"Don't." The word came out wet, mushed around his thumb still hooked on my bottom lip.
Torin didn't move it. "Don't what, June."
"Don't act like you're not enjoying this." My spine hit the glass behind me, cold enough to bite through my blazer. The penalty box smelled like rubber matting and cold metal, and underneath that, him — cedar, leather, something darker I refused to name.
"I'm not enjoying it." His thumb dragged, slow, off my lip and down to my chin, tipping my face up so I had nowhere to put my eyes but his. "I'm working."
"Working." I laughed, and it cracked in the middle. "Is that what we're calling a strip search now?"
"Not a strip search." His free hand came up between us, flat against my sternum, and I felt every one of his fingers through the wool like brands. "A chip search. There's a difference."
The door behind him didn't rattle. Kessler had locked it from the tunnel side ninety seconds ago and hadn't come back. No knock. No footsteps. Just the two of us and the buzz of the arena's emergency lighting turning everything the color of a bruise.
"Let me guess," I said. "You think I'm carrying something."
"I know you are." His hand slid off my chest, down, and I sucked in air through my teeth when his fingers found the seam of my coat and pulled. Not the zipper. The lining. "The accelerator's not just a clause in the appendix, June. It needs a physical key to fire from outside the building's network. A chip. Somebody sewed it into something of yours before you walked in here."
"That's insane."
"That's forensic accounting." He said it the way other men said *baby*. Low. Certain. He turned me by the shoulder — not rough, but there wasn't a version of it I could've stopped — so my back pressed flush to his chest instead of the glass, his mouth an inch from my ear. "Hold still."
"Or what."
"Or I take longer."
His hands went to my collar first. Two fingers slid under the fabric, along my collarbone, checking the seam there, and I hated — *hated* — that my breath caught before my brain caught up to why. His palm was too warm against skin gone cold from the glass. He smelled like ice and rink and something expensive underneath, and it filled up the box until there wasn't room for anything else, not even air that was only mine.
"Nothing there," he said, more to himself than me.
"Shocking. Since there's nothing to find."
His hand moved lower, flat down the front placket of my coat, buttons giving way one by one under his thumb like he'd done this before, like undressing a woman for evidence instead of want was just another Tuesday. The last button caught. He didn't ask. He pulled, and thread snapped, and the sound of it — small, final — went through me worse than if he'd shouted.
"You just tore three hundred dollars of tailoring."
"Bill the pension." His hand slid inside the open coat, along my ribs, and I flinched at the graze of his knuckles even through my blouse. "You're shaking."
"I'm freezing. This is a hockey rink."
"Your pulse says otherwise." His other hand came up to my throat — not choking, just resting, two fingers pressed to the side of my neck where the blood jumped every time he got this close. His thumb found the exact spot, pressed, and I felt my own heartbeat slam back at him like a confession I hadn't agreed to give. "There it is."
"That's called fear, Torin."
"Is it." He didn't sound like he believed me. I didn't sound like I believed me either.
The overhead speaker crackled — building PA, not the tunnel intercom — some tech testing the postgame feed two levels up, a burst of static and a countdown voice: *thirty minutes to presser, thirty minutes.* Neither of us moved. The clock didn't belong to us. It belonged to the fifty reporters who'd be told June Calder signed the residency clause the second this door opened, one way or another.
His hand went to my hair next — pulled it back off my shoulder, fingers combing through slow, like he was checking for wire, for a clip, for anything I might've hidden there, and it should've felt clinical. It didn't. It felt like being catalogued. Owned. My scalp prickled everywhere his fingers passed and I hated how my eyes wanted to close.
"Nothing in your hair." His mouth was right at my temple now. "Which means it's not on you."
"I told you there's nothing—"
"It's in the coat." He said it flat, certain, and his fingers found the inside seam at the hem, pressed, and went still. Through three layers of lining I felt it too — a hard little edge, the size of a fingernail, sewn in tight and flat where no tailor would ever put a seam.
My stomach dropped straight through the floor of the box.
"That's not mine," I said, and for once it was true, and it didn't matter at all.
"Doesn't have to be yours." His voice dropped lower, right against my ear, his chest a wall of heat at my back, his hand still flat over the hidden chip like he could feel it thinking. "It's registered to the trustee account. Which means the second you walk out that tunnel with it in your pocket — the second you *run*, June — it doesn't call me."
"Then who—"
"It calls the collectors directly." His thumb pressed once, hard, over the seam, over the chip, over her heartbeat still slamming under his other hand at her throat. "Skips me. Skips the pension board. Goes straight to the men your father owed money to before he put your name on this building instead of his."
The PA crackled again — *twenty-nine minutes* — and I couldn't get a full breath in, not with his hand on my throat and his mouth at my ear and a name I hadn't heard in six years suddenly sitting in the room with us.
"You're lying."
"Ask me that again," Torin said, "after you've tried to leave with it."