"You put your real name on it."
Nico's hand closed around my wrist before I got the door shut behind us. Not hard. Just enough that I felt every one of his fingers, cold from the car, pressing into the bone.
"That's what you paid for," I said. "A signature. Nobody said it had to be fake."
"Everybody who takes this job uses a name that isn't theirs." He walked me back a step, then another, until my shoulders hit the door. Fifth Avenue traffic hummed twelve floors down, muffled through glass that probably cost more than my apartment. His apartment. Empty except for us. No staff, no photographer, no crowd from the courthouse steps two hours ago clapping for a marriage that wasn't real. "You think I don't run a background check on the man wearing my ring?"
"I think you already knew my name before you hired me." I lifted my chin. Bad move — it put my mouth four inches from his. "So don't act surprised. Act like whatever this is."
"This is me asking why." His thumb moved, just barely, over the pulse in my wrist. "Eli Tan. Real birth certificate, real social, real everything. You signed a marriage contract with your actual legal name to a man your file says handles cleanup for the Falcones. That's not a paycheck decision. That's a leash you handed me for free."
"Maybe I didn't think you'd read the fine print that hard."
"I read everything that hard." He said it flat, like a fact about the weather. "It's the job."
I tried to pull my wrist back. He didn't let go. Didn't tighten either — just kept it, like he was deciding something with his hand instead of his mouth.
"Let go of me, Falcone."
"Nico." His voice dropped a register on the name, like it cost him something to say it plain. "You married me. Use it."
"I married a job."
"You signed real," he said. "Jobs don't do that."
He stepped in the rest of the way, and the four inches disappeared. I felt the heat coming off him through his shirt, felt the top button of his collar undone from the ceremony, a thin gold chain underneath it catching the light from the window. My back was flat against the door. Nowhere to go that wasn't through him.
"What do you want," I said. "An apology for doing my job too well?"
"I want to know what you were thinking." His free hand came up, not to my face — to the knot of my tie, loosening it with two fingers like he had every right. "Sixty grand for a paper marriage. Ninety days. Clean exit. You could've used any name you found in a phone book. You used yours."
"Maybe I liked the sound of it next to yours."
It came out before I could stop it, half a lie, half not, and I watched it land on him like a hit he hadn't blocked. His hand went still against my collarbone.
"Say that again," he said, quiet.
"No."
"Eli."
"I said no." But I didn't move his hand off me. That was the part I couldn't explain to myself, standing there with the tie hanging loose and his knuckles resting warm against my throat.
He tilted his head, studying me the way he probably studied a man before he decided how bad the night was going to get for him. "You don't scare easy. I read that in the file too. Three jobs like this before me, all of them clean, all of them fake names. So tell me the truth, because I don't marry liars twice."
"You didn't marry a person. You married a signature."
"I married the name Eli Tan." His hand slid up, thumb dragging along my jaw, tipping my face so I had nowhere left to look but at him. "That's not a signature. That's a person standing in front of me with his back against my door."
His mouth was close enough that I felt the words more than heard them. My pulse was doing something stupid under his other hand, still circled loose around my wrist, and I hated that he could probably feel it too.
"This isn't in the contract," I said.
"Neither is you using your real name. We're already off script."
He closed the last of the distance slow, like he was giving me every chance to turn my head. I didn't turn it. His mouth brushed the corner of mine, testing, not taking, and I felt the graze of it all the way down to where my hand had somehow fisted in his jacket without me deciding to put it there.
"Tell me to stop," he said against my skin.
"You're the one who stopped."
He made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and kissed me properly then, one hand still at my jaw, the other flattening against the door beside my head like he needed the wall to hold him up too. It wasn't gentle. It wasn't supposed to be — this was two men who'd signed a contract three hours ago, not two people who'd earned this. I kissed him back anyway, harder than I meant to, my fingers dragging his jacket half off one shoulder before either of us noticed we were moving.
His knee slid between mine. My breath caught loud enough that he pulled back an inch just to watch my face do it again.
"Ninety days," I said, breathless, like it was a warning I still believed.
"Ninety days," he said, "starting whenever I say it starts."
A phone buzzed on the counter across the room. Neither of us looked at it. His hand found the deadbolt above my shoulder, fingers closing over the little brass latch like he was about to throw it, seal us both in.
"Nico —"
"Lock the door from your side," he said, low, right against my ear, and didn't move his hand off the lock. "Or mine."