“I’ll speak frankly,” Elena Mikhailovna said. Her voice had the precision of someone used to closing billion-dollar deals. “I want a husband. Not for love, not for appearances, but for something far more complicated.”
Dmitry blinked. His phone felt heavy in his hand. “I… I’m not sure I understand.”
“I need someone to fulfill the terms of an old agreement,” she said. “If I am married by the end of this month, I retain control of my late husband’s charity fund—worth over 300 million rubles. Otherwise, it passes to a board of vultures waiting to strip it for parts.”
Silence.
“And in return?” Dmitry asked cautiously, every instinct in his body screaming this was madness.
“I will pay off all your family’s debts. Your mother will have access to the best oncologists in Europe. Your sister’s education will be funded until her PhD. And you… you’ll have my legal mentorship and a future.”
It felt like selling his soul—but to save the people he loved, how could he say no?
A week later, in a discreet civil ceremony, Dmitry Ivanov became the legal husband of Elena Mikhailovna Sokolova.
Paparazzi barely blinked. The business world whispered but said little—after all, Elena was known for her eccentric decisions. Dmitry stayed in her mansion, in the east wing, like a quiet shadow in her grand life. She was polite, distant, and surprisingly warm at times.
Then, on the seventh morning, just after breakfast, she walked into the reading room with a leather folder in hand.
“I need you to do something for me,” she said without looking up. “It’s why I chose you. Why I tested you.”
“Tested me?” he repeated.
She looked at him then—her eyes sharper than ever. “I didn’t marry you for the money or to keep my fortune. I needed someone I could trust. Someone young, with fire, and the will to fight corruption.”
She opened the folder. Inside were confidential documents—fraud, laundering, bribes. Names. Bank accounts. Including some of Russia’s most powerful elites.
“This fund,” she said slowly, “was a front. It was my husband’s way of laundering money for people you don’t want to cross. I tried to clean it up when he died. They threatened to kill me.”
Dmitry sat frozen.
“You’re a law student, Dmitry. A smart one. I need you to help me destroy them—legally, carefully. It may take years. But if you help me… we might just change everything.”
He didn’t speak for a long time. Then he looked at her and simply said: “Where do we start?”
And just like that, the marriage everyone mocked became the alliance that would shake the empire.