"Say it again." My voice comes out steadier than I feel, which is the only win I've got left in this box. "Say it isn't a threat."
Torin doesn't move his hand off my collarbone. His thumb is still hooked under the torn edge of my coat lining, right where the chip sat sewn into the seam like a tumor nobody told me about. "It's not a threat, June. It's a fact with your name stapled to it."
"My father's been dead six years."
"Then somebody's been paying his interest for six years." He says it flat, like he's reading a scoreboard. "And this—" he taps the chip once against his palm, "—is how they collect when the payments stop."
The PA overhead crackles, the press conference clock ticking down from twenty-something minutes I've stopped tracking. Cold seeps up through the bench, through the ice under the boards six feet away, straight into my spine. He's still crouched between my knees, too close, his forearm braced on the wall behind my head so there's nowhere for my shoulders to go but back.
"Get off me."
"You're not going anywhere for twenty-nine minutes." He checks his watch without looking away from me. "Twenty-six now."
"Then talk. Who's collecting. Who put a chip in my coat lining without me knowing."
He leans in instead of answering, and I feel his breath change temperature against my ear — warmer than the box, warmer than it has any right to be in a building this cold. "You want the whole file in twenty-six minutes, or you want to survive the next five?"
"Don't do that." My hands come up flat against his chest, more reflex than plan. Wool under my palms, heartbeat under the wool, steady where mine isn't. "Don't turn this into — whatever this is."
"What is it, June." His mouth is right at my jaw now, not touching, just close enough that I can smell cedar and rink ice and something underneath that's just him. "Say the word if you know it."
I don't have the word. That's the problem. My pulse is doing something traitorous under his fingers, which are still resting light against my throat like he's counting it on purpose, cataloguing every stutter for later use.
"You're disgusting," I say, and it comes out breathless instead of vicious, and I hate that more than I hate him.
"Your heart doesn't think so." His thumb presses once, right over the vein. "That's the part of you that doesn't lie to me."
"My heart's an idiot."
"Runs in the family, apparently." He tips his head, and now his mouth is at the shell of my ear, and the whole box goes small and hot despite the ice six feet down. "Your father borrowed against a barn he didn't own. You signed a marriage contract in a penalty box to save a barn you don't want. Somebody in this family's got a type."
"Shut up."
"Make me."
I grab a fistful of his collar to shove him back and he doesn't move an inch — just lets me hold on, lets me feel exactly how much stronger he is doing absolutely nothing, and something low in my stomach flips over that has no business flipping over right now. His knee shifts, slides between mine on the bench, and the wool of his slacks drags against the inside of my leg, and I stop breathing for one full second.
"Torin."
"That's the first time you've said my name since the contract." He says it low, almost pleased with himself, and his free hand slides up from my collarbone into my hair, not gentle, tilting my head back until the fluorescent light overhead is all I can see. "Say it again."
"Get. Off."
"Wrong words."
His mouth drops to my throat — not a kiss, just the scrape of stubble, just breath, just enough to feel his lips shape words against my pulse. "Here's the part you don't have yet. That chip doesn't call me if you run. It calls a man named Kessler in Erie who's been sitting on your father's paper since before you had a driver's license. You run, June, Kessler finds out where you sleep before I do."
My whole body goes rigid, and he feels it — of course he feels it, his mouth is right there against my throat — and he pulls back just far enough to watch my face do the thing it's doing, the thing I can't stop it from doing.
"Kessler," I say, and the name tastes like something I swallowed wrong.
"You know him."
"I know the name people whispered at the funeral like it was a bad smell."
A speaker overhead pops, feedback screeching once through the tunnel, and a voice starts counting down the press conference — fifteen minutes — and the box seems to shrink another size around us. His hand is still in my hair. His knee is still between mine. And I still haven't pushed him off, not really, not with any force that would actually move a man his size, and we both know it.
"Fifteen minutes," he says, quiet now, almost gentle, which is somehow worse than the cruelty. "I can tell them the marriage is real. Or I can tell them Kessler's name in front of every camera in that room and watch what it does to the bond price by the third period."
"You wouldn't."
"I would. But I'd rather not." His thumb drags once along my jaw, slow, deliberate, and my breath catches loud enough that he smiles — small, wrecked, not kind. "Tell me why I shouldn't, June. Give me one reason that isn't the contract."
I open my mouth to say something that isn't the truth, and nothing comes out at all, because his forehead is dropping to mine now, because his hand has gone still and warm at the back of my neck, because every single nerve under my skin is leaning toward him even while my mouth is still shaping the word no.
"That's what I thought," he says, so close his lips brush mine on the words, not a kiss, not yet, just close enough to steal the air out of the box entirely.
The PA clicks. Ten minutes.
I don't move away.