# Chapter 5: The Ghost in the Lobby
The headline made it official: "Zenith City's Ice Princess to Marry the Devil in Armani." Whoever wrote it deserved a raise for accuracy.
Isabelle's phone had been vibrating continuously for three hours, a relentless percussion of congratulations, condolences, and thinly veiled curiosity. She'd silenced it twice. It didn't matter. The notifications kept coming, stacking like unpaid debts.
Congratulations, darling! We had no idea you two were even acquainted!
Well played, Belle. Didn't think you had it in you.
Your mother would be so proud. (Would she?)
That last one was from her father's cousin Helena, whose ability to wound with parenthetical asides was legendary even by Old Money standards.
Isabelle sat in the Van Estel library, surrounded by first editions and leather furniture that predated the Civil War, scrolling through social media coverage that reduced her life to a transaction. The photos were everywhere: her arrival at Stone Tower that morning, the engagement ring catching sunlight as she'd climbed into her car, a pulled quote from some "society insider" claiming she and Silas had been "conducting a secret courtship for months."
The fiction was already building itself, brick by efficient brick.
Stone Global Enterprises CEO Silas Stone, 30, and hospitality heiress Isabelle Van Estel, 24, announced their engagement today in a union that bridges Zenith City's Old and New Money dynasties.
Dynasty. As if the Van Estels had anything left to bridge with except a name and a crumbling estate.
Her phone lit up again. This time, she answered.
"Belle?" It was Margot, her former Pemberton roommate, voice tight with concern. "Tell me this is some kind of strategic play I'm not sophisticated enough to understand."
Isabelle leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes. "It's exactly what it looks like."
"Which is what? Because three months ago, you told me Silas Stone was a soulless corporate predator who destroyed Leo's family for sport. And now you're wearing his ring?"
"People change." The lie tasted like copper.
"You don't." Margot's pause was weighted with everything she couldn't say over an unsecured line. "Belle, if you need help—"
"I need you to be happy for me," Isabelle interrupted, injecting false brightness into her voice. "I'm marrying one of the richest men in the country. Isn't that every society girl's dream?"
The silence on the other end was answer enough.
After Margot hung up—gently, sadly—Isabelle returned to the news coverage. A photo from three years ago had resurfaced: her and Silas at the Pemberton Museum Gala, caught in what looked like intense conversation near the Rothko collection. She remembered that night. He'd called Old Money families "parasites feeding on inherited corpses." She'd responded that New Money was "ambition without soul, wealth without meaning."
He'd smiled—actually smiled—and said, "At least we agree we're both bloodsuckers."
Now that photo was being repurposed as evidence of "undeniable chemistry."
A knock interrupted her spiral. The Van Estel butler, Morrison, appeared in the doorway with the particular stiffness that meant trouble.
"Miss Isabelle, you have a visitor."
"Tell whoever it is I'm indisposed—"
"He insists it's urgent. A Mr. Leo Chandler."
The world tilted sideways.
Isabelle found him in the estate's marble entrance hall, standing beneath the crystal chandelier her great-grandfather had commissioned in Vienna. Leo looked wrong here—hollowed out, smaller than she remembered, wearing an ill-fitting navy suit that screamed department store rather than bespoke.
He'd lost weight. His family's collapse had carved him down to angles and exhaustion.
"Leo." Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
He turned, and the look on his face was worse than anger. It was betrayal, raw and uncomprehending.
"I saw the announcement," he said quietly. "At work."
"Work." She kept her tone neutral, though dread was already pooling in her stomach.
"Stone Global Enterprises. Acquisitions department." His laugh was bitter. "Ironic, right? I'm working for the man who acquired my family's ruin. And now I find out you're marrying him."
Of course. Of course Silas's reach extended even there, pulling Leo into his orbit like some kind of corporate black hole.
"Leo, I don't owe you—"
"An explanation?" He stepped closer, and she could see the sleeplessness in his eyes, the particular devastation of someone whose world had been methodically dismantled. "We were going to get married, Belle. We had plans. A future. And then he destroyed everything—my family, your fortune, us—and now you're going to stand at an altar and pledge yourself to him?"
The NDA clause hovered in her mind like a legal gag order. No disclosure of contractual nature of marriage or financial coercion to any third party. Breach meant immediate debt collection, Arthur's ruin, the end of everything.
She couldn't tell him. She couldn't explain.
So she did the only thing the contract allowed: she lied.
"We were children with childish plans," Isabelle said, her voice ice over razor wire. "I grew up. Maybe you should too."
Leo flinched as if she'd struck him.
"You don't mean that."
"Don't I?" She gestured vaguely at the decaying grandeur around them. "Look at this place, Leo. Look at what our families have become. Old Money is dying. Silas Stone is the future. I chose to be on the winning side."
"You chose." He said it slowly, testing the words like a foreign language. "You're telling me you want this? That you want him?"
Every instinct screamed to tell him the truth—that she was trapped, coerced, that this was salvation wearing the mask of a society wedding. But Arthur's heart medication sat upstairs on his nightstand, and the foreclosure notice gave them seventeen days, and Silas Stone's contract left no room for honesty.
"Yes," she said simply.
Leo stared at her for a long moment. Then something shifted in his expression—the last bit of hope guttering out like a candle.
"You're just like him now," he said quietly. "Cold. Bought. I hope the price was worth it, Belle."
He walked past her, shoes echoing on marble that had witnessed two centuries of Van Estel history. The door closed with a soft, final click.
Isabelle stood alone in the hall, the engagement ring heavy as a shackle on her finger, and let herself feel it for exactly thirty seconds: the grief, the guilt, the sick knowledge that she'd just murdered Leo's last good memory of her to protect a contract she hated.
Then she locked it away in the same place she'd been storing every humiliation since Silas Stone had entered her life.
Her phone buzzed. Silas's name glowed on the screen.
Need to coordinate schedules for charity gala Thursday. My driver will collect you at 6 PM tomorrow for dinner planning. Dress appropriately. —S
Not a request. A summons.
Isabelle typed back with cold efficiency: Received.
She looked at her reflection in the hall's antique mirror—designer suit, perfect hair, grandmother's pearls, and a 3.2-carat diamond that caught the light like a warning flare.
The Ice Princess stared back at her, composed and untouchable.
Somewhere beneath that flawless surface, Isabelle Van Estel was drowning.
But the contract didn't include a clause for救 that either.
**