I made it back to my parents' estate a little after Markus left to start tailing Alex, driving one of the half-dozen cars my parents insisted on keeping at every property they owned — for appearances, mostly, the way they kept everything for appearances. The estate gate buzzed me through after the obligatory back-and-forth with whoever was on intercom duty that week, demanding my full name like they didn't already know exactly whose car was idling outside.
"Lawrence Sebastian Grey," I said, flat, annoyed, "son of Hailey and Dean Grey. Let me in."
"Of course, sir. Apologies."
The drive up to the house took longer than it needed to, winding through more landscaped trees than any reasonable family required, past a wall you couldn't even see from the road. My mother always said it was about privacy. I always thought it was about making sure nobody got close enough to see how hollow the whole place actually felt once you were inside it.
"Welcome home, son," my mother said, waiting at the door like she always did — never meeting me halfway, never once in my life walking the extra ten feet it would have taken to actually greet me partway down the drive. "We've missed you."
"Me too," I lied, accepting her hug the way I'd accepted it my entire life — present, polite, somewhere else entirely.
"We have a lot to discuss," she said, already steering me toward the sunroom where my father was waiting.
I knew exactly what was coming before we'd even sat down. We always ended up here eventually — the long hallway past the kitchen, past the rooms where the staff who actually ran this place slept, into the sunroom with its wall of old photographs that none of us ever looked at anymore.
"Son," my father said when we walked in, like he hadn't seen me in months instead of weeks.
"Yes, Father." I sat across from both of them, already bracing.
"About the conversation we had," my mother began, settling into her seat with practiced grace, "regarding finding you a wife before you take over the casino—"
"I remember," I said, cutting her off before she could build any momentum.
"We've identified a few candidates," she continued anyway, like I hadn't spoken at all. "Suitable families. Good connections."
"I told you I'd find someone myself," I said, rolling my eyes the second she looked away to pour her tea — tea that I knew, from twenty years of watching, had a healthy splash of vodka in it. My father knew too. He just never said anything, the same way he never said anything about most of what happened in this house.
"And have you found anyone," my father asked, raising an eyebrow, clearly expecting the answer to be no.
If I could have told them the truth — that I had no interest in any woman, suitable family or otherwise, that the only person who'd made me smile in longer than I could remember was a man in a maid's costume currently sitting on ninety thousand dollars of my money — this conversation would have gone very differently. It also would have ended with my disownment by dessert, so I kept my mouth shut and let the lie sit there unchallenged.
"If you can't find anyone," my mother said, sipping her tea, "we'll help."
The grand clock in the corner chimed, marking another hour I'd lost to this exact conversation, recycled almost word for word every time I came home. I found myself drifting, thinking about green eyes and a blush that came too easily, about how Alex had looked standing at that table with a tray balanced on his hip like the whole world wasn't already too loud and too much for him.
He'd be perfect, I thought, if my parents would ever let me have a man instead of a wife. The way he flustered so easily. The way he clearly thought no one could see straight through every lie he told.
"Lawrence!"
I blinked back into the room to find both my parents staring at me, my mother's expression somewhere between confused and startled. "What's going on with you," she said. "You're smiling. I haven't seen you smile like that since you were small."
"Nothing," I said, shaking the thought loose before it could show any more on my face than it already had. "Just remembering something. I'm going to go rest before dinner."
"Rest up," my father said, already turning back to my mother, already moving on to whatever came next in their carefully curated afternoon.
I left the sunroom as quickly as I could without it looking like I was running, walked the long hallway back toward the part of the house that still felt vaguely like mine, and sat on the edge of my bed turning the same idea over and over until it stopped sounding reckless and started sounding like the only real option I had left.
My parents wanted a marriage. They never said it had to be the kind of marriage they were imagining.
And Alex — scared, broke, desperate enough to rob a casino for his sister's sake — was exactly the kind of person who might say yes to a deal he couldn't actually afford to refuse.
I picked up my phone and called Markus before I could talk myself out of it.
"Keep an eye on him," I said, when he answered. "I think I know what I want to do."