He sets the pad of his thumb at the hinge of my jaw, just under my ear, and drags it slowly down the line of my throat—away from the pulse, not toward it, reading me the way he reads a fiber line—until he stops in the hollow of my collarbone, right where his cross pendant would rest if it hung from my neck instead of his.
His touch is shocking. It isn't cold. His thumb is scorching hot. The pressure is calibrated—firm enough to claim the territory, gentle enough not to bruise. He keeps his hand at the base of my throat, thumb resting in the hollow of my collarbone, the heat radiating into my skin like a registered signal.
He closes his eyes for a fraction of a second. A muscle feathers in his cheek.
"No," he says. His voice scrapes out. "You belong to me now."
I stare at him. The possessive force of his statement paralyzes me. He doesn't say it like a threat. He says it like an absolute law of the universe. Gravity exists. Water is wet. Imani belongs to Vincenzo.
Before I can form a single coherent response, a shrill alarm rips through the dead air of the vault.
I flinch violently, slamming my back against the terminal. He drops his hand from my throat and spins toward the door, his posture instantly shifting from possessive stillness to lethal readiness.
The red emergency lights begin to strobe.
I whip my head toward the diagnostic screen. The green text is gone. The screen is flashing a bright, angry crimson. The brute-force algorithm I was running has been terminated.
"What did you do?" he demands, his eyes sweeping the room for threats.
"I didn't do anything!" I drop my hands to the keyboard, hammering the escape key. The system ignores my commands. A script fires off on its own, line after line scrolling past. "It's an automated countermeasure. A fail-safe."
"Explain."
"The system recognized the manual bypass on the battery array. The fail-safe didn't just lock the vault down. It rigged it."
I read the flashing red warning scrolling across the monitor. The words make my blood run cold. The ambient temperature in the room, already freezing, seems to drop another ten degrees in an instant. The faint, mechanical hum of the battery array shifts into a high-pitched whine.
I look up at him. The lethal, unshakeable Costa enforcer.
"They know the main power was cut," I say, my voice trembling despite my best efforts to keep it steady. "The system just initiated an external override."
"Can you stop it."
"I don't have access. It's a hard-coded command running off the external grid."
The strobing red lights cast terrible, violent shadows across his face. He steps toward the terminal, his physical presence dominating the space. "What is the command, Imani."
I point a shaking finger at the center of the screen.
WARNING: EXTERNAL OVERRIDE INITIATED.
SECURITY BREACH DETECTED.
~~ENVIRONMENTAL PURGE PROTOCOL ENGAGED.
OXYGEN EXTRACTION IN 60 MINUTES.~~NEW:ENVIRONMENTAL PURGE PROTOCOL ENGAGED.PASSIVE VENTILATION OVERRIDDEN. OXYGEN EXTRACTION IN 60 MINUTES.
"They aren't coming to get us," I whisper, staring at the flashing red letters. "They are going to suffocate us."
4
Vincenzo
The blaringsiren rips through the dead vault. Red warning lights ignite. The harsh crimson glare washes over the towering concrete walls. The mechanical shriek of the alarm tears through the concrete underfoot. The diagnostic screen flashes with a fatal countdown. Sixty minutes. Sixty minutes until the system purges every breath of air from this sealed metal tomb.
Imani stares at the monitor. Her skin looks flushed in the warning lights. She does not scream. She does not drop to her knees and weep. She curses under her breath and immediately attacks the keyboard.
My flannel is layered over her sweater, the dark plaid wrapped tight around her shoulders. She is wearing my clean linen and ozone now, and the sight brands itself into my brain. She belongs to me. The Bellanti architects built this fail-safe to eliminate intruders. They built it to bury anyone who touched their ghost-signatory network. They will not bury her.
