Chapter 4 · On the Razor Hinge

Chapter 4: On the Razor Hinge

"Say the number, June."

The steel cabinet bit into the back of my skull, cold enough to make my eyes water, and Luca Crowe's palm stayed flat against my hip like he'd already signed for the bone underneath it. My skirt was shoved to my waist. His belt hung open, leather slapping my thigh every time his weight shifted between my knees.

I didn't answer. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper and shook my head instead.

"No?" His voice dropped low, gravel dragged over stone. "A year of nothing out of that mouth, and you pick now to go stubborn on me."

Something cracked against the outer door. Not a knock. A suppressed round, flat and muffled through the wood, then two more, fast. My father's men. Or his. I couldn't tell whose boots were pounding the hall, and for one second neither of us moved, both of us listening to men hunt each other three walls away while his hips stayed locked against mine.

Luca didn't even turn his head.

"Ignore that," he said, like it was weather. "My guys have it."

"You're not even—" My throat closed on the rest of it. A year of silence doesn't open on command, not even with a gunfight on the other side of a door. I grabbed his wrist, nails digging four crescents into his skin, and shoved. He didn't move an inch.

He caught my jaw instead, thumb pressing into the hinge of it, tilting my face up like he was reading a combination he already owned.

"You scream for me," he said, "or you give me the number. Pick one, little bride. I'm not a patient man on a good day, and today somebody's shooting up my building."

The gunfire kept going, dull and rhythmic, hammering through the wall. My pulse matched it beat for beat. Under me the carpet smelled like gun oil and cedar — his cedar, his leather, a scent invasion so total I couldn't find my own skin underneath it anymore. His free hand slid up and covered my mouth, not rough, just final, cutting off even the air I would've used to lie to him. Sensory deprivation, deliberate, like he wanted me alone in my own head with nothing but his weight and his voice.

"Say it," he murmured against my ear, softer now, which was worse. "One number. Four digits. I'll stop asking you to scream and I'll just make you."

I sank my teeth into his jaw instead. Not a kiss. A bite, hard, along the stubbled line of bone, and he hissed — the first sound I'd ever pulled out of him that wasn't calculated — and froze an inch short of the place neither of us could walk back from.

"Jesus." He touched his jaw. No blood, barely. He looked down at me with something that wasn't anger. Worse. Want, sharpened into a blade. "You want to play rough. Fine. We play rough."

The outer door took another hit, wood splintering somewhere down the corridor, a man shouting a word I couldn't catch over the blood roaring in my ears. Then nothing. Then shouting again, closer, boots pounding the marble like a second heartbeat under mine.

"They're in the building," I tried to say — nothing came out, just breath, panic clawing up my throat while Luca smiled, slow and awful, like chaos turned him on more than it scared him.

"They're in my hallway," he corrected, reaching past my head into the drawer built under the cabinet. He came back with the fountain pen from the signing table, heavy, gold-nibbed, the same one my father had pressed into my hand three days ago. He closed my fingers around it, hard enough to bruise, and I felt his grip leave a fresh finger-bruise print right over the old one.

"Write it," he said. "Or don't. But know this — the second that door gives, whoever walks through sees exactly what we're doing. So either you give me four digits and this ends where I decide, or we finish with an audience."

"You wouldn't," I breathed, except I wasn't sure, and he knew I wasn't sure, and that uncertainty was its own kind of leash.

"Try me." His hand moved from my mouth to the collar of my blouse and pulled, one clean motion, and I heard the torn cloth before I felt the cold air hit my collarbone. He didn't look away from my face while he did it. That was the part that scared me — not the strength, the patience behind it, like he had all night and the gunfire was just background noise to him.

Another round of suppressed fire cracked through the wall, closer now, close enough that plaster dust sifted down from the ceiling and settled on his shoulder like snow. He brushed it off without breaking eye contact with me.

"Men are dying for this number," I said, finding a scrap of voice I didn't know I still had.

"Men are always dying for something," he said. "Tonight it's you."

His hips pressed forward, slow, deliberate, and I felt the blunt, scalding heat of him right against the last thin layer still between us. Not through it. Just there. Promising. My whole body locked, thighs trembling against his, and I hated how much of that trembling wasn't fear.

"Give me the number," he said against my ear, voice gone to gravel and smoke, "or I ruin you right now, number or not. Your choice which one it is."

A whole year of silence sat behind my teeth, heavier than anything I'd carried since the hospital room, since my mother's hand going slack in mine. Four digits. That's all it would take to make the gunfire outside stop mattering, to make him stop, to make this end on my terms instead of his. Four digits, and I'd belong to him in every way that wasn't on paper yet.

Something cracked loose in my chest. Something that had been locked shut for three hundred and some days.

He held there against me, the last inch, not yet inside.

My lips parted.

"Not yet."