To the fans, the studio, and Mr. Vance: My comments earlier tonight were made in the heat of a high-pressure production environment. They do not reflect my professional respect for the designate hierarchy or the necessary protocols of?—
I stopped. My stomach churned, a hot, acidic roll of revulsion that started in my gut and burned up my throat.
"Protocols of what?" I asked, my reflection staring back at me even through the glow of the screen, all hollow-eyed, pale, sharp. "Systemic breeding coercion disguised as health and wellness clauses?"
I backspaced, holding the key down. The cursor ate the words backward, erasing the lie letter by letter.
...respect for the difficult job of Artist Relations. My priority has always been the safety of my client, and?—
Delete. Delete. Delete.
Every version felt like swallowing glass. If I apologized, I signed off on the idea that Illyana was livestock to be traded for quarterly projections. If I apologized, I admitted that reading the fine print, that demanding safety clauses, was an act of aggression rather than protection. I would be signing my own soul over to them, initialing every page.
I snapped my laptop shut and tossed it away. It hit the duvet with a muffled thump, tilting precariously on the edge of the bed. I looked around the room, the cheap plastic kettle with the frayed cord, the framed print of a generic London bus that had faded, the menacing water stains on the ceiling that looked like continents on a map of hell.
This was where fifteen years of perfect attendance, sixty-hour work weeks, and bulletproof contract surgery had landed me. A budget room in King's Cross with a door that wouldn't hold a determined room service cart, let alone a mob.
I stood up, needing to move, needing to burn the cortisol flooding my system. I paced. Three steps to the grimy window, turn, three steps to the door. Turn. My pencil was still behind my ear. I took it out, rolling the hexagonal yellow barrel between my thumb and forefinger. It was a fidget, a grounding technique I’d used since university.Graphite and wood. Real things. Structures you can hold.
I needed a fresh strategy. The logical move, the Rowan move, was to wait out the news cycle. Forty-eight hours. The internet had the attention span of a gnat. Something else would happen, a scandal with a royal Omega, a politician caught in a heat knot in a public loo, and the eyes currently focused on me would shift. I just had to be invisible until then.
I reached for my phone.
Not the burner. The other one, the work phone I'd turned off and stripped and buried at the bottom of my bag three hoursago, because it was a beacon and I knew better. I found it by feel in the dark of the folio pocket. Dead. Cold. I held it in both hands anyway.
There was one person I called when things went genuinely sideways. Not Benny. Benny was for professional fires. Tessa was for the other kind. She would pick up on the second ring, no matter the time, no matter what continent she was currently hiding on, and she would listen to the whole thing without interrupting. She processed slowly and privately, at great cost to herself, and she would spend the next week quietly catastrophizing on my behalf while pretending she wasn't. She was the only person I knew who treated other people's crises with the same obsessive, architectural attention she gave her own work.
I put the phone back in the bag.
I had already burned one person's life to the ground tonight. I wasn't taking Tessa's peace as well.
The pencil went back behind my ear. I told myself: forty-eight hours. Ghost in the machine.
My burner phone buzzed on the nightstand, rattling against the veneer.
I stared at it. This was a burner, a cheap Nokia brick I’d bought at a bodega in Camden on the way here, registered to a fake name. Jane Doe. Because I had zero imagination when terrified. No one had the number except Benny, my one contact in legal, and I had told him only to use it if the building was on fire.
I picked it up, expecting a text about severance packages.
It wasn't a text. It was a notification from a social media app, one of the location-based ones, that laughed in the face of privacy settings. Someone had tagged me in a photo.
I tapped the screen, dragging up the low-res image. My breath caught in a shallow hitch, a sharp pain behind my ribs.
The photo was grainy, shot in low light, angled upward from hip height. It showed a hallway. Ugly, mustard-yellow carpet with a swirling pattern designed to hide stains. A door with the number204in peeling brass variety.
And sitting outside the door, like a grim offering, was a takeout menu for the curry shop down the street. The bright orange flyer I had kicked aside when I entered two hours ago because I was too busy hyperventilating to pick it up.
The caption was simple, functionally brutal:
Found the paperwork bitch. Knock knock. #ThePaperMintBeta
My blood didn't freeze; it vaporized. The cold logic that usually governed my brain, the part of me that understood force majeure and indemnity clauses, short-circuited.
They weren't discussing me anymore. They weren't meme-ing me. They were hunting me.
I moved to the door, pressing my ear against the painted wood. Silence. The low, electric hum of the vending machine down the hall. The distant, mournful sound of a siren, heading away from me towards Islington.
Think, Rowan. Calculate.
