Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Five: Chapter Forty One

**Delaney**

She didn't sleep that night, not really, not after the tunnel, not after his thumb had rested at the corner of her mouth like he had every right to it, so instead of sleeping she did the thing she'd promised herself she wouldn't do anymore.

She opened the folder called Taxes 2019.

Chapter forty one had been sitting unfinished for eleven months, a scene she'd abandoned halfway through because she hadn't been able to figure out how Roan Vale would say the thing his publicist needed to hear, the actual, unguarded thing, without the words sounding like something out of a different, braver man's mouth. She read the unfinished paragraph three times in the blue light of her laptop at 1 a.m., and then, without deciding to, she started typing.

He touched her mouth like it was something he'd been given permission for weeks ago and only now believed it. "Say the word," he told her, "and I'll go back to being careful." She didn't say the word. She had spent two years learning what careful men looked like from the outside, and this was not that. This was a man choosing, in real time, to stop protecting himself from her.

She stopped typing. Stared at the screen. Realized, with a slow, sick lurch, that she had just transcribed the tunnel. Not imagined it. Not embellished it. Copied it, word for word, thumb and mouth and all, into a document she'd told herself no longer existed.

She closed the laptop hard enough that the sound startled her cat off the windowsill.

At 7 a.m., her phone buzzed. Roman.

Coffee. My place. We should talk about last night before Priya finds out from a photographer instead of from us.

She stared at the text for a long time before typing back: There were no photographers in the tunnel.

There's always a photographer somewhere. Occupational hazard. Also I want to see you and that felt like the more honest reason to say.

She sat with that for longer than she'd admit to anyone, cat included, and then she got dressed and went.

Roman's apartment was smaller than she expected for a man making the money he made, sparse in a way that read less like minimalism and more like a man who didn't trust himself to accumulate things he'd have to lose later. There was exactly one photo on the wall, a faded print of a boy in oversized hockey gear standing next to an older woman with the same sharp cheekbones he had.

"My grandmother," he said, following her gaze, before she'd asked. "Raised me from nine. She's the only person who calls me by my Korean name anymore. Everyone else decided Roman was easier."

"What's your Korean name?"

"Seo joon." He said it carefully, like a word he didn't get to use often and missed more than he let on. "It means to help, to assist. My grandmother used to say it was a joke, giving a name like that to a kid who grew up to get paid for hurting people on purpose."

"I don't think it's a joke," Delaney said, before she could stop herself. "I've watched you help a rookie find his skate laces at 8 a.m. I've watched you look back after a hit, when the cameras weren't on you to see it. I think you've just been doing the job under a name nobody bothered asking about."

Something moved behind his eyes, unguarded in a way the tunnel hadn't even managed, and he looked at her for a long moment before saying, quiet, "I read chapter forty one this morning. Before you sent it, actually. You forgot the folder auto syncs to a shared drive from the team laptop I had you use for the joint statement draft."

Delaney's stomach dropped through the floor for the second time in two weeks.

"You read it."

"I read it." He didn't look smug about it, or triumphant, just steady, watching her the way you'd watch something you were trying very hard not to spook. "You wrote what happened in the tunnel. Word for word. Thumb and all."

"I can explain."

"You don't need to." He crossed the small kitchen, slow, giving her every chance to step back the way he had the night before, and this time she didn't want to take it. "I've spent a year reading you write me as a better man than I usually let myself be. I want to know what happens if I just... try to actually be him. No fiction. No alias. Just us, figuring out if the version you wrote was ever really fiction at all."

**Roman**

He hadn't meant to read chapter forty one. He'd meant to check the shared drive for the joint statement draft at six in the morning, the way he did most mornings when he couldn't sleep, and instead he'd found a document with his own voice in it, written four hours earlier, and he'd read it standing in his kitchen in the dark like a man finding scripture.

Now she stood in that same kitchen, morning light doing something unfair to the line of her jaw, looking at him like she expected him to weaponize what he'd read, and it occurred to him, with real force, that every man who'd ever mattered in her life probably had.

"I'm not going to use it against you," he said. "I want that clear before we do anything else. Whatever this is. You writing me. Me reading it and not being able to stop. None of that is leverage anymore. I already spent my leverage in a hallway three weeks ago and I've regretted the method every day since, even if I don't regret where it led."

"That's a strange thing to admit to the woman you blackmailed."

"It's the only honest thing I've got left to offer you." He reached for her hand, slow, and she let him take it, which felt like more of a victory than any hit he'd ever landed on the ice. "Priya thinks the fake dating is working too well. She's not wrong. I don't know how to fake something I don't think I'm faking anymore."

"Three months," Delaney said, but her voice had lost its edge, gone soft and uncertain in a way he'd never once heard from her in a conference room. "That was the deal."

"Deals get renegotiated." He brought her hand up, pressed his mouth to her knuckles, old fashioned and unpracticed and entirely unlike the version of himself the league had spent years building. "I'm renegotiating. Right now. In my kitchen. Badly, probably, because I've never done this without a contract in front of me."

"What are the new terms?"

"No rule," he said. "No performance. Just find out what happens if Roan Vale gets to be real for longer than a chapter." He watched her face for the door closing, the retreat he'd braced for since the hallway, and instead watched something in her go soft and unguarded and terrified all at once. "Tell me if that's too much. I'll go back to careful. I told you, I've had practice."

"Don't," she said, and stepped into the space between them before he could ask her to clarify which part she meant. "Just... don't go back to careful. Not yet. Let's see how far honest gets us first."

He kissed her then, finally, in a kitchen with one photo on the wall and a name only his grandmother still used, and it felt nothing like the tunnel and nothing like the photo line and nothing like anything either of them had written or performed for anyone else. It felt, for the first time in three weeks of contracts and cameras, like something that belonged only to the two of them.