While My Husband Cheated, I Married His Powerful Brother

Dorian did not believe in love.

He had seen what it did to people. What it had done to his mother, specifically. The way she had sat by the window for hours, staring at nothing and her wedding ring still on her finger. The way she had stopped eating. Stopped sleeping. Stopped being the woman who used to chase him around the garden with a hose and laugh until she could not breathe.

Love was a chemical reaction. A temporary insanity. People called it magic because they did not want to admit they had been duped by their own biology.

He was thirty-four years old. He had never been in love and he did not intend to start.

His office on the top floor of Zeus Group headquarters was cold by design. Gray walls. Gray carpet. A desk that was more surface than furniture. No family photos. No personal effects. Nothing that would give anyone the impression that the man behind the desk had a life outside these walls.

His assistant, Mark, had worked for him for six years. Mark had never seen him smile.

That was not entirely true. Dorian smiled when it was useful. At board meetings. At charity galas. At the rare moments when a deal closed exactly the way he had planned. But those smiles were tools. They meant nothing.

The only person who had seen something real from him was his grandmother.

And she was dying.

He pushed the thought away. He had been pushing it away for three months, ever since the doctors used the word months instead of years. He sat at his desk and looked at the spreadsheet on his screen. Acquisitions. Margins. Projections. Numbers did not lie. Numbers did not leave. Numbers did not look at you with sad eyes and say I just want to see you happy before I go.

His phone buzzed. A text from his half-brother.

Dad wants to have dinner. Just the three of us. You should come.

Dorian deleted it without reading it again.

His half-brother was two years younger. Same father, different mother. The father had kept the affair secret for twelve years. Twelve years of coming home late, of business trips that lasted too long, of his mother asking does he still love me? and Dorian, at fourteen, not knowing how to answer.

The father had given his half-brother a company, money, connections, and a leg up he had never offered Dorian, because Dorian was supposed to inherit Zeus Group. Dorian was the legitimate son. The heir. The one who would carry on the family name.

His half brother was the one who got to be loved.

Dorian had built Zeus Group into what it was today. When his mother died—cancer, five years ago, and she had fought it alone because his father had already remarried to the woman he had cheated with—the company was worth seven hundred million. Today it was worth four point two billion.

He had done that all by himself, not his useless father or his stupid half brother.

And he would never, ever let it fall into someone else’s hands. The company was his mother’s legacy. Every investment. Every partnership. Every building with the Zeus name on it. She had put her life into this. Her money. Her time. Her hope.

He would die before he let his half brother or anyone take any of it.

The only person who’d ever gotten something real from him was his grandmother.

And she was dying.

He called Mark and gave him an order he never thought he’d have to give — find him a wife, and a way to give his grandmother a great-grandchild, before the month was out. Then he hung up and went to see her.

She had shrunk over the past year. Bones pressing against skin, hands trembling around a water glass. Eighty-seven years old, and the only thing she still asked for was to hold a baby before she died. He’d told her he’d see what he could do. She’d called him a liar. She wasn’t wrong.

He was leaving her room when he saw a woman in the hallway, gripping an IV pole like it was the only thing keeping her upright — hair a mess, hospital gown thin and pale blue, one ankle wrapped thick. He recognized her instantly. The bar. The hotel room he’d woken up alone in. He’d thought about her more than he wanted to admit, for a woman whose name he’d never even asked.

She told him what she’d overheard. Told him she was pregnant, that the timing matched a night neither of them had used protection, that she needed money and protection from a husband who’d already made sure she had nothing else. He said nothing for a long moment, searching her face for the tell that liars always gave him. It wasn’t there. What was there looked less like a lie and more like a woman with nothing left to lose making the only move she had.

"What kind of deal?" he said.

She took a breath like she was about to jump off something high.

"It’s a deal where we both get what we want."

He took her to a private lounge on the third floor — a room for people whose names opened doors. She sat with her wrapped ankle propped on a second chair, small in the oversized seat, and for once he didn’t offer her water or a blanket or any of the things a normal person would. This wasn’t a social call. It was a negotiation.

"Your name," he said.

"Veyra."

"Tell me about the deal."

She sat up straighter. Her hands, which had been shaking, went still.

"I’ll sign whatever you want — prenup, postnup, NDA. I don’t want your money and I don’t want your name. Two things. Visitation rights, even if it’s a weekend a month — I lost a baby once, a few years ago, and I don’t think I’d survive losing another one, even if I’m not the one raising it. And somewhere to go when I leave my husband. A studio. A basement. I’ll work for it. I just need a chance."

The room went quiet.

Dorian looked at her — the mess of her hair, the broken ankle, the hands she’d forced still through sheer will — and thought about his mother sitting by a window, asking for help until she stopped asking because no one ever answered. He thought about his grandmother’s face when she talked about a baby.

"You’re serious," he said. Not a question.

"I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life."

He leaned back and looked at her for a long moment. "I have conditions."

She nodded, trying and failing to hide relief.

"First — you tell me everything about your husband. Every secret, every weakness, every dirty deal he’s ever made. I don’t do business with people I don’t understand."

"Okay."

"Second, you live in my house. Not a studio. My house — my grandmother will want to see the mother of her great-grandchild, and she’ll know if I’m hiding you somewhere. You’ll have your own wing, your own entrance. You won’t have to see me if you don’t want to." He paused. "But she’ll want to see us together. So you’ll have to pretend."

"Pretend."

"That we’re in love. That this is a real marriage. Not a woman who walked up to a stranger in a hospital hallway and offered him a baby for a place to sleep."

She laughed — small, broken at the edges, but a laugh. "That’s a lot of pretending."

"You said you could give me the child. You didn’t say anything about the acting." He held her gaze. "Can you do it?"

She searched his face for something. He didn’t know what. He didn’t know if she found it.

"Yes," she said. "I can do it."

He nodded, short and final.

"Then we have a deal."