The door clicked shut like a verdict.
Boxes thudded. For Maya the sound was small and final; it meant she'd gone from scandal to stage prop in one short breath. Cameras still angled at the building, a thin line of reporters on the sidewalk, but inside the penthouse was quiet and bright and clinical, it was almost like living inside a white photograph.
Liam's place was not a home. It was a display. Glass walls, chrome, a kitchen that looked like it had been designed to avoid fingerprints. Everything had a purpose. Nothing felt lived in. He watched her from the half-dark of the hallway with that neutral face he kept like armor. She watched him back, short and raw and trying not to be a joke.
They had rehearsed it twice already that morning — the smile, the line for the press, the way they responded when a reporter asked if the marriage was real. They'd said the same words until the syllables scraped. They would be together at the gala, together at a donor breakfast, together for market confidence. They would be a picture. Outside, the cameras had filed the angle; inside, they'd practiced the warmth.
Practice is cold.
"You walk like a woman who thinks this is temporary," Liam said, stepping into the light. His suit fit like a second skin. "Don't make it worse."
Maya set down a box of framed prints. "Don't tell me how to be," she said. Sharp. Her voice had a grain the rehearsals couldn't sand away.
"You signed a contract, Maya." He said it like an observation, not a threat. "Act like a married woman for the camera."
She smelled the threat without it being said, the board's handshake, the donors' quiet pullback. Acting was survival. Resentment flared under her ribs.
Tess had warned her about living with a man like a specimen. "Don't let him make the space empty," Tess had said days ago on the phone. "Bring your mess." Maya had tried. Boxes of her brushes, a battered lamp from the studio, a stack of journals. The penthouse swallowed them like a mouth.
They moved through the day in rehearsed fragments. Public smiles on the terrace. A staged dinner where her laugh was measured and his eyes softened on cue. Photographers clicked like small guns through the windows. Then behind closed doors, their faces hardened again.
They argued about small, human things that suddenly felt enormous. Whether he would let her keep the studio keys. Whether she would say "husband" in interviews. Whether the public statement should mention a mutual desire to "support each other." She wanted blunt truth. He wanted the story tidy.
He wanted narratives nailed down. She wanted to keep a life that wasn't a line item.
The arguments burned fast because there was no room for slow. They were two matchsticks: spark, snap. Then the next rehearsal, their smiles again like armor.
That night, after a forced dinner where both made the right noises, the cameras left the street and the penthouse put on its quiet. For a beat they stood in the living room surrounded by art and the echo of their performances. Liam's volcano-calm uncoiled.
"Don't pretend you're okay with this," he said.
"I never pretended," Maya replied. The whole day had an edge that cut. She wanted to be furious at him for making her a prop and at the world for leaking a photo that should have been private. She wanted to be anywhere else.
He closed the distance like a man closing a deal. There was no slow courting. He cupped her face with fingers that were deliberately gentle, then not. The gentleness was a test. She pushed back, because she always pushed against being owned.
"You don't get to keep the moral high ground," he said. "Not while you stand in my bed in that photo."
She laughed — a short, bitter sound. "Neither do you."
Then the words became mouths and mouths became heat. The argument dissolved, jagged and quick, into action. His hands grabbed her sweater, pushed it up, and slid over skin without ceremony. She shoved at him first and then didn't. The penthouse, sterile and echoing, took in the noise of them like it had taken in everything else.
They fell against the wall. He pinned her wrist above her head with one hand and used the other to press fingers into the small of her back. She smelled like whiskey and steel. His mouth ate hers while his hand rode the curve of her hip like he was claiming territory.
"Say it," he murmured into her hair. "Say you want me."
Her answer came sharp and real. "I want you," she said. Not soft. Not ashamed. The consent was her voice and it cut through the noise. It made this real, not theft.
He moved faster. Rougher than that stupid one-night months before. This was not fumbling. This was force and rhythm and intention. He shoved her against the couch, palms slipping across the fabric as he stripped her down. Her bra snapped somewhere in a clatter, a small percussion. His hands found her breasts, hard, claiming. He didn't linger with kisses that asked; he kissed like he expected agreement and got it.
Up close he felt like a thing with a plan. He tugged her to the edge of the couch, bent her up, and with one hard, smart motion he pushed inside her — cock sliding into pussy with a sound that made both of them startle. It was deeper, broader than before; it hit angles she hadn't expected.
He held her by the hips, digging his fingers into her ass each time he thrust, as if the pain would keep her present. The pace was a gallop. Maya's nails scored the leather of the couch. She bit down on his shoulder to keep from crying out in a way that would make the neighbors know too much.
"Say it," he said between breaths, not a demand so much as a statement of hunger. "Say you're mine."
She moaned then, not because she'd been told to, but because she wanted to damn him into admitting it too. "I'm yours," she rasped. The words came out rough and damp against his skin.
He slammed harder, cock hitting the place inside where she tightened without meaning to. The room blurred on the edges. They moved with animal economy, hips and hands and the shock of being visible and private at once. He used the word "mine" like a key and she used her hands and her moans like a counterargument. This wasn't tender. This was two people using desire like a weapon and a shield.
At some point he eased — not because he softened so much as because the thrust slowed into a hard, grinding rhythm that was almost considerate. He folded over her, breath hot on her ear, his hands still hooked to keep her open, to keep the space shaped. His voice, now lower, not a demand: "Stay."
She stayed. Afterward, the silence hung heavy. He rolled off her and lay facing the ceiling, breathing like someone who had been running. She sat up, fingers trembling, and pulled her knees to her chest. They lay like that, two ragged silhouettes on a couch that had eaten more secrets than either wanted to admit.
There was no real talk. No apologies. They were both practical in the aftermath, like people who'd agreed on terms and now were checking boxes. He lit a cigarette and then extinguished it; she took a sip of water and wrapped a throw around her shoulders.
Then she noticed the couch seam where the leather met fabric. A tiny pull in the stitching. Habit made her fingers trace for flaws. Her thumb snagged on a tag, hidden, sewn into a crevice where no one would look.
She peeled it out with the small, private curiosity of someone hunting for a detail that might be useful: a maker's tag, a repair mark, a care label. Instead, the tag had handwriting — cramped, deliberate. A name. Claire. And a date, months ago. Not recent enough to explain everything and recent enough to raise a question.
Maya's stomach dropped like a stone. Claire was Liam's sister, the woman who'd shown up at the gallery a few weeks earlier, all fragile smiles and soft apologies. She'd promised to keep distance. The tag, small and personal, said something else: proximity.
She sat very still. The city outside blinked with lights. Inside the penthouse the hush felt thicker, like the air before a thunderclap.
The tag was stupid. It was a scrap. It was a small thing — a needle in a haystack that might mean nothing. Or it might be the seam that, when pulled, unravels the whole fabric.
Maya stuffed the tag back, because doing nothing felt safer than showing him she'd found it. But the question hung in the room like a second lover: who had sewn Claire's name into Liam's couch? And why would anyone put a woman's name there if not to mean something?
She watched Liam at the window, breath slow, looking out at the city that he seemed to own and she only rented for a season. She wanted to ask. She wanted to throw the tag at his feet and demand explanations.
Instead she folded her hands in her lap and let the thought spool quiet. The contract made them a picture for other people. The couch made them a mess for them.
Outside, somewhere, a shutter popped. Inside, a tiny cloth tag in her mouth tasted like a lie.