The air is thick with his anger. Suffocating.
And validating.
“I appreciate the defense,” I cut in before it boils over. “But I don’t need a white knight.”
“I know,” Gio says, voice dropping, private despite the audience. “You need leverage.”
He takes a long pull of his beer, then looks back at me. The heat in his eyes burns brighter.
“You got the access. Now you get the revenge.”
I blink. “Revenge?”
“Success,” he corrects. “The kind that makes them regret every email they sent. The kind that makes them wish they’d picked you.”
He leans in, shoulder pressing mine, breath ghosting over my ear.
“We’re going to make them watch, Zoë. And we’re going to make sure they know exactly what they missed.”
I shiver.
Anticipation. Dark. Hungry. It matches his gaze.
“Is that part of the deal?” I murmur.
“That’s the bonus.”
His hand slides from my shoulder to the back of my neck, thumb stroking the sensitive skin there. Possessive. Grounding. Intimate in a way that has nothing to do with business.
“Drink your wine,” he says.
I do. One long swallow. The alcohol burns away the taste of rejection.
Gio watches me—heavy, unreadable. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t soften. He catalogs the reaction, files it away.
Around us, the bar noise swells again—laughter, shouting, clinking glasses—but the bubble around our table holds.
We sit in the eye of it.
And for the first time all night, I can’t tell whether I’m the shield or the one holding the lightning rod.
OceanofPDF.com
Chapter 13
Gio
The booth at the back of the Penalty Box sits in a pocket of dim light, illuminated by a flickering lager sign and the wash from a television mounted above the bar. It’s secluded enough that the noise from the front room—the laughter, clinking glasses, the low thrum of gossip—feels distant, like it’s happening underwater. We’ve been here twenty minutes since the team cleared out.
Adrian and Declan were the first to go. Adrian checked his watch, muttered something about Clara expecting a report, and they were gone before I could call him out for the lie. Declan followed, citing Talia.
Then the excuses came from the other side of the table. Dante stood, stretching his arms over his head.
“Fraternity meeting,” he said. “Sigma Chi needs a quorum for something stupid.”
“I’m in,” Cole added, grabbing his jacket. He didn’t look at me or Zoë. He just moved, his usual volume dialed down to a hum that raised the hair on my arms. When Cole goes quiet, the stakes climb.
They leave first.
