Chapter 5 · She Closes the Door

"Get out." I say it before Luca does, my hand already flat on the door, shoving it shut in Marco's face.

He doesn't even flinch. Just braces his palm against the wood from the hallway side, phone still up, still recording. "Boss, the stream's at two hundred thousand and climbing. People want a statement."

"They'll get one when I decide they get one." Luca's voice comes from behind me, low, flat, the kind of calm that means he's about three seconds from breaking something. "Now move your hand, Marco, before I move it for you."

Marco moves it. I throw the bolt.

The click of it lands loud in the sudden quiet. My back's still against the door, chest going up and down too fast, and somewhere out there two hundred thousand strangers just watched Luca Voss rip a marriage contract in half with my body still warm off his lap.

He's standing by the desk now, jacket open, the torn halves of the paper still in his fist like he forgot he's holding them.

"You want to explain that?" I ask.

"I already did."

"You said I'm not in the price." My voice cracks on the word *price* and I hate it. "In front of your whole family. On camera."

"That's the part you're stuck on." He drops the pieces on the desk like they're nothing. "Not that half your city just found out the ledger's fake. Not that Costa's people are probably rewinding that clip right now trying to figure out how much you actually know."

"I know I signed a year to keep my brother breathing." I push off the door, and it feels good to move, to close the distance instead of standing pinned to wood. "And you just told two hundred thousand people I'm not part of that deal anymore. So which is it, Luca? Am I your wife or your accountant?"

"Neither." He says it like it costs him nothing, and that's what gets me, that flat, easy nothing. "You're my CFO. Starting tonight."

I laugh. It comes out wrong, too sharp. "You don't get to promote me out of a hostage situation."

"I get to do whatever keeps you alive." And there it is — his voice drops, loses the boardroom edge, goes somewhere rougher. "That ledger's got Costa's name bleeding out of every fake line you found. The second he knows you're the one who read it, the contract doesn't protect you. A title does. Mine."

"So this is still about control."

"This is about you not ending up in a trunk, Nora."

The way he says my name — not *Ms. Vale*, not *bookkeeper* — stops me for a second. He crosses the room while I'm still catching up to it, and suddenly there's no desk between us, no torn contract, just him, too close, smelling like whiskey and gun oil and something warmer underneath that I refuse to name.

"Stay as my bookkeeper," he says. "Or walk out that door and I can't promise what's waiting for your brother tomorrow."

"That's not a choice. That's a leash."

"Call it whatever helps you sleep."

I shove his chest — not hard, not enough to move a man his size, but enough to make a point — and my palm stays there a half second too long, feeling his heart going faster than his voice lets on. His hand comes up, wraps around my wrist, not gripping, just holding, like he's checking if I'll pull away first.

I don't.

"You tore up a wedding contract on livestream," I say, quieter now, because yelling isn't landing and this might. "You want to tell me that was strategy? Or did some part of you actually mean it?"

Something moves behind his eyes, quick, gone before I can name it. "Does it matter which?"

"It matters to me."

He steps in. Not fast — slow enough that I could stop it, slow enough that not stopping it is its own answer. The desk edge digs into the back of my thighs. His hand's still on my wrist, thumb dragging once over the pulse there like he's counting it.

"You read my books in four hours flat," he says, voice dropped to something meant only for this six inches of air between us. "Found four years of skimmed cash nobody else caught in a decade. You think I'd hand a woman like that back to Costa over a piece of paper?"

"So it wasn't strategy."

"Didn't say that either."

"Luca—"

His mouth is an inch from mine when the door shudders — not a knock, a fist, hard enough to rattle the bolt.

"Boss!" Marco again, and this time his voice has a crack in it that wasn't there before. "Boss, you need to open this door right now."

Luca doesn't move. Doesn't even turn his head. "I said I'll give a statement when I'm ready."

"It's not about the stream." A pause, and I feel the change in the air before the words even land. "It's her brother. They found him."

My whole body goes cold at once, wrist still caught in Luca's hand, his face gone still in a way I've never seen, and Marco's voice comes through the door one more time, lower now, like he doesn't want to be the one saying it.

"He's not answering. Nobody's answering."