Chapter 3 · Cut the Power

Chapter 3: Cut the Power

"Say it." His teeth stayed at my pulse, not biting, just resting there like a promise he hadn't decided to keep. "One number, June. That's all I'm asking."

I didn't answer. I couldn't, not with my cheek bleeding on the inside and his knee wedged so far between my thighs that the silk had nowhere left to go. My wrists burned where his belt cut into them behind my back. The door was still between us and the hallway, but I could hear something now — boots, more than one pair, moving fast on marble.

"Someone's coming," I said. My voice came out wrecked, a year of silence cracking right down the middle.

Luca's head lifted off my throat. For one second he looked almost amused. "First words in a year, and they're a warning. Cute."

"Luca —"

"Don't." He pressed two fingers flat against my sternum, right where my heart was trying to climb out of my chest. "You talk when I tell you what to say."

The pounding hit the outer door — not a knock, a ram. Metal shrieking against the frame. My stomach dropped straight through the floor.

"That's my father," I said. "He doesn't send men to rescue anyone. He sends them to clean up."

Luca's jaw tightened. He was already reaching past me for the blank rider still crumpled against my hip, the one with my half-signature smeared where his thumb had dragged it. "Then we give him something he can't clean."

"What are you —"

He shoved the paper against my bound hands. "Finish it. Sign the rider. Right now, with your hands like that, however you can."

"I can't hold a pen, you tied —"

"Then use your mouth." His voice dropped, flat and ugly and completely serious. "You become my wife in full in the next ten seconds, or my men open that door to a hostage situation instead of a marriage. Pick, June."

I stared at him. At the pen he was holding an inch from my lips. At the door bucking again in its frame, hinges screaming.

"You'd let them think I'm your prisoner," I said, "just to watch me sign with my teeth."

"I'd let them think whatever keeps a federal badge from putting a bullet in my ceiling." He leaned in, breath hot against my ear. "Your father's crew isn't here for you. They're here for the keycard in my coat and a body on the carpet. Guess whose."

That landed. My pulse kicked so hard I felt it in my ears.

"Sign," he said again, softer now, almost gentle, which was worse. "Marry me on paper in the next breath, and I have a legal reason to keep a dead silent woman locked in my suite. Don't, and I have to explain a corpse."

I took the pen between my teeth. My hands, twisted behind my back, couldn't help at all — he had to guide the paper against the wall himself, flattening it with his palm an inch from my face while I scratched a crooked line across the signature block. Ink smeared my lip. I tasted metal and cheap ballpoint plastic.

The ink was still on my lip. His hand didn't leave the page.

"You smeared the line on purpose," he said.

"I smeared it because my hand doesn't belong to a signature block," I said. "Don't narrate it into obedience."

"Then give me a cleaner no, or a cleaner yes. The countdown is not going to pick for you."

"Luca." I swallowed metal and ballpoint. "Ask me again when the pen is off my mouth."

"Good girl," he murmured, and something in my chest flipped over even as I hated him for saying it.

The door took another hit. Wood splintered at the frame.

Luca swore, grabbed my shoulder, and hauled me off the wall. "Lights," he snapped at no one — at the room itself — and crossed to a panel I hadn't noticed before, half-hidden behind a drape. He wrenched it open and killed the breaker with one hard pull. The suite went black except for the hallway strip under the door.

"If it's dark," I said, "they'll think something's already wrong in here."

"Something is wrong in here." He yanked the heavy drapes shut over the window, plunging us deeper into shadow, then came back for me, belt still looped tight at my wrists. "They see light, they see a hostage scene lit up for a camera. They see dark, they slow down. That's five more seconds I need."

"Five seconds for what?"

He didn't answer with words. He pulled me down onto the carpet — the thick wool one in front of the steel recording cabinet, the one I'd been staring at for twenty minutes trying not to think about what it held — and came down over me, knee driving my legs apart again before I even hit the floor.

"Luca, they're going to break through any second —"

"Then we give them a scene they can't arrest." His hand found the torn gap in my robe, where the silk had already slid off my hip, and dragged it the rest of the way open, baring skin from collarbone to thigh. Cool air hit me and I gasped. "Married couple on the floor. Not a hostage. Not a crime scene. Just a husband who can't keep his hands off his wife."

"That's insane —"

"It's legal." His mouth dropped to my collarbone, teeth scraping, and I felt the growl under it more than heard it. "Everything I'm about to do to you is completely, perfectly legal, June. That's the whole point of the paper you just signed with your teeth."

His hand slid down my ribs, my stomach, lower, rough and sure, like he already knew exactly where I'd fight him and where I wouldn't. I twisted under him — not away, not really, and some traitor part of my body arched up to meet his palm before my brain caught up and hated myself for it.

"Say the number," he said against my skin, one last time, voice gone ragged. "Last chance before this gets a lot harder to stop."

I bit down on my ruined cheek instead of answering. My silence was the only thing I had left that was still mine.

The outer door cracked — not broken yet, but close, wood screaming against the deadbolt — and somewhere past it a man's voice barked an order I recognized, flat and cold, my father's voice twisted into someone else's command. "Breach on three. Crowe first. Leave the girl."

Leave the girl. Like I wasn't even the reason they were here.

Luca's whole body went still above me for half a second, calculating, and then his hips pressed down harder, pinning me flush to the wool, his ragged breath scalding the curve of my hip through what was left of my robe. The steel cabinet rattled against the back of my skull from the force of it, cold metal biting into my hair.

Bootsteps thundered up to the door, right outside, close enough I could hear boot soles squeak on marble.

"Three," the voice said.

Luca's teeth found my throat again, right over the pulse, and this time I felt him bite down.