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I press harder against her, and it drags a gasp out of her throat. She shakes her head, so I clamp my hand over her mouth. I keep circling her clit through the wet fabric and catch her nipple between my teeth through her blouse.

Her heat soaks through the cotton under my fingers as I work her, and her hips buck against my knee. Every muffled sound she makes vibrates into my palm.

I pin her tighter and roll her nipple between my teeth, and her back arches off the wall, her thighs clamping hard around my leg. I spread her open with my fingers just to feel how slick she has gone for me.

She bites the meat of my palm hard enough to break skin, but I don’t let go of her. She’s furious and she’s falling apart at the same time. Both of those things are honest, and I want every last piece of it. I hook a finger into her panties and start to drag them down her legs.

Then the overhead lights die, and the floor drops out from under my feet.

Delaney screams into the dark. “What is happening? Lev, what is that?”

My body moves before my mind does. I don’t decide to shield her. I simply am, wrapped around her, dropping us both into the corner of the car, one hand cradling the back of her head, my back and shoulders turned to take whatever is coming. If the cables give and we hit the bottom, I hit the wall first, and she hits me. It is the only arrangement I will accept, and my body chose it without asking my permission, which tells me something I don’t have time to examine.

“Don’t be scared,” I say into her hair. “Delaney, look at me. I have you.”

She doesn’t seem to hear a word of it. Her hands claw at my shirt, fisting the fabric over my spine, dragging herself higher against me as though she could climb out of the falling box through my chest.

“We’re going to die,” she sobs. “We’re going to die in here.” She’s shaking so hard it rattles through both of us.

Metal shrieks somewhere above us, a long tearing sound that goes through my teeth, and my stomach lurches up into my ribs as the car keeps sliding down. Her fingers dig into my back hard enough to bruise. I hold her skull to my chest and brace my legs against the far wall and wait for an impact I cannot stop.

“Stay calm,” I shout over the noise. “Hold on to me and don’t let go, whatever happens next. I have you. I have you.”

The safety brake catches with a bone-deep slam, and the whole car jolts to a stop and hangs there, swaying on the line. The emergency light stutters, dies, then holds. Her face swims up out of the dark, yellow and bloodless.

“It’s over,” I say, and stroke her hair back off her damp face. “The brake caught. It stopped, and it is over now.”

The panel crackles to life. “The control system failed. Both of you stay in the corner and don’t move around in there.”

“What the hell just happened?” I demand at the speaker, keeping my voice flat so she doesn’t hear what is under it.

“We cannot confirm the cause yet, sir. There may be another drop. Keep the passengers in the corner and stay off the doors. We are working as fast as we can.”

The last of the color leaves Delaney’s face.

“The team is in the shaft now,” the voice adds. “The car is stable for this moment.”

“We are going to die,” Delaney whispers. “We’re going to die, and they are going to pull two bodies out of this box, and Milo is going to cry, and there will be no one left in the world for him.”

I take her face in my hands and press her forehead into my chest. “You aren’t going to die. Do you hear me? Not today.”

“You can’t promise that.” Her tears soak through my shirt. “You can order people around and buy whole companies, but you cannot fix a broken elevator, Lev. You cannot promise me a single thing in here.” She lifts her wet face to mine. “This is the one place your money and your name are completely useless, and we both know it.”

She is right, and the truth of it closes a fist around my heart. I’ve spent my whole life making certain that nothing was ever outside my control, that every threat had a name and an address and a price. I broke my own body to earn that control. And here, in a box hanging off a frayed line, all of it is worth exactly nothing. We could fall again in the next second and be crushed at the bottom of the shaft, and there isn’t one thing in my power that would stop it from happening. For the first time in twenty years, I can’t buy or threaten my way out of a room.

So I do the only thing left to me. I cup her jaw and force her eyes up to meet mine.

“Listen to me,” I say. “As long as I’m still breathing, I will not let you die in here. Not while I’m alive to stop it.”

“Lev,” she chokes out, my name breaking clean in half.

“You’re going home tonight. You are going to walk through your own door and cook Milo his terrible dinner and yell at him to finish his homework. He’s going to complain about the pasta and you’re going to threaten to serve it again tomorrow. None of that changes. Do you understand me?”

“You don’t know that,” she whispers.

“I know that I would tear this shaft open with my hands before I let it take you,” I say. “Believe that part, if you cannot believe the rest.”

Slowly, a little light comes back into her eyes, though I can see she doesn’t truly believe she’ll live long enough to see any of it.