're the only one who can do it. Please, Felicia."
Oh my god. I stood up. "You said this was about mom," I snapped. "I'm leaving."
"She's sick."
Perhaps, I thought, sitting down was a better idea. I sat. I blinked. "What?" I said, stupidly.
Tears brimmed in his eyes again, and I could have almost sworn they were real. But why would my father cry over the woman he had married? As far as I could tell, he'd never given a second thought to her after the ink on the marriage certificate was dry.
"She has cancer," he said, and the words came out in a sob.
I felt cold. Looking down at my hands, I flexed my fingers, trying to warm them up. "What do you mean, she has cancer?" It was a stupid question. But I'd just talked to mom two days ago. Why had my father flown out here to tell me she was sick? Why couldn't she have told me in a phone call? Surely she was already in treatment.
None of this felt right.
My father shook his head and mopped at his eyes with a napkin. "We found out a week ago," he was saying, "but we couldn't start chemo."
My mouth went dry. "Why not?"
He brought his hands to his face, and I was shocked to see them covered in liver spots, wrinkled and papery. They were in the hands of an old man.
"I'm ruined," he said.
My mouth dropped open. "What do you mean, ruined?"
He shook his head, unable to speak, and took a few deep breaths. "There's no money left," he said finally. "It's... it's gone."
I pressed my lips together. "It's gone?" I couldn't believe it. My father was richer than King fucking Midas. How did that kind of money just... disappear? "How the hell did you manage that? You don't have the houses? The cars? All the artwork?"
"It's all leveraged. Everything. I owe it all."
Shock numbed me. "You... is this about the company, or you?" "Both."
"You crossed the streams?" How was that even possible? The corporation should have had enough equity and assets to fund any venture, no matter how stupid.
"It was private. I wanted to start up a new company on my own. But it didn't work. And the company... well, financial empire-building isn't what it once was. We're broke. I'm broke."
I sat there in silence. Across the coffee shop, someone burst into laughter and the noise grated against my nerves.
"Are you on drugs?" I finally said. "What on earth made you do those things?"
He finally lowered his hands, but he didn't look at me. "Maybe," he said. "Maybe I was."
Holy shit, I thought. "How much do you owe?"
He told me. The number he quoted was so huge that even if I grabbed a plane and sacks full of dollar bills and spent a month dumping money into the Pacific, I wouldn't have come close to making a dent in what he'd wasted.
I sat and stared at him some more. "Are you for real? Jesus Christ, meth-heads are better at money than you. What the hell is wrong with you?"
He just shook his head and I realized that was all I was going to get out of him.
I leaned back, reeling. "Why don't you guys declare bankruptcy?" "Because... it's my life, Felicia." I flinched at my name. "I can still fix it, I just need enough capital. And I could cook some books and get it, but..." He trailed off. "Your mother should have started chemo last week. But I can't afford it. Every bill is past due, my credit is tapped out, and I dropped the insurance a few months ago to free up some money..."
This couldn't be real. No one could have been this stupid.
"So it's just pride that's keeping you from saving mom." I stared at him, cold with fury. If he wanted to ruin his own life, well, he was welcome to it, but to drag mom down with him... I couldn't stand it.
"No," he said, and he finally looked up at me. "No, I have a plan. I have a backer. Someone who believes in my vision. I can get it done, but I need his help. And... there's a condition."
I had an oddly clear premonition. "This is one of those Indecent Proposal things, isn't it?" I said. My voice was too loud. Heads turned in our direction. "Holy shit. I'm your daughter."
"No!" he said, his face flushing, his eyes darting this way and that. "No, it's not like that."
"What, I have to sleep with him and he'll give you a million dollars and I'll see diddly? Is that it?"
"No! It's..." He turned to his omnipresent briefcase, popped it open, and pulled out a contract as thick as a paperback book. He extended it to me, but when I just stared at him, he set it on the table between us.
"It's a marriage proposal," he said.
I started to laugh. "Oh my god. Oh my god. You were always such a humourless dick, I thought you were serious there for a while!" It still wasn't very funny—joking around about cancer was a seriously shit thing to do—but the relief I felt was so welcome that I felt I could forgive it. After all, if all his sins had been as relatively innocent as a joke about cancer he would have practically been a shoo-in for heaven instead of the soulless earth-bound lich he was.
"It's not a joke," he said quietly. I stopped laughing.
"Who's this backer?" I said. Visions of his usual colleagues danced through my head. Getting married to one of the corporate aristocracies was probably on my bucket list somewhere between eating a bucket of toenails and breaking my kneecaps with a ball-peen hammer.
He took a deep breath. "Anton Waters."
My eyebrows lifted so far that they were in danger of wandering into my hair. "The Anton Waters?" It was too absurd to be real.
I looked at the contract in front of me, and sure enough, there was his name. Anton K. Waters. A man I'd only read about in magazines and heard about on tv and in idle gossip in online forums. The ruthless, powerful, and boringly attractive lord of Empire Capital, is one of the biggest corporations in existence. He'd risen to prominence from nowhere over the short course of ten years until he was on the top of the heap, leaving the bodies of competitors and colleagues alike in his wake. Anyone who got in his way was disposed of without ceremony or even, it was said, emotion.
Or so I'd heard. And I'd heard a lot. Lately, no one could shut the hell up about him for more than five seconds. He'd been on all the major magazine covers, sometimes twice, and even in my relatively television-free existence every other news report I'd happened to catch seemed to mention him in some way.
And here was a marriage contract, like something out of the nineteenth century, staring at me. With his name on it.
What's the catch? I wondered. Because there had to be a catch. There was no way a guy like Anton Waters needed an arranged marriage to get him hitched. He made money and fucked bitches. Probably. That's what young, powerful, rich, handsome men did. My father had been one, once.
And look where it got him.
And mom, a little voice whispered. Look where mom is now.
I licked my lips. "What's in this contract?" I said.
"You'll want a lawyer to go over it with you," he said, "but it's like a prenup."
A prenup. Right. "And what business does Anton Waters have asking for an arranged marriage?"
My father looked away. "I don't know. He said his reasons were his own.
You don't have to sign it. You can walk away. It's merely a condition for his backing." Walk away and leave your mother to die. The implication hung in the air between us.
"He's going to pull your ass out of the fire and all he wants is to get married sight unseen to a woman he's never met before?" I asked him. Saying it out loud somehow made it sound even worse than it was.
A ghost of a smile flitted across his face. "Well, that, ninety-five per cent of the profits, directional control of the venture—"
I held up a hand. "Stop. I don't care." I reached out and gave the contract a tentative nudge, wondering if it were rigged to explode. It probably was, in a way. I was going to have to find a good lawyer. And not just a good lawyer, but a lawyer unscrupulous enough to take part in essentially selling me off to be married like a piece of property.
Haha. Good one. I could just run down to the state bar office and throw a rock, probably.
I took a deep breath. The contract in front of me gave me the impression of great weight, as though it had its gravitational pull, one strong enough to derail my entire life.
"What does mom think about this?" I asked quietly.
My father looked down at his hands. He fiddled with his fingers, pulling and kneading.
"She doesn't know, does she?" I knew it. And she hadn't told me when I'd talked with her two days ago because she didn't want me to worry.
Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
"He wants to meet with you first," my father said. "He said you should drop by any time you like. His door is always open to you. He wants to make sure you will... meet his needs in a wife."
Meet his needs? Christ, that sounded ominous. A cold fist closed around my stomach and squeezed.
"This is completely ridiculous," I said. "You know that, right?" My father didn't answer.
I picked up the contract and stuffed it into my messenger bag. "I'll go talk to him," I said. And give him a piece of my mind while I'm at it.
The look of naked relief on my father's face made me want to punch him.
He'd destroyed my mother's life without a thought, and now he wanted me to destroy my own by letting him use me as a pawn.
Well. I loved my mother, but I wasn't her. I stood up and walked out of the coffee shop, not even saying goodbye to my father. I was the master of my fate. I wouldn't let some man control me, and if Anton Waters thought he could buy someone's hand in marriage in this day and age, he had another thing coming.
***
Empire Capital, like most of its sister companies—each fairly interchangeable and all with thrusting, dominating names compensating for something—stood on Wall Street. It looked like a mausoleum on the outside, so I was surprised when I entered the mezzanine to find the insides gutted and remodelled in an ultra-nouveau post-modern style. On the one hand, I could appreciate the fine, smooth lines of a well-designed space, but it made me angry that someone had been paid handsomely to minimize the character of the building while I, struggling alone in my art studio, strove to put character into the world. It was clinical. And also I liked old buildings.
Anton Waters, I decided then and there, was a jerk.
I strode up to the front desk, sleek and cleverly fashioned and utterly alone in the centre of the dark grey slate floor. The receptionist behind it tapped away on a thin white keyboard and stared at a thin white monitor. She wore the tiniest of Bluetooth headsets. Also white. Naturally.
She didn't even look up at me for a full minute. It figured. I was dressed like... well, like a boho hobo who had just crawled out of her weed den. Streaks of dried clay marred my work clothes, cracking and crumbling. Even as I stood there, not moving, tiny flecks flaked away and floated to the immaculate floor.
Good. I wasn't going to be the perfect little wife Mr Waters probably wanted, and I was happy to show it in whatever way I could.
Finally, the receptionist deigned to glance at me. Her perfect nose wrinkled. The clothes she wore probably would have paid for a month's rent.
"May I help you?" she said.
This was going to be fun. "Yeah," I said. "I'm here to speak to Anton Waters. He's expecting me," I added, hoping this would help my case. It didn't.
She blinked politely, and I felt a tiny bit bad. She probably thought I was a crazy person who had refused to take her meds. I kept a close eye on her hands in case she had a secret panic button concealed under the lip of her desk. "Is he?" she said. "May I ask who is calling?"
"Felicia Dare."
At the sound of my name, her entire demeanour changed.
"Oh!" Her pretty eyes grew wide. "Of course, Ms Dare. I'll call up and let them know you're here."
So he was expecting me. That was... unexpected. Frankly, in my experience, powerful rich men made their schedules and everyone else had to keep up with them. That I wasn't going to be kept waiting was... nice. "Er... thanks," I said. I glanced around for a place to sit down while she hurriedly punched numbers into the sleek number pad sitting next to her computer.
"Yes, Felicia Dare is here to see Mr Waters," she said. Someone burbled at the other end of the line. "Yes, thank you," she replied and hung up. She flashed me a huge smile. "He'll be waiting for you. Top floor, of course."
"Thanks," I said again, feeling lame. I skirted the desk and the now-beaming receptionist and made my way to the corridor of imposing elevator doors. They looked like something out of some old sci-fi silent film. One of the creepy dystopian ones. I pressed the button for the doors that led straight to the top, and they opened immediately. I stepped inside. They shut behind me, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach as it shot up.
Now that I was inside the elevator and clearly on my way to see Anton Waters, my nerves began to fail me. What was I thinking? What was I doing? I should have ripped up that contract and thrown it back in my father's face and not even bothered to come here. I could take out a line of credit to pay for Mom's treatments. Couldn't I? Like everyone else and their dog applied for credit cards and ran up crazy massive debt. I could do that too! And then I could declare bankruptcy! Everyone wins!
Yes. That was what I would do. I'd yell at the billionaire for a bit, and then turn around, go back to my apartment, and drive myself into financial ruin. Hey, it worked for my father.
No sooner had I reached this conclusion than the elevator came to a heart-stuttering stop, and the doors opened wide.
The top of Anton Waters's financial behemoth resembled the bottom only in that they were both huge spaces. Where the bottom floor had been all brushed steel and dark grey slate, the top floor of the building was laid in white marble and gold. Everything, from the white marble floor to the delicious dark brown leather furniture to the rich mahogany desk to the crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling—a chandelier! in a corporate office!—spoke of tastes too sumptuous for mere mortal minds token.
Behind the desk, a man whom I could only assume was Mr Waters's assistant stood and bowed to me. Like, bowed. Full tilt and everything. Perhaps the firm did a lot of business with the Japanese or visiting