Chapter 8

The system chirped its verdict before Carmen could react. Victory reversed. Defeat from the jaws of triumph. The chat-newly re-enabled-erupted in conspiracy theories and outrage, accusations of rigging and corruption and billionaire caprice.

Carmen sat frozen, her finger still hovering over the filter toggle she'd never intended to press.

She understood, suddenly and completely, what had happened. The forty-five thousand dollars wasn't generosity. It wasn't even interest. It was severance. Payment for services rendered, for three years of performed affection, for the use of her face and body and carefully constructed accessibility.

He was buying her silence. Her absence. Her permanent removal from his attention.

The realization should have relieved her. It did relieve her, some part of her singing with desperate joy. But another part-the part that remembered being loved, however destructively-felt the hollowness of transaction where connection had been.

She looked at the split screen. At the cheap pink avatar. At the woman inside it who didn't know what she was accepting.

"Congratulations, Izzy." Carmen's voice was steady, professional, the performance of a lifetime. "You won fair and square."

Isabelle's avatar tilted its head. "Did I?" The voice was amused, knowing, entirely too perceptive. "I suppose that depends on how you define winning."

The chat demanded punishment. The forfeit. The ten minutes of unfiltered reality.

Isabelle leaned back, the chair's hydraulics wheezing. "So, A.C." She drew out the name, making it intimate, making it public. "What'll it be? You bought the victory. You choose the price."

Ambrose's fingers moved before his mind could intervene. Not filters. Not faces. Nothing that would expose this creature to the crowd's vulgarity, nothing that would share what he'd found with the screaming masses.

His message appeared in the private channel his donation had opened, a whisper only she could see: "Sing a lullaby. Something that induces sleep. Absolute silence from all others during performance."

The request hung in the digital space, strange and private and wrong. Not the demand of a spectator seeking entertainment. The plea of a desperate man purchasing medicine.

Carmen read it and felt ice in her veins. Sleep. He was still chasing sleep. But to ask for it from... a voice? A streamer? In her memory, a hundred specialists with degrees from Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic had failed. The thought was absurd. And yet... the way he was spending money... A horrifying possibility bloomed in her mind: what if this time, it worked? The thought was so shocking she couldn't breathe. Then, slowly, a cruel smile touched her lips. Let it work. Let someone else be his cure. His cage.

She should warn her. Should find some way to communicate the danger, the trap, the slow suffocation of being needed for only one thing.

But Carmen said nothing.

Because Izzy was smiling-that horrible, knowing smile visible even through the avatar's limited animation-and because some part of Carmen, the part that wasn't wisdom but human bitterness, wanted to see what happened when someone else took her place in the basement.

"Of course, A.C." Izzy's voice was honey and velvet and something else, something that shouldn't exist in human speech. "Sweet dreams."

The lights in her room dimmed. The screen adjusted, contrast lowering, colors softening. She cleared her throat-a sound like pages turning, like doors closing-and began to sing.