"Let go of me." I keep my voice flat, because if it cracks even once, eleven thousand empty seats might as well be full.
Torin doesn't let go. His hand stays locked around my wrist, thumb pressed dead center on my pulse like he's clocking it for a file somewhere. In his other hand, the chip sits between two fingers — small, black, worth more than my father made in a decade.
"One call," he says. "That's all this takes. I connect it to the collector your dad owes, and by morning they know which door to knock on."
"You wouldn't."
"I deed arenas to pension funds for fun, June. Don't tell me what I wouldn't do."
He hauls me out of the box before I can argue, hand still locked on me, and I don't fight him in front of the one working camera in the concourse. Nobody's captioning me *desperate*.
The tunnel is narrower than I remember. Cinderblock sweats cold. He walks past the locker room, past the equipment cage, down a service stair I didn't know existed, until the air turns thin and metallic, tasting like oil and standing water.
"Where are we going?"
"Somewhere the mics aren't."
The pump room door groans on a hinge nobody's oiled since the building had a budget. It's a different cold in here — ice-plant cold, the kind that gets into your collarbone and stays. Compressors hum along one wall. Pipes thick as my thigh run floor to ceiling, frost bearding every joint. No window. One door, and we're both on the wrong side of it.
"You brought me to a room with no way out to threaten me better?"
"I brought you here because it's the only room they haven't bugged." Flat, like it's supposed to calm me down. It doesn't. "Collectors are two floors up right now, going through the ledger with your GM. Skip one game — one — and that default paperwork disappears right behind you."
"I'm not skipping."
"Then you're staying." He steps in. The compressor noise eats whatever space was left between us. "Staying means you're mine for seven games, on paper and off it. That's the clause you signed. I'm collecting."
The pipe at my back is freezing through my coat. He isn't cold at all. That's the whole problem with Torin Black — he runs hot in a building built to freeze people, and standing this close to him feels like standing next to a fire you already know is going to take your hand off, and doing it anyway.
"You don't get to collect a person."
"Watch me."
His hand leaves my wrist. Goes to my collar instead, two fingers hooking the fabric, and I feel the seam give before I hear it — cloth stretched right to the edge, then gone. The air in here is machine-thinned, and my chest can't pull a full breath of it, and I honestly don't know anymore how much of that is the room and how much is him.
"Torin—"
"You keep saying my name like it's a red light." His mouth is close enough that I feel the words land on my jaw before I hear them. "It isn't one. You signed that away in the box."
His hand slides up my throat, thumb finding the same spot he already marked on my wrist. Cedar and cold metal and ozone off the compressors — his smell crowds out the machine oil, crowds out everything that isn't him, and I hate how fast that happens.
"If I scream—"
"Nobody's close enough to hear it." A fact, not a threat, which is worse. "I checked before I brought you down here."
My spine's flat against the pipe, frost soaking through wool, his shoulders a wall with no room to duck around. His knee finds the gap between mine before I can close it. The collar finally tears, an inch of skin hitting air colder than anything I've felt in my life. His hand doesn't stop there. It drags the ruined fabric off one shoulder, then the other, until there's nothing left covering me but the shadow he's throwing.
"Say the word," he says against my ear, low, not a question at all, "and I stop. Say nothing, and I finish what that contract already started."
I can feel exactly where this is going — hips flush to mine, nothing left between us but heat and the cold coming off the pipes, my whole body arguing with every word my mouth is trying to build.
"Torin, don't—"
His mouth stops half an inch from mine. One hand drags down, slow, past my hip, and I feel him line himself up against me, nothing between us now but a fraction of an inch and every bad decision that got me into this box in the first place. Not inside. Not yet. Just the blunt, unbearable pressure of him right there, waiting, like he wants me to feel exactly how close *not yet* actually is.
"Last chance," he says, voice wrecked around the edges now too, like this is costing him something he didn't plan on spending. "Beg me to stop."
I don't answer. I can't. There's maybe five seconds between where he is and where he isn't yet, his whole body a wall of heat pinning mine to freezing metal, and neither of us moves — not him forward, not me away.
"Or," he says, "stop lying about wanting me to."
The tip of him presses harder against the entrance, patient, deliberate, like he's got all night and I've got none. My hands are fisted in his shirt and I don't remember putting them there. My mouth opens to say his name again and nothing comes out at all — no red light, no green one, just the two of us frozen at the exact point of no return, and somewhere two floors up, a collector is closing a ledger that has both our names in it.