MARRY YOUR KILLER
Chapter One: The Call That Changed Everything
---
The call came at 3:47 AM.
Jasper Jean Mariano was already awake. She was always awake at 3:47 AM, because 3:47 AM was when the shipping reports from Europe arrived, and 3:47 AM was when the other shipments needed to be accounted for, and 3:47 AM was when her father had taught her that empires were either built or burned.
Tonight, she was in her penthouse overlooking BGC, the city lights sprawled beneath her like a kingdom she was still learning to rule. Her laptop screen glowed with manifests—forty-seven containers from Rotterdam, three flagged for inspection, two that needed to be rerouted before morning. Standard work. Controlled work. The kind of work that kept her hands busy and her mind quiet.
Her phone buzzed against the marble counter.
She glanced at the screen. Mama.
Her mother never called at 3:47 AM. Her mother was asleep by ten, awake by six, and operated with the precision of a woman who had spent thirty years managing a household that was also a fortress. A call at this hour meant one of three things: her father had taken a turn, someone was dead, or something was coming.
Jay picked up on the second ring.
"Ma."
"Get ready, child." Her mother's voice was calm, too calm, the voice she used when the world was about to shift. "Someone is coming."
Jay's fingers paused over the keyboard. "What time?"
"Five in the morning. Here at the house."
The ancestral home in Alabang. Where the family gathered for weddings, funerals, and things that were neither but somehow required the same formal attire and careful faces.
"Who?"
Her mother didn't answer immediately. In the background, Jay heard the soft clink of porcelain—her mother setting out the good cups, the ones reserved for important guests. The ones that hadn't been used since her father's last birthday, when half the business elite of Manila had filled their living room.
"The Watsons," her mother said finally.
Jay went very still.
"The whole family?"
"The whole family." Her mother's voice didn't change, but Jay heard it anyway—the edge beneath the calm, the warning wrapped in silk. "Get ready, child. Hurry."
The line went dead.
Jay set the phone down slowly. Her hand was steady. Her breathing was steady. Everything inside her was screaming.
The Watsons.
Three generations of blood feud. A war that had started before she was born, over a deal gone wrong, a betrayal that no one in either family could fully remember but everyone carried like a scar. She had grown up hearing the names—Watson this, Watson that—spoken like curses in the Mariano household. She had attended funerals for cousins she barely knew, men and women who had died because of the color of their last name. She had learned to hate the Watsons the way she learned to pray: without thinking, without questioning, because that was what her family did.
And now her mother was setting out the good cups for them.
Jay stood up from her desk. She walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out at the city, her reflection ghosting over the lights. In the glass, she saw a twenty-one-year-old woman in a black blazer and loose hair, sharp cheekbones and sharper eyes, the face of someone who had learned to be dangerous before she learned to be anything else.
She thought about calling her cousin Michel Angelo. He would know what this meant. He always knew. But it was nearly four in the morning, and Angelo had been working eighteen-hour days for weeks, handling the legitimate side of the business while she handled the other, and she didn't want to wake him for something she could face alone.
She thought about calling Percy. Her stepbrother would be awake—Percy was always awake, always in the middle of some chaos she would have to clean up later—but Percy would also be useless in a crisis that required subtlety. He would show up at the ancestral home in a hoodie and flip-flops and ask the Watsons if they wanted beer.
She thought about calling Aries. Her twin would understand. Her twin always understood, because they shared the same blood and the same burdens and the same face, almost. But Aries was also the soft one, the one who cried at funerals while Jay stood stone-faced, and she didn't want to see the fear in her sibling's eyes before she understood what they were walking into.
She called no one.
She went to her closet and pulled out the dress she wore when she needed to be untouchable: black, tailored, expensive in a way that didn't need to announce itself. She pinned her hair up, exposing the line of her jaw, the set of her mouth. She looked at herself in the mirror and practiced her smile—polite, distant, the smile of a young heiress who had never hurt anyone in her life.
The mask fit perfectly. It always did.
---
The ancestral home in Alabang was lit up like Christmas when she arrived.
Jay pulled her car through the gates—the security guards waved her through without checking her ID, because everyone who worked for the Marianos knew her face, her car, her way of moving through the world—and parked beside her mother's sedan. Three black SUVs were already there, sleek and anonymous, the kind of vehicles that carried men who didn't want to be noticed.
The Watsons had arrived early.
She walked up the path to the front door, her heels clicking against the stone, her face carefully blank. The garden was immaculate—her mother had clearly been preparing for days, maybe weeks, arranging the lanterns and the flowers and the perfect angles that made the house look like something out of a magazine. Jay wondered how long her mother had known about this meeting. She wondered why no one had told her sooner.
The front door opened before she could knock.
"You look beautiful, child."
Her mother stood in the doorway, elegant in emerald green, her smile warm and her eyes cold. Jeena Mariano was a small woman, barely five feet, but she filled every doorway she stood in like she had built it herself. She reached up and smoothed a strand of hair behind Jay's ear, a gesture so familiar it made something in Jay's chest ache.
"What is this, Ma?" Jay asked quietly.
Her mother's hand lingered on her cheek for a moment longer than necessary. "Family," she said simply.
Then she turned and walked inside, and Jay followed.
---
The living room was full of people.
Her father sat in his wheelchair near the fireplace, dressed in a formal barong, sitting upright in a way he hadn't managed in months. His hands were folded in his lap, steady, but Jay saw the slight tremor in his jaw, the effort it took to hold himself together. He had been the Don once, the most feared man in the Philippine underworld, and even now, bedridden and broken, he commanded the room like he still owned it.
Her mother took her place beside him, one hand on his shoulder, a united front that had survived forty years of marriage and three decades of war.
Michel Angelo stood by the far window, arms crossed, face carved from stone. He was twenty-eight, her eldest cousin, the kuya who had raised her when her father grew too ill to do it himself. He ran the legitimate business with military discipline, and he was the only person in the world who could make Jay feel like a child with a single glance. He glanced at her now, a quick assessment, and gave her the smallest nod. Good. You're here. Stay sharp.
Percy was in the corner, pretending to check his phone but vibrating with the need to be chaotic. He was twenty-three, her stepbrother, and he had never met a serious situation he couldn't make worse with a well-timed joke. He caught her eye and mouthed something she couldn't quite read—Watson, maybe, or what the hell, or both.
Aries stood beside Percy, still as a statue, their shoulders almost touching. Her twin had the same dark hair, the same sharp features, the same way of going very still when something was wrong. Aries looked at her across the room, and Jay saw the question in their eyes: Do you know what's happening?
Jay gave a small shake of her head. No. But I will.
Tita Gemma was arranging flowers on the sideboard, a deliberate calm, her hands steady even though she had to know. Tito Rachel sat in his usual chair, quiet and solid, the calm in every storm.
And then there was Ci N.
Jay spotted him immediately—behind the large potted plant near the hallway, his shoes visible, his phone probably recording everything. Ci N Perelta was nineteen years old, technically her younger brother from another mother, practically her son, and he was the most chaotic human being she had ever met. He treated her empire like a playground and somehow made her laugh when she forgot how. He was also, she noticed with a mix of fondness and exasperation, holding a bag of pork cracklings.
She would deal with him later.
The room fell silent as the front door opened again.
Serina Watson stepped in first.
She was everything her mother was not—tall, pale, elegant in white, her silver hair swept back from a face that had probably been beautiful once and was now simply formidable. She smiled as she entered, and it was the smile of a woman who had buried enemies and outlived rivals, who had built an empire from the bones of men who underestimated her.
Behind her came her husband, Keizer Watson, leaning on a cane but still commanding, his eyes scanning the room with the practiced assessment of a man who had once been the most dangerous person in any room he entered.
Behind them came the sons.
Keigan Watson was seventeen, tall and lean, his face set in an expression of cold indifference that didn't quite hide the sharp intelligence behind his eyes. He moved like someone who had been trained to kill, and Jay filed that information away carefully.
Keiran Watson was ten, small and bright-eyed, holding his mother's hand and looking around the grand living room with open curiosity. He was the only person in the room who didn't seem to understand the weight of what was happening.
And then, behind them, came Mark Keifer Watson.
Jay had seen his face on magazine covers. She had seen his smile in business articles, his laugh in society pages, his name on the lists of the country's most eligible billionaires. She had dismissed him as a playboy, a lucky heir who had inherited money and simply didn't ruin it.
She had been wrong.
He stepped into the room and the air changed. He was taller than she expected, broad-shouldered, dark hair swept back, a smile on his face that was warm and easy and completely practiced. He looked like a man who had never wanted for anything in his life.
But his eyes—his eyes found hers immediately, across the room, across the families, across three generations of blood feud.
And behind that charming smile, she saw something else. Something cold. Something calculating. Something that told her, with absolute certainty: This man has killed before. This man will kill again.
Her hand went instinctively to the small of her back, where a knife was always hidden beneath her blazer.
His eyes flicked to the movement. His smile widened.
"Jasper Jean Mariano," he said, stopping in front of her. His voice was warm. His eyes were not. "I've heard so much about you."
She held his gaze. "I doubt that. People who talk about me usually don't live long enough to tell the story."
Behind the potted plant, Ci N made a sound like a kettle about to whistle.
Keifer laughed—a warm, easy sound that didn't reach his eyes. "I like her already."
"That makes one of us," Jay said.
Percy, from the corner: "I knew it. The Philippines is going to run out of popcorn."
Michel Angelo stepped forward, positioning himself slightly in front of Jay. "Serina. Keizer. This is unexpected."
Serina Watson's smile was razor-sharp. "Is it? I think you'll find, Angelo, that this meeting has been expected for a very long time."
Jay's father cleared his throat. The sound was soft, barely a whisper, but everyone in the room went silent.
"Let's go inside," Jasper Mariano Sr. said, his voice still carrying the weight of a man who had once been the most feared crime lord in the Philippines. "We have a lot to discuss."
He looked at his daughter. Then at Keifer.
"You two. Sit together."
---
The next three hours were a blur of words that Jay would replay later, dissect later, understand later.
She heard her mother's voice, calm and measured, laying out the terms of a merger that would combine Mariano Logistics and Watson Real Estate into a single entity worth more than anything the country had ever seen. She heard Serina Watson's counter-offers, her demands, her conditions. She heard her father's occasional interjections, quiet but final, the voice of a man who had built an empire and was now deciding its future.
She heard the word marriage and felt the room tilt.
She heard end the war and secure the future and for the families.
She heard her own voice, somewhere distant, saying things she didn't remember deciding to say.
And through it all, she was aware of Keifer Watson sitting beside her on the long sofa, his shoulder almost touching hers, his presence a weight she couldn't ignore. He didn't look at her during the negotiations. He kept his eyes on the elders, his face pleasant, his posture relaxed, the picture of a young man who was letting his parents handle things.
But every time the conversation turned to her—her age, her inheritance, her suitability—she felt him watching. Not with judgment, not with calculation, but with something else. Something she couldn't name.
When the meeting finally ended, when the details were settled and the engagement was announced to the gathered families and the champagne was poured for a toast she didn't drink, Jay found herself on the balcony, breathing the cool air and trying not to commit murder.
The estate was quiet now. The families were inside, pretending to get acquainted, pretending this was a celebration and not a transaction. She could hear Percy's laugh echoing through the house, and Ci N's voice rising in protest about something, and the soft murmur of women's voices discussing flowers and dates and all the things that turned a business arrangement into a wedding.
She didn't turn when she heard footsteps behind her.
"You're taking this better than I expected."
Keifer leaned against the railing beside her, close enough that she could see the faint shadow of stubble on his jaw, the way his shirt fit across his shoulders, the careful blankness of his expression.
"I'm planning seven different ways to kill you right now," she said.
"Only seven? I'm insulted."
She turned to look at him. In the moonlight, without his practiced smile, he looked younger. And tired. And something else—something that might have been loneliness.
"You don't want this either," she said.
It wasn't a question.
He was quiet for a moment. "I want my family to survive. I want my brothers to grow up without looking over their shoulders. I want the war to end."
"And me?"
He looked at her. Really looked. And for the first time, the mask slipped.
"I want to know who you really are," he said quietly. "Because I have a feeling the world only sees about ten percent of you. And I'm very, very curious about the other ninety."
Something shifted in her chest. Something she didn't have a name for.
"Careful," she said. "Curiosity killed the cat."
His smile returned—but this time, it was different. Warmer. More real.
"Satisfaction brought it back."
From inside, they heard Percy's voice: "CI N IS BEHIND THE PLANT, AND HE HAS CHICHARRON!"
And then Yuri's cold voice—Yuri Hanamitchi, red-haired and terrifying, who was apparently also here: "I told you, you were being obvious."
And then a crash, and Ci N's voice: "THE PLANT FELL OVER—WAIT ANGELO, KUYA ANGELO, NOT THE FACE—"
Keifer looked at her. She looked at him.
And despite everything—despite the arranged marriage, the blood feud, the war she knew was coming, the fact that she was engaged to a man she should hate—Jay laughed.
It was the first real laugh she'd had in months.
Keifer watched her, and something in his expression shifted. Settled. Softened.
"I'm going to make you laugh like that again," he said.
She stopped laughing. "Don't make promises you can't keep, Watson."
"Mariano." He said her name like a challenge, like a vow, like a warning. "I don't make promises I can't keep."
Behind them, Ci N was being carried away by Michel Angelo while Percy filmed and Yuri provided commentary and Keiran asked loudly why the funny guy was in trouble.
Jay looked at her future husband.
"We'll see," she said.
---
END OF CHAPTER ONE
---