Under Contract

Chapter two: A Business Contract

The gala kept moving around us, but my skin still remembered the sound of his voice.

Be careful, Ms. Richardson.

Like he had said it for my benefit.

Like he had meant it as a threat.

I took a glass of champagne from a passing tray mostly to give my hand something to do. The stem was cold against my fingers, the bubbles too bright, too sharp, and for one stupid second I focused on that instead of the fact that Anton Vespucci had looked at me like I was one wrong sentence away from becoming interesting in ways neither of us could afford.

Blend in.

Pretend.

Pretend you belong here, pretend your pulse isn’t acting deranged, pretend the man across the room isn’t currently rearranging your nervous system by existing in a dark suit and expensive silence.

I lifted the glass to my mouth and let the champagne bite.

This was business.

That was the point.

I hadn’t come to Vespucci Tower to be dazzled or distracted or privately ruined by a man with a face designed by hostile gods and a bank account large enough to distort moral judgment. I had come because my company needed the right kind of investor, and Anton Vespucci, unfortunately, infuriatingly was exactly that.

Or he was supposed to be.

If he wasn’t, then fine.

This would be the last time I made a proposition like this to him. If Anton didn’t want in on the platform in its current form, someone else would. I already had interest. Serious interest. He was not the only billionaire in New York with a taste for growth and control.

He was just the only one who made me want to commit minor crimes with my bare hands.

I started to turn away with every intention of leaving him standing there by the windows like the bad idea he was.

He didn’t let me.

His hand touched my elbow lightly. Firm enough to stop me. Careful enough that no one watching would call it anything but polite.

That somehow made it worse.

I turned back.

Anton was already guiding me toward the quieter end of the bar, away from the worst of the noise. The city burned behind him through the glass, white and gold and endless, Manhattan spread out like power had taken physical form just to flatter him.

Up close, his cologne hit me again.

Dark. Clean. Expensive.

Dangerous in a way scent had no business being.

“We need to talk business,” he said.

Voice low. Controlled. Like control was not just a habit with him but an entire religion.

I crossed one arm under the other, champagne still in hand. “Now? Here?”

“Not here.” His eyes held mine. “My office. Thirty minutes.”

My stomach turned over once.

I hated that it did.

“Your office,” I repeated. “That sounds ominous.”

A shadow of amusement touched his mouth and vanished before it became anything generous. “You’re asking for fifty million dollars.”

There it was.

The number landed hard and clean and immediate.

Fifty million.

Enough to scale the platform globally. Enough to hire faster, build properly, secure the infrastructure, outpace competitors who had already spent months circling what I had created like they were waiting for me to slip. Enough money to stop surviving and start winning.

Which meant, naturally, that it would come with strings thick enough to hang me.

I looked at him over the rim of my glass. “And?”

“And we discuss terms in private.”

“Convenient for you.”

“Yes.”

God, he was infuriating.

I should have pushed harder right there.

Instead I held his gaze for one long second and said, “Fine.”

His expression didn’t change, but something in him stilled more completely, as if my agreement had settled a calculation.

Then he made the smallest gesture with one hand.

Follow me.

He didn’t say it aloud.

He didn’t need to.

I set down my half-finished champagne on the nearest tray and followed him out of the gala.

The shift from public performance to private quiet was almost violent.

One minute there was music, laughter, light, bodies moving in polished circles, and the thick social heat of a room built for money to admire itself. The next, we were in a hallway of dark wood, soft lighting, and silence so complete my heels sounded indecently loud against the floor.

Anton walked ahead of me without looking back.

He didn’t need to check whether I was still there. He moved like a man accustomed to being followed, broad shoulders straight beneath his suit jacket, every step measured, every line of him composed with the kind of unconscious authority that would have been unbearable if it weren’t so irritatingly attractive.

I watched the set of his back and resented the fact that I noticed things like that.

The perfect rhythm of his stride.

The way his shoulders moved under tailored wool.

The sheer impossible confidence of him.

When we reached his office, Anton opened the door and stepped aside just enough to let me enter first.

I went in without hesitation.

If he expected caution, he could be disappointed privately.

The office was exactly what I should have expected and still somehow worse. Floor-to-ceiling windows. The city glittering below like an obedient machine. Dark wood. Clean lines. A desk large enough to sign treaties on. Leather chairs. No clutter. No softness. The entire room looked like power had hired an architect.

Anton closed the door behind us.

The sound landed heavier than it should have.

He crossed to the other side of the desk, removed his jacket with infuriating ease, and draped it over the back of his chair before sitting down like the whole city had been built specifically to improve his posture.

Then he looked at me.

“Sit.”

I remained standing for half a second longer on principle.

Then I sat in the chair across from him and crossed one leg over the other, because if Anton Vespucci thought I was about to be intimidated by square footage and Italian leather, he was deeply confused about who I was.

“All right,” I said. “Now tell me whether you’re serious or just enjoying yourself.”

His brows shifted slightly. “About what?”

“The money.” I leaned back. “Fifty million. You said it like a man making an offer, but you’ve also spent the last hour behaving like a beautifully dressed threat, so I’d like clarification.”

For a second he said nothing.

His fingers rested against the arm of the chair, still, deliberate, as if he were deciding how much truth to hand me without insult.

That silence told me more than an answer would have.

Because Anton didn’t look amused.

He looked careful.

And for a man like him, careful was rarely good news.

When he finally spoke, his tone had flattened into business.

“I’m serious.”

I nodded once. “Then what’s the catch?”

His gaze held mine.

Not drifting. Not breaking. Straight through.

“Programming changes.”

I went still.

He continued before I could interrupt.

“You open your APIs to my partners. I want access during the rebuild. Daily check-ins in my office. You work here while the platform scales. I want visibility over the build from start to launch.”

I stared at him.

Then I laughed.

Sharp. Disbelieving. Mean enough to satisfy me.

“You can’t be serious.”

“I am.”

“Watch me code?” I sat forward. “Open my APIs to your partners? APIs I pay for, maintain, secure, and spent years building? You want me to walk into your office every day so you can breathe down my neck while your people ‘look’ at my product?”

“I want control over the investment.”

“You want control over me.”

That landed.

Not because he flinched.

Because his jaw tightened once, very slightly, as if accuracy irritated him when it arrived from anyone else’s mouth.

“This is what I ask for,” he said.

“Then what you ask for is absurd.”

His gaze darkened.

I kept going.

Because anger had already outrun caution and was currently carrying me by the throat.

“You don’t get to buy your way into my infrastructure and call it oversight,” I said. “You don’t get to hand me a number big enough to make headlines and then act like that entitles you to sniff around my user data and dismantle the system I built because you like the sound of control.”

His eyes sharpened at user data.

Good.

Let him understand exactly where the line was.

“You assume too much,” he said.

“No,” I snapped. “I understand enough.”

My voice had risen by then. I didn’t care.

The office swallowed the sound and gave it back polished, which only made me angrier.

“I built this from nothing,” I said. “You don’t get to rewrite my vision because you have money and a beautiful office.”

Something changed in his face then.

Not softness.

Never that.

But the mask slipped just enough for something darker to show beneath it. Not cruelty exactly. Something more dangerous. The part of Anton Vespucci that didn’t just enjoy control but understood it intimately enough to wield it without apology.

“Take it or leave it,” he said.

Low. Even. Worse for the calm.

“Fifty million doesn’t grow on trees.”

I stood.

So fast the chair legs moved against the floor with a sharp, ugly sound.

“You’re impossible.”

“Frequently.”

Heat moved through me so fast it felt stupidly close to the kind that had nothing to do with anger. I stepped around the chair before I could stop myself and ended up too close to the desk, too close to him, too far into the dangerous territory where business and whatever else this was started sharing a border.

“I don’t owe anyone obedience,” I said.

Anton rose too.

That was unfair.

He was taller standing. Broader. More physical somehow, even without moving. One hand flattened briefly against the desk between us, and for a second the whole room seemed to narrow to the space separating my body from his.

“Good,” he said quietly.

The word hit harder than it should have.

My pulse jumped.

He noticed.

Of course he noticed.

“Good intentions,” he said, gaze fixed on me now in a way that made my skin feel too tight. “Bad methods. Story of my life.”

That should not have affected me.

It did.

Because for one disorienting second he no longer looked like an investor or a rival or a man trying to buy his way into my company.

He looked like trouble with history behind it.

Like secrets.

Like the kind of man who had done bad things for reasons he still thought were defensible.

We stood there breathing too quietly in a room suddenly full of tension with nowhere decent to go.

The city glowed behind him.

The party noise had disappeared completely.

His gaze dropped to my mouth.

Just once.

Then returned to my eyes.

The movement was small enough that I could have pretended not to notice.

I didn’t.

That was my mistake.

Because the second I noticed it, the whole room changed shape.

I took a step back before my body could embarrass me further.

“Fine,” I said.

My voice came out sharper than I intended.

His expression did not change.

“Fine?” he repeated.

“Your money. Your rules. For now.” I held his stare, even with my heart doing deeply unprofessional things. “But you push too far, and I walk.”

That earned the faintest ghost of a smile.

Not warm.

Dangerous.

“You won’t.”

The confidence in it hit like insult and invitation all at once.

I should have hated him more than I already did.

Instead I looked at him, at the impossible certainty, the arrogance, the way he had turned a business meeting into something that felt like the opening move in a private war, and understood with perfect clarity that this deal had just become very, very personal.

And somehow, the worst part was that Anton finally looked relaxed.

As if this had been the outcome he wanted all along.

As if my anger, my resistance, my refusal to make things easy had only confirmed what he needed to know.

I hated that.

I hated him.

And leaving his office that night, with fifty million dollars hanging over my head like temptation in a tailored suit, I knew one thing with complete and miserable certainty.

This would become an on earth hell experience.