Chapter 2 · The Dead-Signal Suite

Chapter 2: The Dead-Signal Suite

"Inside," Luca says, and the door seals behind us like a vault closing. Call the suite captivity. Call the shake in my hands body betrayal. This is dark mafia law with a sensory drag under it, and the street rule still pretends to be touch her and die.

The lock isn't a click. It's a thunk, deep in the frame, the kind of sound that means the latch is steel and the hinges are bolted to something that doesn't care about fire codes. My back hits the door a second later because he put me there, one hand flat on my sternum, not hard enough to bruise, hard enough to pin.

"Phone," he says.

I don't move. He reaches into my coat pocket himself, finds it, and drops it on the entry table face-down. No bars. No signal bars at all, not even the little X that means searching. Just dead glass.

"This whole floor's jammed," he says, like he's telling me the thermostat's broken. "Nothing in, nothing out. Your lawyer's going to think you stopped answering on purpose."

I look at the dead phone instead of him. That's a mistake. He tips my chin up with two fingers, barely any pressure, and somehow it feels like a hand around my throat.

"Look at me when I talk to you," he says. "Or don't. Doesn't matter. You're not talking anyway."

He knows. Of course he knows. My father sold that silence to him across a table an hour ago like it was a feature, not a wound.

His mouth comes down on mine before I can turn my face away, and it isn't a kiss so much as a hostile takeover — his hand fisting in my hair to hold the angle, his body crowding mine flat against the door so there's no room to even shrug a shoulder. I bite down. I feel his blood before I taste it, copper and warm, and for one half-second he goes still.

Then he laughs against my mouth, low, like I've confirmed something for him.

"There she is," he says.

He doesn't pull back. If anything he leans in harder, licking the cut I gave him into my own mouth, and my whole body does something humiliating — it softens, right where my brain is screaming at it not to. My fingers curl into the lapel of his jacket like I'm trying to push him off and I'm not pushing at all.

"Nothing to say?" he murmurs against my jaw, moving down to the hinge of it, teeth dragging slow. "Your father says you haven't spoken in a year. I think that's a lie. I think you're just waiting for the right question."

I keep my mouth shut. My heart is doing eighty in a forty.

His mouth stayed at the hinge of my jaw. The lock had already made its decision. Mine was late.

"A year of quiet," he said, "and the first room you spend a voice on is mine. Your father will hate that more than the contract."

"I didn't save it for you," I said. "I saved it because a dead promise was the only thing he couldn't notarize."

"Then spend it here. The door is shut. He is on the other side of the thunk. This is the cheap part."

"Nothing about your hand on my sternum is cheap."

"No." He didn't smile. "Say what you came through that door still owning."

"The recording. The cabinet. The four digits. Not your name, and not his campaign."

"You can keep the digits tonight," he said. "You don't get to pretend the lock surprised you. You watched me throw it."

"I watched you buy a silence and then ask it to perform."

"I'm asking you. Different man. Worse terms, if you want them said out loud." His thumb stayed under my collarbone, not climbing. "Tell me to take my hand off."

"Take it off and I will think about the door," I said. "Leave it and I will think about why I haven't used the year on anyone else."

"That's an answer."

"It's the only one you get before I remember how to be a coward again." I looked at the sealed frame, not at his mouth. "My father doesn't come through that door. Not for a photo, not for a correction, not to put my hand on a pen. Say you understand that, or take the contract back to the table."

"I understand it," Luca said. "He sold the hour. He doesn't get the room it happens in."

"Again, without the notary voice."

"He doesn't get the room." The words were quieter, and they landed. "Your turn. Say my name like it isn't a line item."

"Luca." I hated the fit of it. "The door stays shut. That is the vow. Don't ask me for a softer one while your jacket is still in my fist."

He straightens, and the air between us changes — colder, business again, except his hand is still flat against my ribs like he's deciding whether to count them.

"The locker number," he says. "You give me that, and I unlock the door myself. You walk back to your father's office tonight. Try it."

I don't answer. I don't even blink in a way that could be mistaken for an answer.

"Fine." He reaches into his jacket and pulls out folded paper, snapping it open with one hand — a contract rider, blank lines where names should be, blank lines where numbers should be. He presses it flat against my chest, his palm over the paper, over me, like he's checking a pulse through it. "Marriage addendum. Still blank. I was going to let you read it before you signed anything else tonight. Change of plan."

His other hand goes to his own belt.

The sound of the buckle coming loose is small and precise, and it lands louder than anything my father said at that table. I understand exactly what it's for half a second before he uses it — not on himself, on me, looping it once around my wrists and pulling them behind my back in a single motion that's almost gentle, almost careful, which is somehow worse than if he'd been rough about it.

"Say the number," he says, voice dropping, right against my ear now, "and this comes off. All of it. The belt, the paper, my hands. You walk out that door and I never touch you again."

I shake my head.

"Wrong answer," he says, almost fond about it, like I'm a child who keeps reaching for the stove.

He slides the blank rider up so it's trapped between the door and my spine, crumpling under my bound wrists, and goes back to my throat like he never left — except there's nothing careful in it now. His mouth finds the long line of my neck and his teeth scrape down, slow, deliberate, right over the vein that's hammering so hard I can feel it in my own ears. Not a bite yet. The threat of one. A test, to see what sound I'll make.

I don't make one. I bite down on the inside of my own cheek instead and taste blood that's mine this time.

His knee comes up between my legs, heavy, forcing my thighs apart through the silk, and the robe he loosened in the hallway finally gives — the sash sliding free, the fabric falling open at the hip, bare skin meeting the cool recycled air of a room with no windows and no signal and no way for anyone to come looking for me.

His hand slides along that newly bare thigh, slow, almost reverent, fingers spreading like he's measuring something, and his breath goes rough against my throat.

"Last chance before I stop asking nicely," he says, teeth still at my pulse, knee still wedged between my knees, his hand climbing higher along skin that has no business trembling the way it does. "Give me the number, June."

I feel his teeth press — not bite, press — right over the vein, and his knee shoves my robe the rest of the way open against my hip.