Accidentally His

LAYLA

I HATED ASKING FOR HELP.

I hated it more than I hated the eviction notice sitting unopened on my father's desk, more than the calls from the bank I'd started screening because I couldn't stomach one more conversation about grace periods that had already run out twice. I hated it enough that I'd spent three days telling myself I wouldn't do it, that there had to be another way, some version of saving Bellini & Associates that didn't require me to swallow my pride and dial a number I'd deleted years ago.

There wasn't. So there I was, standing in my father's cramped office above the drafting studio, staring at a woman I hadn't spoken to in three years, listening to her offer me a lifeline with the same detached ease she might use to order coffee.

"You want me to do what," I said.

Samira Farah didn't so much as blink. She sat in my father's worn leather chair like she'd never once considered that it wasn't hers to sit in, her manicured hands folded neatly in her lap, her expression carrying the particular calm of someone who already knew how this conversation would end.

"Attend Nadia's engagement banquet tomorrow night," she repeated, like the request were reasonable, like she hadn't just asked me to hand over one evening of dignity in exchange for a check with enough zeros to save the firm my father had spent thirty years building. "As her assistant. Nothing more. You'll help manage the guest list, keep things running smoothly behind the scenes, and by morning, this entire arrangement will be nothing but a favor between family."

"I'm an architect," I said. "Not a party planner."

"You're my niece," Samira said, "whose father is three months behind on a loan I happen to know the exact terms of, because your mother, God rest her, made the mistake of telling me everything the last Christmas we all spent together." Her smile didn't reach her eyes. It never had, not once in my entire life, not even at the funeral. "I'm offering you a solution, Layla. I'd think carefully before turning it down."

I hated that she was right. I hated it more than I could say out loud in that office, surrounded by blueprints for buildings we might not get to finish, for a business that had been my father's entire identity since before I was born, since before he'd married my mother and built something he'd hoped, foolishly maybe, would outlast both of them.

"Fine," I said. "One night. I show up, I disappear into the background, and we're square."

"Wonderful." Samira rose smoothly, already smoothing the front of her blazer, already treating the matter as settled the way people who'd never had to beg for anything always did. "Nadia will send over a dress. Try not to embarrass either of us."

"When have I ever embarrassed you," I asked, unable to keep the edge out of my voice.

She paused at the door, glancing back at me with an expression I couldn't quite read, something between pity and calculation, though at the time, I told myself it was simply Samira being Samira. "You haven't," she said. "Yet."

I didn't understand what she meant by that until much later. By then, it was already too late to matter.

✦ ✦ ✦

My father found me twenty minutes after she left, still sitting at his desk, staring at the eviction notice like it might rearrange itself into something less devastating if I looked at it long enough.

"You didn't have to do that," Elias Bellini said quietly, settling into the chair across from me, exhaustion carved into every line of his face in a way that had become permanent over the last two years. "Whatever she offered. Whatever you agreed to."

"Someone had to," I said. "You've been carrying this alone for too long, Baba. Let me help."

"This isn't your debt to carry."

"It's not yours either," I said. "Not really. The market crashed. The Hendricks contract fell through because their own investors backed out, not because of anything you did wrong. You don't deserve to lose everything you built because of circumstances outside your control."

He didn't argue, though I could see he wanted to, the same stubborn pride that had kept this firm alive through two recessions and a divorce still burning somewhere beneath the exhaustion. My father had never been good at accepting help, not from me, not from anyone, and I understood exactly where I'd inherited that particular flaw.

"One night," he said finally. "That's all Samira asked for?"

"That's all," I said, though something in my chest tightened at the memory of her parting words, some instinct I couldn't quite name whispering that nothing involving my aunt had ever been quite as simple as it first appeared.

✦ ✦ ✦

The Farah estate looked exactly the way I remembered it from childhood summers I'd spent feeling like an outsider in my own family, marble floors that swallowed sound, chandeliers dripping with more money than my father's firm had earned in the last five years combined, and enough staff moving silently through the halls that I felt like an intruder the moment I walked through the door.

"You're late," Nadia said, appearing at my elbow in a cloud of expensive perfume, radiant in a black-and-gold gown that made the borrowed dress on my body feel even more like a costume than it already did. "Not that it matters. No one's supposed to notice you tonight anyway."

"Comforting," I muttered.

She had the grace to look slightly guilty, tucking a strand of dark hair behind her ear in the same nervous habit she'd had since we were children. "I do appreciate this, Layla. I know it's not exactly your scene."

"Nothing about tonight is my scene," I said, glancing around the ballroom already filling with guests I didn't recognize, jewelry worth more than my apartment, conversations conducted in the particular hush of people who'd never once worried about where their next month's rent was coming from.

"Just help with the guest list at the east entrance," Nadia said, already being pulled away by someone eager for her attention, her mother watching from across the room with an expression I couldn't quite place. "And Layla, thank you. Really."

I spent the next hour exactly where I'd been told to stay, checking names against a list, directing unfamiliar faces toward a party I had no actual stake in, until the doors opened one final time and the entire room seemed to shift its attention toward the entrance at once.

I didn't need anyone to tell me who'd just arrived.

Zayd Marchetti moved through a crowd the way certain people simply did, not loudly, not with any visible effort, but with an ease that made everyone else in the room rearrange themselves around him without seeming to notice they'd done it. Dark hair, sharp features that carried both the warmth of his mother's Damascus roots and the cool precision of his father's Milanese bloodline, a tailored suit that probably cost more than my father's entire remaining inventory of drafting equipment.

I'd seen his face in enough business magazines to recognize him instantly, though nothing in those photographs had prepared me for the way the room actually felt different once he was standing in it, like the air itself had rearranged around the sheer, quiet weight of his presence.

He wasn't looking for me. There was no reason he would be. I was staff for the night, invisible by design, exactly the way Samira had wanted it.

Which was why it startled me so completely when his eyes found mine across the crowded room and held there, a fraction of a second longer than made any sense at all.

I looked away first, heat crawling up my neck, and busied myself with the guest list like it might actually save me from whatever strange awareness had just passed between us.

It didn't matter. I told myself it didn't matter. In an hour, I'd disappear back into my own life, and Zayd Marchetti would never think of me again.

I was still telling myself that twenty minutes later when I noticed Samira huddled near the east staircase with a man I didn't recognize, both of them speaking in low, urgent tones over a folder she kept glancing at like it might combust in her hands.

I couldn't hear what they were saying. But I saw her slide something out of that folder, papers, official-looking, stamped with a seal I couldn't make out from this distance, and I saw the man nod once before disappearing into the crowd with it.

I didn't think anything of it. Not then.

The lights in the ballroom flickered once, twice, and then died entirely, plunging the entire estate into sudden, disorienting darkness.

Somewhere near the front of the room, I heard Samira's voice cut through the chaos, sharp with a fear that didn't match the simple inconvenience of a power outage.

"The documents," she said. "Someone find the documents, now, before---"

The rest of her sentence was lost in the commotion of two hundred wealthy guests suddenly stumbling in the dark, and I stood frozen at the edge of it all, some instinct I couldn't name telling me that whatever happened in the next few minutes was about to change everything.