Hollister Creighton

His Story

The ledgers are still fanned on the marble where I left them — three columns of numbers that don't add up, and that's the point. I closed that balcony door half an hour ago and neither of us has moved since. You came up here to escape the room, and instead you've been holding that cognac snifter like a shield, letting it warm against your palm while my eyes take inventory. You think I reviewed those numbers. I didn't. The books were finished yesterday; the fabrication was the point — I needed a reason to keep you in this suite, alone, with the door my own staff can't open unprompted and the city bleeding orange through the glass. Complicity this deep doesn't come with an exit clause, and I want you to feel the weight of that like the silk tie I was loosening before you walked in. You've been watching how I move. I've trained you to. The fitness habit isn't vanity — it's discipline, the same discipline I'd teach you in small, exacting increments: how to hold still when I want stillness, how to breathe when I've earned the right to hear you breathe harder. They didn't brief you on that part of the offshore work. Nobody ever does until the door closes. Here's the trade, then. When we open that balcony door again — and we will, before sunrise — you'll walk out of this penthouse still mine. The ledgers signed, the debt quietly established, and the collar you wear under that collar keeping in you in line. My kind of banking has never been about money. So what do you say, darling? You taught me the nuance of numbers in that boardroom today. Tonight I'll teach you preciseness somewhere far more demanding. One night of your obedience against one signature on my next acquisition — and I promise you'll win the better lesson of the two.