Chapter 4

He moved so fast I didn't have time to gasp.

One second I was standing in the stairwell doorway, papers scattered at my feet, staring up at Silas Kade. The next, his hand was around my wrist—not rough, not gentle, just absolute—and we were moving sideways down the hall, away from the recording room, away from Liam's easy laugh still echoing in my skull.

A door. He found it without looking, the way people find things they've already mapped. A storage closet, dark and close, smelling of industrial cleaner and cardboard. He pulled me inside and pressed the door shut behind us with a soft, final click.

The darkness was total.

I could feel the heat of him in front of me, close enough that my next breath pulled in cedar and smoke. My back was against a metal shelving unit, something hard digging into my shoulder blade, and I was shaking—not from cold, not from fear exactly, but from the aftershock of what I'd just seen. Liam's hand under her skirt. Her voice reading his words back to him like a trophy. *Just a few more months until the funding clears, and I'm dumping that boring bitch.*

The shaking wouldn't stop.

Silas's hand came up in the dark. Found my jaw. Not cupping it—just holding it still, two fingers and a thumb, the same clinical steadiness as the night in the rain when he'd pressed his fingertips to my pulse.

"Breathe," he said. Low. Not a comfort. An instruction.

I breathed.

The shaking slowed.

"You knew," I said. My voice came out barely above a whisper, but it was steady now. "You already knew about him."

A beat of silence. Outside the door, somewhere down the hall, I heard a door open and close. Footsteps. Then nothing.

"Liam has been courting my firm for four months," Silas said. "He needs our capital to close his next funding round. Men who need things talk too much." A pause. "He told one of my associates he was planning to liquidate a joint asset once the deal cleared. He used the word 'finally.'"

Joint asset.

The apartment. My savings. Three years of careful, quiet accumulation, now sitting in a deed with his name on it, waiting to be liquidated the moment he didn't need the cover of a stable marriage anymore.

*Just a few more months.*

The math assembled itself in the dark with horrible clarity. The funding timeline. The video. *I gag every time.* All of it patient and deliberate, a man waiting out a clock while I stood in the kitchen every morning making coffee and calling it a life.

"How long?" I asked.

"Long enough."

I closed my eyes. It didn't change anything—the dark was already total—but I needed the gesture, needed to close something.

"What do you want?" I said.

His hand dropped from my jaw.

I heard him shift. Felt the air change the way it does when someone moves closer, when the space between two bodies compresses to something that has its own specific weight.

"I want the deal dead," he said. "I want Liam Calloway to walk into a room full of investors with nothing. No capital, no credibility, no narrative." A pause. "I can do that. I have everything I need to do that. What I'm missing is standing right in front of me."

"Me."

"You." His voice didn't change register. "Your name is on the deed. On the joint accounts. On two years of financial records that tell a very specific story about where his money actually came from. You give me access to that, you cooperate with what comes next, and I will hand you enough to bury him so deep he never climbs back out."

The shelving unit pressed into my spine. I thought about the vanilla perfume soaked into the car seat. I thought about the duvet pulled over his head, the muffled *God, you are exhausting.* I thought about standing in the rain at two in the morning with nowhere to go, tied by paperwork to a man who'd been running out the clock on me.

"And what do I owe you for that?" I asked.

The silence stretched one second past comfortable.

"Yourself," he said. Simple. Like it was already settled.

I should have laughed. I should have pushed past him and walked out of the closet and down the stairs and out of the building and kept walking until I'd put enough distance between myself and every man in this story to think clearly.

I nodded.

I felt him register it—some small shift in the air, a stillness that wasn't stillness but decision.

Then his head dipped, and I felt his mouth—not on my lips, not anywhere obvious. His teeth found the soft place just behind my ear, the curve where jaw meets neck, the spot that has no name because no one had ever thought to learn it. Liam certainly hadn't. He'd never been curious enough.

Silas was curious.

He bit down. Lightly. Just enough.

The sound that came out of me was not a sound I recognized. Small and involuntary and humiliating in its honesty, a noise that bypassed every careful thing I'd built around myself in two years of slow erosion and came straight from somewhere undefended.

He didn't move away. He stayed exactly there, his breath warm against my skin, and I felt his mouth curve—not a smile, just the ghost of one, pressed against my pulse.

"Tears are useless, Ivy." His voice was very quiet. Almost gentle. Which made it worse. "Stop crying over a dead man, and let me show you how to bury him."

I hadn't realized I was crying until he said it. Just one track, silent, running down my cheek in the dark. I reached up and pressed the back of my hand against it.

He stepped back. The air between us returned to something breathable.

"Go back in there," he said. "Act normal. You're good at that."

He opened the door.

The hallway light hit me like a verdict.

---

I found a bathroom first. Ran cold water over my wrists until my hands stopped shaking, then looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment. My mascara was intact. My expression had settled back into the composed, unremarkable face I'd been wearing for two years.

Almost.

I pulled my collar up before I walked back to Liam's recording room. Knocked twice, the way I always did.

"Hey." Liam looked up from his phone. Chloe was gone—just him now, feet up on the desk, the picture of ease. "Thought you left."

"I had contracts to drop off." I held up the folder. I'd collected the papers from the stairwell landing on my way back, every page, no evidence left behind. "Your signature's needed on the third page."

He reached for it without getting up, barely glancing at it, scrawling his name with the same careless efficiency he applied to everything that didn't have an audience.

"You okay?" he said, not really asking. His eyes were already drifting back to his phone.

"Fine."

He looked up then. Just for a second. Routine check, the kind you do with furniture—confirming it's still where you left it, still serving its purpose, still not requiring your attention.

But then his gaze snagged.

It moved to my collar. To the place where my hand had been, where I'd thought the fabric was high enough, where the mark Silas's mouth had left was apparently not as hidden as I'd believed.

Liam went very still.

His eyes came back to mine, and I watched something move through them—not guilt, not recognition, not the self-awareness of a man who had any right to feel either. Something older and uglier than that. Something territorial.

"What's on your neck?" he said.

The folder sat between us on the desk. His signature drying on the third page.

I held his gaze and said nothing.

And let him wonder.