The Hundred Dollar Contract

Chapter 2

The heavy beat of the club throbbed in perfect, cruel synchrony with the pulse beneath Katherine’s palm where the hundred-dollar bill lay flattened against the polished bar top. Killian didn’t reach for it right away.

He studied the crumpled note the way a collector might examine a flawed but fascinating artifact, head tilted, eyes narrowed, lips parted just enough to show the edge of teeth. Then that same dissecting gaze lifted and pinned her in place.

“A hundred dollars,” he murmured, the words rolling out like distant thunder wrapped in velvet. The low vibration traveled straight through her molars. “That’s a very specific price for a very specific kind of desperation.”

“It’s what I have,” Katherine snapped. The bravado flickered like a candle in a draft, but it held. “Take it or don’t. I’m not here to haggle over my own ruin.”

Killian straightened to his full height. The motion made the shadows rearrange themselves around him; his silhouette seemed to drink the dim light and give nothing back. He loomed, not aggressively, but with the effortless authority of gravity itself.

The scent that rolled off him, expensive tobacco layered over something sharper, electric, like the air right before lightning splits a summer night wrapped around her tighter than any touch.

“You think you’re buying a body,” he said quietly. “You think you’re buying an hour of forgetfulness to spite the man who broke your heart.”

Katherine recoiled half a step before she could stop herself. “How do you…”

“You have ‘divorced’ written in the way you hold your shoulders, Katherine,” he cut in, speaking her name with the calm familiarity of someone who had already read the final page of her story. “And you have ‘revenge’ written all over that red dress. But a hundred dollars won’t buy a man like me. Not for the night.”

Heat flooded her cheeks, humiliation, bright and vicious, finally overtaking the numb armor she’d worn since George walked out. She lunged for the bill, fingers trembling with the need to snatch it back and flee.

Before she could close the distance, his hand came down over hers. Palm to knuckles. Skin searing. Grip like black velvet stretched over iron.

“However,” he continued, voice dropping even lower, eyes locking onto hers with a gleam that was equal parts hunger and amusement, “I find I’m bored tonight. And I find your little architectural critique of my brother’s club… unexpectedly interesting.”

He paused, letting the silence stretch until it felt like another form of touch.

“I’ll take the hundred. But the price isn’t only the money. The price is your total honesty. For one night, you aren’t a wife. You aren’t a socialite. You aren’t a victim. You’re just mine.”

“Yours,” she breathed. The word tasted like both verdict and lifeline.

“Mine,” he confirmed.

With a slow, deliberate ceremony he slid the bill free, folded it once, and tucked it into the breast pocket of his charcoal suit. The motion was almost tender.

“Let’s go. My brother keeps a penthouse upstairs for… private consultations. Since you hate the layout down here, perhaps the view from the top will be more to your liking.”

“Name?” Katherine asked, peering at him.

“Call me Killian.” He replied.

The elevator was a sleek silver capsule, mirror-polished and utterly silent. It felt less like transportation and more like insertion into another plane of existence.

Killian stood directly behind her. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t need to. His presence pressed against her back like a physical field, warm, heavy, inescapable.

When the doors parted, the penthouse opened before her like a brutalist cathedral: soaring ceilings, expanses of raw concrete, black glass, and dark leather furniture that looked carved rather than built. Cold. Masculine. Unapologetically dominant.

“The owner of the club stays here?” Katherine asked. Her voice bounced faintly off the hard surfaces.

“When he’s in town,” Killian answered. He shrugged out of his charcoal jacket and let it fall across the back of a leather sofa that probably cost more than George’s entire garage.

His fingers moved to the buttons of his vest next, methodical, unhurried, each release a small, deliberate punctuation.

“But tonight,” he added, “it’s just us. And your hundred dollars.”

Katherine turned from the floor-to-ceiling windows where the Manhattan skyline glittered like broken glass under moonlight. Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard she wondered if he could see the rhythm through the thin silk of her dress.

The reality of her choice, of walking out of one life with nothing but rage and a single bill, and straight into this stranger’s orbit crashed over her in cold waves.

“You’re remarkably quiet,” Killian observed, “for a woman carrying so much rage.”

He was down to his white dress shirt now. Sleeves rolled to mid-forearm, revealing corded muscle and the faint shadow of dark hair. The casual strength in his forearms made her throat tighten.

“I’ve never done this before,” she admitted. The confession came out small, almost childlike.

“I know.” He crossed the room in three long, soundless strides. He stopped close enough that she had to tip her head back to meet his eyes. “He was a fool, Katherine. He had a thoroughbred and treated her like a draft horse. He didn’t want your fire because it threatened to melt his ice.”

“Don’t say a word about my past,” she hissed. Her fingers curled into tight fists at her sides. “I didn’t pay you to talk about him.”

“You’re right.” Killian’s voice softened to something almost gentle. “You paid me for the friction.”

His hand rose. Long fingers wrapped around the nape of her neck, warm, sure, possessive. His thumb traced the delicate line of her jaw, tilting her face until she had no choice but to look directly into the dark abyss of his gaze.

Then he leaned in until his lips brushed the shell of her ear.

“I’m going to make you forget he ever existed,” he whispered. “But when you wake up tomorrow, remember this: you chose this. You bought this. You aren’t the victim tonight. You’re the architect.”

He kissed her.

It bore no resemblance to the careful, perfunctory presses of lips she had received for five years. This was conquest, rough, demanding, tasting faintly of the gin she’d sipped downstairs and the raw, unfiltered hunger she had buried beneath perfect table settings and polite smiles.

A jagged sound tore from Katherine’s throat, half sob, half moan. She surged up into him, desperate for the heat, the violence, the obliteration.

She wanted marks. She wanted to be used until nothing remained of the woman George West had so neatly discarded.

They never reached the bedroom.

Killian lifted her as though she weighed nothing. Her legs locked instinctively around his waist. He backed her hard against the central concrete pillar. The shock of cold, unyielding stone against her spine collided with the furnace of his body pressed to her front. The contrast ripped a gasp from her lungs.

He didn’t handle her like something fragile. He handled her like forged steel, rough, urgent, unapologetic. His hands gripped her thighs hard enough to leave deep purple imprints she already knew would bloom by morning. She welcomed every bruise like a medal pinned to surviving.

The scarlet silk dress, Serena’s riot-starter, was shoved up to her hips. Fabric strained, then gave with small, sharp tearing sounds as Killian claimed his “down payment” with a ferocity that stole her breath again and again.

She clawed at his shoulders, nails carving red tracks through his shirt into skin. Her head fell back against the pillar; the city lights smeared into streaks of molten gold and black across her blurring vision.

Time dissolved. They moved from the pillar to the wide leather sofa, then, at last to the massive bed in the master suite, charcoal sheets already cool against fevered skin. Killian was inexhaustible, a force of focused, relentless energy that fed on the starvation she had carried for half a decade.

He drove her to the razor edge of collapse, then pulled her back over into shattering release after release until her mind emptied of everything except sensation. Until even her own name felt distant and unimportant.

As the first thin gray light of dawn seeped through the glass, Katherine lay sprawled in the tangled sheets. Every muscle felt heavy, deliciously used, gloriously spent.

Victory lived in the ache between her legs, in the tender bruises on her inner thighs, in the way her body finally felt claimed instead of merely occupied.

Killian lay beside her, chest rising and falling in slow, even rhythm. In the pale morning light he looked almost ordinary, almost human.

Katherine stared at the back of his dark head, then let her gaze drift to the ruined red dress crumpled on the floor like shed skin. The rage that had fueled her all night had burned itself clean, leaving only a vast, ringing quiet inside her chest.

She had done it. She had survived the first night without George.

But when she tried to shift her weight, a sharp, deep twinge lanced through her hips, a blunt reminder of exactly how thoroughly Killian had taken what she offered. She closed her eyes. A single tear escaped and tracked silently toward her temple.

She had spent her last hundred dollars on a ghost.

And in few hours, she had to face the man who had turned her into one.