"Say the name, Ira." Calder's thumb pressed under my jaw, tipping my head back against the cold steel wall. "Or I start cutting and we find out together."
"You cut blind, you kill the leverage." My voice cracked on the last word. Hated that. "The chip's rigged to a dead-man loop. Slice wrong, it fires early. Ledger's out in ten minutes instead of six hours."
"Then don't make me guess."
"Vantage-7." I spit it out fast, like it burned my mouth on the way. "Subdermal. Left side, under the ribs, not the collarbone. Your guy already checked the wrong spot."
Something shifted in his face. Not relief. Recalculation.
"Left side," he said, and his hand left my jaw.
It didn't go far. It went lower — flat palm, fingers spread, dragging down the side of my throat, over the ridge of my collarbone, and I felt every knuckle drag through the thin cotton of my shirt like he was reading me in braille. My breath snagged. I hated that too.
"Don't," I said.
"Don't what." Not a question. His hand kept going, over my ribs, pressing, hunting for a hard little bump under skin that shouldn't be there. "You want me guessing with a scalpel instead?"
"I want you to keep your hands where I can see them."
"They're exactly where I can see them." His mouth came close enough that I felt the words more than heard them, warm against my temple, and under that — cedar, gun oil, river damp off his jacket, a smell with no business making my knees go soft in a room built to keep me from breathing. "Where's the scar."
"There isn't one. Clean insert. You won't find it by feel."
"Watch me."
His fingers hooked the hem of my shirt and dragged it up, slow, deliberate, cold air hitting skin that hadn't seen daylight since the dock. I grabbed his wrist. Might as well have grabbed a girder.
"Calder."
"Ira." He said my name back like a mockery of comfort, and kept pulling until fabric bunched under my arms and his palm flattened against my ribs, thumb tracing bone like he could feel a barcode through skin. "Breathe out."
"Why."
"Because if you don't, you're going to pass out before I find it, and then I'm cutting anyway."
I breathed out. My whole body betrayed me on the exhale — shoulders dropping into the wall, spine curving toward his hand instead of away from it, like something in me had already decided he was safer than the six-hour clock. I hated my own ribs for that.
His fingers found the faint raised seam low on my side and stopped. Pressed. Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough I felt it in my teeth.
"There you are," he said, quiet, almost gentle, which was worse than shouting.
"Congratulations. Now let go."
He didn't. His other hand slid into my hair at the base of my skull, tilting my face up to his, and this close I could see the exact shade his eyes went — not soft, never soft, but slower, like he'd stopped running numbers for one second and started running me instead.
"You strapped a bomb to your own ribs," he said, "and walked it into my house."
"You bolted the hatch on a woman holding your dock's whole future. We're even on stupid."
His thumb dragged along my jaw, slow, and my pulse jumped hard enough I was sure he felt it against his palm. His gaze dropped to my mouth and stayed there a beat too long, and my stomach did something ugly and warm and completely unwelcome.
"Say it again," he said. "That you want my hands off you."
I opened my mouth. What came out was smaller than I wanted. "Get off me."
"Your mouth says that." His forehead dropped to touch mine, breath hot, ragged at the edges in a way that hadn't been there a minute ago. "Your neck's telling me something else. Pulse doesn't lie the way you do, Ira."
"Don't flatter yourself."
"I'm not flattering anyone. I'm reading a body I just spent five minutes on." His hand slid from my ribs to my hip, fingers pressing in hard enough to leave marks, dragging me half a step closer until there was no air left between us, only heat and damp river-cold jacket and the thud of his heart under my palm — I hadn't noticed my own hand climbing his chest until it was already there. "You're shaking."
"It's cold in here."
"It's ninety degrees in here. Vents don't run cold, sweetheart. I welded that room myself."
My fingers curled into his shirt before I told them to. His mouth was an inch from mine, close enough that I could taste cedar and salt on his breath, and every rational, ledger-counting part of my brain screamed at me to shove him back into the steel wall he'd bolted me against — and my hips tipped toward him instead, an inch, involuntary, like gravity had rearranged itself around this one man's hands.
"No," I said.
His grip on my hip tightened, thumb pressing bruises into skin through denim, and he didn't move away — he leaned in, lips ghosting the corner of my mouth, not quite a kiss, close enough to steal the word right out of my throat.
"Say it like you mean it," he murmured, "and I'll stop."
"I mean it." It came out on a breath instead of a warning, and his jaw flexed like he heard exactly how much it wasn't one.
"Try again."
I didn't get the second word out. My spine arched into his hand instead, traitor that it was, and his low sound against my mouth wasn't a laugh — it was hunger finding the crack in my no.