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And they're still hidden.

It's probably going to take me the rest of my life to fully unravel whatever it was that my mother set up in that trust of ours.

If I live through this.

Marry respectable.

Matriarchal bloodline.

There is a gun in the safe. I know that combination like my own hands. Ten seconds? I could open it in ten seconds. The gun is loaded. All guns are loaded. And I don't mean that as a cautionary tale for children. There is simply no point in keepin' guns for protection if they're not loaded.

Whether that gun in the safe has been used, let alone oiled, in the last decade, I have no idea.

But it's the only hope I've got. That's the only thing down here that can save me now. Because I will, under no circumstances, leave this bunker with Marcus White Jr. still alive.

It's him or me.

"Nothing to say, sweet-pea?" Marcus asks. "No comments, no notes?"

I pull myself together and say, in a voice as lighthearted as I can manage, "Well, that certainly explains your behavior."

Which makes him laugh. "Doesn't it though? I mean, how would you feel, darling? How would you feel if the man you were promised was out in the world fucking whores? And ruining your career? And saying mean things to you?"

He stares at me, completely sincere. Almost pleading for me to understand how I've wronged him. How all he's doing here is taking what's his.

The fact that his mind is in this space blows me away. But I can't say it surprises me.

He takes another step forward, closin' the distance between us until there are only a couple of feet left.

He drops the camera like it's a piece of trash and says, "I've tried my best to be patient with you. And you were so perfect until he got to you again. You were recovering. You were doing so well, Savannah. I want you to do well, baby-doll. That's all. I want you to thrive."

The last word lands soft, reverent, and that is somehow the most terrifying thing he's said yet. Then he extends his hand toward me, palm up, open.

An offering.

Like I am the prodigal and he is the father, and all I have to do is walk back into the frame.

I don't take his hand. I only stare up at him. But he pleads with me with his eyes. They are soft now, almost forgiving. As if I'm the sinner here.

Play the game, Savannah. Gun. Safe. Ten seconds.

It might as well be ten hours, that's how scarce seconds are these days.

I force myself to accept his offer and let him pull me to my feet, because that is what you do when the game is still in play and the gun is still in the safe and the seconds are still tickin' down like a country auction nobody wins.

His hands find me immediately. Both of them. Everywhere at once in that proprietary, inventory-taking way that has never once felt like desire and has always felt like appraisal—like he is checkin' the condition of something he paid for and means to keep.

He paws at my hips, my stomach, slides his flat palms up my ribcage with the unhurried confidence of a man who has never once questioned his right to anything in this room.

I go still. I go absolutely, deliberately, architecturally still—the way my mother taught me to hold a pose in front of a camera when I was seven years old and the light wasn't right yet and you just had to wait for it. I learned early how to be a body without bein' a person inside one.

He squeezes my breasts. One arm loops around me like a lasso finding purchase, and his mouth comes down on mine, and his hips press forward with that grinding, insistent certainty—his cock hard against me, announcing itself like it's owed an introduction.

I force the revulsion down into the same place I keep everything else I cannot afford right now.

Ten seconds, Savannah. You have to find ten seconds where he's not here with you, not in view of the safe.

And you will do whatever it takes to get those ten seconds.