Chapter 3 · Three Tides Down

"Move." Marco's hand closed over my wrist before the elevator gate finished shuddering open. "Cold room. Now." "I'm not going anywhere with you." I yanked back. My blouse gaped where he'd undone it, cold air biting straight through to skin. "You already got your show, Bell. Buttons, hair, pulse. You want an encore?" "I want the second chip." He didn't let go. "And you want the ice house not seized at dawn. So walk." He hauled me through a steel This was captivity: no way out, touch-her-and-die if the rival reached the glass, body betrayal soaking my skin while dark mafia heat and sensory drag held the vault. door that breathed fog when it opened, and the freight noise died behind us — replaced by a hum, low and mechanical, and a cold that hit like a slap. Racks of tuna hung in rows, frost furring their tails white. My breath came out in a cloud. "Fourteen tides," he said, checking a gauge on the wall like we were discussing weather. "Three down already. You're doing math in your head right now, aren't you. Counting how many left before you get your booth back." "Twenty-eight." My teeth wanted to chatter. I didn't let them. "I can count, Bell. I ran that pier's books for six years while my husband ran his other business behind my back. I know how to count." "Your husband." He said it soft, almost gentle, which was worse than if he'd sneered it. "Smuggler's widow. That's what the floor called you an hour ago. In front of forty buyers." "Say it again." My voice cracked but I held his eyes. "Go on. See if it still works on me the third time." "It's not working on you." He stepped closer, and the cold coming off the racks felt like nothing next to the heat coming off him. "That's the problem. You're standing here shaking and it's not the cold room doing it." "Don't." I put a hand flat on his chest — meant to shove, ended up just resting there, feeling his heart go steady and slow under my palm while mine slammed against my ribs like it wanted out. "Don't tell me what my body's doing." "I don't have to tell you." His hand came up, thumb dragging along my jaw, tilting my face up into the freezer light. "You can feel it yourself." He backed me into the rack frame, cold steel biting through my blouse, and put his mouth an inch from my ear — the same inch from last night, the same inch that had already ruined me once tonight. "Second chip," he said. "Older serial number. I haven't told you where it lives. You want to know why?" "Because you're a liar with a flashlight and a badge you probably bought." My hands found his coat lapels, gripping, and I couldn't have said if I was pulling him closer or holding him off. "Tell me or get off me." "Because the day I tell you" — his mouth grazed the shell of my ear, and my whole spine lit up like a struck match — "is the day you stop needing me in this room. And I like you needing me in this room, Lila." "I don't need you." It came out wrecked. Not the voice I meant to use. "Say that again with your hips not doing that." I froze. His knee had wedged between mine somewhere in the last ten seconds without my permission, my body apparently, and I hadn't noticed until he named it. Heat crawled up my throat, humiliating and undeniable, my hips already tilting a fraction toward the pressure like they had their own contract with him. "Get your knee off me." "Make me." His hand slid to my waist, thumb finding bare skin where the blouse had come open, and I sucked in a breath that had no business sounding the way it sounded. "You're not fighting, Lila. You're arguing. Different thing." "I hate you." "Sure." His mouth moved along my jaw, not kissing, just breathing there, hot against the cold, and my head tipped back against the rack frame on its own, exposing my throat like an offering I hadn't agreed to make. "Hate me quieter, then. Your voice is shaking too much to sell it." His hand slid lower, over the curve of my hip, pulling me flush against him so there was no pretending anymore, no room between us for me to lie to myself in. I felt exactly how much he wanted this, and worse, I felt my own body answer it — a slow wet ache low in my belly that had nothing to do with the chip, the pier, or the fourteen tides, and everything to do with the weight of him pressed against me in the freezer light. "Marco—" "First time you've used my name." His voice had gone rough at the edges. He caught my jaw again, tilted it, and his mouth hovered a breath from mine, close enough that I could taste the coffee and salt on his exhale. "Say it again." "No." But my hands had fisted tighter in his coat instead of shoving him away, and my hips had gone still against his knee in a way that wasn't retreat — it was want, plain and traitorous, and we both knew it. "Your mouth says no." His thumb dragged over my bottom lip, slow, deliberate, like he was memorizing the shape of my refusal. "Everything else in you is telling me something different." "Don't you dare—" His mouth crashed down over mine before the sentence finished, and for one shattering second I kissed him back — hard, furious, my fingers dragging him closer instead of pushing him off — before some last scrap of sense clawed its way up through the heat and I wrenched my face sideways, gasping against his jaw instead of his mouth. "Stop," I said. It came out as a whisper, not an order. My whole body was still curved into his, hips still tilted toward that knee, breath still sawing out of me like I'd run a mile. "Marco, stop—" His hand tightened on my hip instead of letting go. "The mark is on the blotter. Look at me."