Page 10 of Danny

He'd seen it happen. Seen Hargrove's hand on my wrist in real time, and killed the man's membership before Theo took his first step.

A quarter of a million dollars. Gone in the time it takes a man's fingers to close around my wrist.

"Why?" I whisper.

Evie just squeezes my arm and walks away, and I stand there in the middle of the floor with the wine bottle and the question and the strange, terrifying electricity of being noticed by someone I can't see.

I finish the shift on autopilot. Pour drinks, clear glasses, smile the way you smile when your body knows the choreography but your brain is somewhere else entirely. Midnight comes. The floor empties. I go downstairs to the staff locker room, change out of the uniform that fits like it's been made for me, and pull on my jeans and my Goodwill coat and sit on the bench for a minute, just breathing.

My wrist is fine. Not even red anymore. Hargrove's grip was firm, not brutal. Physically, nothing has happened.

But something happened upstairs, in a room I've never seen, on a camera I'd never known was pointed at me, and the man who runs this building made a decision that cost a fortune because someone's fingers were where they shouldn't have been.

I pull my bag over my shoulder and walk out into the corridor that leads to the staff exit. Fluorescent lights, linoleum floor, the unglamorous guts of the building that the members never see. It smells like industrial cleaner and the ghost of whatever the kitchen cooked tonight.

Danny Sterling is standing at the end of the corridor.

I stop.

He's leaning against the wall near the exit door, arms crossed, still in his suit — black tonight, every line of it sharp and severe. He looks like he's been there a while but hadn't planned on it. Like he'd meant to be somewhere else and his feet brought him here instead, and he's irritated about the mutiny. Honestly, he looks fucking edible, even with a scowl.

He straightens when he sees me. Uncrosses his arms.

Neither of us says anything for a second. The fluorescent light is not kind to most people, but it turns his eyes almost silver, and his jaw is set in a way that looks less like composure and more like something being held together by force.

"Are you alright?"

Three words. Low, clipped, almost formal. Like he's rehearsed them and is annoyed with how they come out.

"I'm fine, Mr. Sterling," I say. "Theo handled it. It was nothing."

"It wasn't nothing." He growls and then coughs a bit as if he’s catching himself in his anger. “Please, call me Danny.”

The exact words Evie used. Except Danny’s are harsher, with a weight behind them that makes the corridor feel smaller.

"He grabbed my wrist," I say. "I've had worse."

Something moves across his face. Fast, dark, gone before I can read it. His jaw tightens another degree, which I wouldn't have thought was possible.

"You shouldn't have had worse," he says. "And you shouldn't have had this."

He takes a step toward me. Then another. Closing the distance between us with the slow deliberation of a man fighting every one of his own rules, and I can see the fight happening — in the rigid line of his shoulders, in the way his hands stay at his sides like he's ordering them to stay there.

He stops in front of me. Close. Closer than the corridor requires. Close enough that I can smell him — cedar and something clean— and I can see the faint lines at the corners of his eyes that mean he's older than I'd first guessed, mid-thirties.

"Your wrist," he says.

"What?"

"Show me."

It isn't a request. But it isn't a command either. Somewhere in between — a question disguised as a statement, asked by a man who doesn't know how to ask for things gently because he's never had to.

I hold out my left hand, as Danny reaches to take it.

His fingers are careful. That's the part that undoes me. This man — who's destroyed a $250,000 membership with a phone call, who runs a building full of billionaires with the efficiency of a man who's eliminated kindness as an unnecessary variable — holds my wrist like it's something that could break. He turns my hand over, slowly, examining the skin where Hargrove's fingers had been. There's nothing to see. No marks. No bruise. But he looks anyway, his thumb tracing the inside of my wrist in a line so light I almost can't feel it.

Almost.