Chapter 4 · Stay or Recant on the Floor

"Say it again." Vale's mouth was still at my throat when the elevator doors split open on the vault level. He didn't lift his head. He just walked me backward into the dark, one hand still locked under my jaw, the other splayed flat against my spine like he was steering a door he didn't trust to swing shut on its own. "Say what." My voice came out in pieces. The cold hit my bare shoulder where his teeth had been. "That you're leftover." His breath dragged over the mark he hadn't made yet. "Try it now. See if it sounds true down here." I couldn't get it out. That was the problem. That had always been the problem, since the second Rhys said *leftover* on a stage full of people I'd filed birth records for. The vault door groaned behind us, heavy and slow, the kind of steel that didn't care what was happening on either side of it. Motion-sensor light stuttered on, dim amber, catching rows of ledger boxes and a single steel-framed bunk shoved against the wall — night-shift crash space, not romance, and somehow that made it worse. He walked me to it. My knees hit the edge and I sat down hard because he made me. "Vale." I got a hand on his chest. It didn't move him an inch. "This isn't the elevator anymore. You don't get to—" "I get to whatever you don't stop." He crouched, dragging my blazer off one shoulder, the fabric tearing at the seam where it caught on the pin still holding my clerk's badge. The little metal clip skittered across the concrete floor and I heard it more than saw it, because his mouth was back on my collarbone and my whole skull had gone white and stupid. "That's Guild property," I said, which was the dumbest thing I could've said with his hand working the last buttons of my blouse open one by one, unhurried, like he had all night and knew I didn't have the spine to make him stop. "Then bill me." He peeled the blouse off my arms. Cold air hit skin that hadn't seen air in an hour. "You keep talking about paperwork like it's going to save you." "Somebody has to." My voice cracked right down the middle. He went still for one second, just looking at me — really looking, the amber light doing nothing to soften the hunger on his face — and then he was pulling the last strap down and there was nothing left between us and the room. Nothing. I felt it like exposure, like every scar and every stamp mark on my own skin had just been read out loud. "Rhys can freeze your brother's file tomorrow morning," Vale said against my ear, low, almost gentle, which was the cruelest part. "He can't touch the tuition contract. I bought that in September." His hand found my jaw again, thumb dragging my chin up so I had nowhere to look but him. "You know what that makes me?" "Another leash," I said. "Just a nicer one." "Say leftover again." He pressed me back onto the thin mattress, his weight coming down slow, deliberate, a wall of heat and muscle settling exactly where I couldn't get free of it. "Say it with my mouth on you and see if it's still true." I couldn't smell anything but him — that dock-salt, engine-oil scent that didn't belong anywhere near a place that smelled like old paper and cold steel. It filled up the room like he'd claimed the air before he'd claimed anything else. My skin was covered in the finger-shaped marks he'd left through the elevator ride, small blooming bruises down my forearm, proof I hadn't imagined the grip. "You don't get to erase what he did," I said, and my hands were fisted in his shirt, and I didn't know if I was pulling him closer or trying to shove him off, and neither did he, because he laughed against my throat, short and dark. "I'm not erasing it, sweetheart." His knee pushed my legs apart, unhurried, deliberate, like he was reading the last line of a contract before he signed it. "I'm rewriting who gets to touch the page after." His body settled against mine, skin to skin, nothing left to peel away, nothing left to hide behind. I felt him — hot, heavy, right there, a fraction of an inch from a line neither of us had crossed yet — and every rational thing I owned went quiet. "Vale." It came out wrecked. "Five seconds." He didn't move. He just held there, forehead dropped to mine, breath ragged, like it was costing him something to wait. "Stay under me. Or get up right now and go back up that elevator and tell the whole floor you take it back. Tell them you're not leftover. Tell them you're his." I didn't move. "Say it," he said again, softer now, his mouth brushing mine, not quite a kiss, not quite anything I could name. "Tell me to stop." The seconds went by loud, like a clock I couldn't see ticking somewhere in the vault's dead air. One. Two. My hands were still in his shirt. My hips hadn't pulled back. My mouth wouldn't open on the word he wanted. Three. "Gia." His voice cracked on my name, right at the edge of losing whatever control he'd been "Say stay, or walk out into the rain naked." The last covering left my skin. His canine sat on my throat. The tip pressed the entrance and held, not yet inside, last half-second. No phone. No knock. Stay, or recant leftover on the floor.