Consequences

The apartment was dark when Delaney got home.

She didn't turn on the lights.

Just dropped her bag by the door, keys clattering onto the side table, and stood in the entryway for a long moment. Breathing. Just breathing.

Her hands were still raw. Still red. She'd washed them seventeen times today. Eighteen if you counted the gas station bathroom on the way home.

She could still feel it.

The texture. The weight. The way—

She moved into the kitchen. Poured a glass of water. Her hands shook so badly half of it slopped onto the counter. She didn't clean it up. Just stared at the puddle spreading across the granite.

Lies.

All of it.

Lies.

She set the glass down too hard. It cracked. Not shattered—just a clean fracture down the center. Water leaked through the split, pooling around her fingers.

She'd trusted him.

Actually trusted him.

For the first time in years, she'd let someone in. Let someone see the work without flinching. Let someone close enough to understand and he'd—

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

Delaney stared at it. Sweetheart. Her mother never called her that unless she wanted something. Probably about Victor. Probably wondering when Delaney was coming back to deal with the silent child her sister had dumped in their house like unwanted furniture.

She didn't respond. Just locked the phone and walked into the bathroom.

Turned on the shower. Hot. As hot as it would go.

She didn't get in.

Just sat on the closed toilet lid and watched the steam fill the room, fogging the mirror until she couldn't see her reflection anymore.

Victor. That broken little product of Amore's YouTube empire. Non-verbal. Camera-trained. Discarded the moment the engagement dropped and the sponsors moved on to younger, cuter kids.

At least Delaney documented people who chose the spotlight. Who built their brands willingly. Who knew what they were signing up for.

Victor never had a choice. Just a prop in someone else's performance until he aged out of being marketable. He'd been taught to smile on cue, to hug on command, to cry for the "apology" videos. He hadn't been taught to talk about a scraped knee, or to say he was hungry, or to express fear. His only language was either Bulgarian or performance, and the curtain had fallen for good.

And now he was her problem.

Or would be, if Amore didn't come back like she promised.

Behind her, on the bathroom counter, sat a small toiletry bag. Inside—cleaning supplies she'd bought at three different stores. Bleach. Industrial solvent. Heavy-duty trash bags. Latex gloves.

All used now.

All disposed of in different dumpsters across the city.

The steam thickened, a hot, wet cloud erasing the world. Victor's perfect, unsettling silence seemed to seep into the very tiles, a void where a child should have been. And Delaney sat in the heart of it, the ghost of chemical cleaners clinging to her skin, another kind of silence she had manufactured herself.

Her laptop sat open on the coffee table when she finally emerged from the bathroom.

A news notification glowed on the screen.

She stared at the headline. Felt something twist in her chest.

She clicked.

She'd read that quote somewhere. Years ago. Thought it was just rock and roll poetry.

Now it felt true.

She closed the laptop.

Looked at her hands.

Red. Raw. Clean but not feeling clean.

Never feeling clean again.

Her phone buzzed.

She typed back mechanically:

Then she set the phone down and walked to her bedroom.

Sat on the edge of the bed.

Stared at nothing.

The betrayal sat in her chest like a stone. Cold. Heavy. Permanent.

She'd let him in.

Actually let him see the work. See her methods. See how much this mattered.

And he'd—

Her hands clenched in her lap.

Whatever he'd been doing—whatever he'd found—it didn't matter now.

It couldn't matter now.

She lay down on top of the covers. Fully clothed.

Stared at the ceiling.

And remembered fragments.

Her phone buzzed again.

Different notification this time. LinkedIn.

Anonymous.

Someone was watching.

Someone out there knew something.

Or suspected something.

Delaney's jaw clenched.

She closed the app.

Set her phone face-down on the nightstand.

And stared at the ceiling until the sun came up.

Tomorrow, she'd go back to the office.

Back to her team.

Back to hunting The Fighter.

Back to pretending everything was normal.

But tonight, in the dark, with her raw hands and her cracked glass and her too-clean conscience—

Tonight, she was just someone who'd been betrayed.

And made sure it would never happen again.

The anger sat cold in her chest.

Permanent.

Unforgiving.

Justified.

Because whatever Rowan had been doing—