“Agreed,” he said.
I blinked. “That easily?”
“I know the difference between negotiation and waste.”
I took the pen. My hand hovered over the signature line.
A voice inside me screamed.
Another voice, older and tired, sounded like Grandma Bee humming over a pot of beans, saying, Survival first. Pride later.
I signed.
Adrian took the contract and tucked it back into the folder.
Then he extended his bare hand.
I stared at it. “Absolutely not.”
“It’s customary to shake after an agreement.”
“You don’t like touch.”
His voice lowered. “That is not what I said.”
The air changed.
It was ridiculous. I had been awake for nearly twenty-four hours. My grandmother was in surgery. I had just become indebted to a man who treated emotion like a clerical error.
And still, I looked at his hand.
At the faint scar.
At the careful stillness.
I placed my fingers in his palm.
The effect was immediate.
Adrian inhaled sharply, not loud, but deep enough to cut through the quiet car. His fingers closed around mine with restrained force, as if he had caught something falling and did not know whether to save it or crush it.
Warmth surged up my arm again.
Not normal warmth.
This was brighter, stranger, like standing too close to lightning before it struck.
His pupils widened.
For one suspended moment, Adrian Park did not look like a CEO, or a tyrant, or a man who owned towers.
He looked starving.
Then he released me and turned his face away.
“Be at my penthouse at six,” he said.
The car stopped outside my apartment building.
I got out without answering.
Only after the car disappeared did I realize my palm was still tingling.
Grandma Bee survived the surgery.
At 5:11 in the morning, Dr. Brennan called while I was standing under a shower that had gone cold ten minutes earlier. I answered with shampoo in my eyes and terror in my chest.
“She made it through,” he said. “The next forty-eight hours are critical, but the procedure went as well as we could have hoped.”
I sank onto the bathroom floor and cried into a towel so my neighbors would not hear.
At 6:03, I arrived at Adrian Park’s Lincoln Park penthouse wearing black slacks, cheap sneakers, and a white blouse with a coffee stain near the hem.
The building had no lobby so much as a marble cathedral guarded by men who looked trained to notice everything, including weakness.
The elevator required a palm scan I did not have.
The guard from the hospital appeared and handed me a temporary access card.
“I’m Daniel Cho,” he said. “Head of security.”
“You’re the one who kidnaps poor women from hospitals?”
“I escort.”
“Comforting.”
His mouth almost moved. Not quite a smile. “Mr. Park is expecting you.”
The elevator rose in silence.
When the doors opened, I forgot to breathe.
The penthouse occupied the entire top floor. Glass walls framed the city in every direction. The lake stretched gray-blue under the morning sky. Everything inside was expensive, minimalist, and cold enough to make a museum feel cozy.
There were no family photos.
No clutter.
No signs that a human being lived there except for a black coat draped over a chair and a half-finished glass of water on a table.
Adrian stood near the windows, already dressed in a dark suit.
Gloves on.
Of course.
“You’re late,” he said.