The room doesn't move.
Carson is staring at his brother. "You don't touch the company."
"I do today."
"For her."
Atlas glances at me.
"Yes."
He says it so plainly that even I take a breath.
Carson's face goes terrible.
He comes at me. Not far — two steps. He raises a hand like he might touch my face.
I take a step back.
Pete is already between us. He is in his sixties. He moves like he was a Pinkerton in another decade.
"Mr. Hale. Please."
"Move."
Pete does not move.
Atlas, mild: "Pete. Don't scare Wren."
I throw him a look. "Who said you could call me that."
"Quietly," he says. "I'll only call you that quietly."
Carson loses the temperature he's so proud of.
He kicks the coffee table over. Glass everywhere. My father is suddenly in front of me, an arm across my chest like a seatbelt.
Carson's chest is moving. He doesn't take his eyes off me.
"Wren. Come here."
He has said those two words so many times.
I used to come. Through the yelling. Through the bruising. Through the grip on the back of my neck. I came when he called me from a private island and I came when he called me from a bachelor party. I came after he had killed me — the next session, two weeks of game-time later, the second he summoned, I was already at his elevator.
I do not move.
Atlas extends his hand to me, palm up.
"Come to me."
AURA, in my ear, soft now, almost respectful: Male lead Intimacy Score: sixty-two.
I look at Carson's bright red eyes.
I put my hand in Atlas's palm.
His hand is cold and steady.
Carson's expression breaks into pieces.
The story of Atlas Hale taking the Westside sleeve is in the Puget Sound Business Journal by Wednesday.
Carson becomes a joke at his own clubs.
What is funnier, and what no one is reporting: he starts to court me.
Mornings I get flowers. Used to be his EA placed the order on a recurring template. This week the cards are handwritten.
Wren. Stop this.
Wren. I'll learn.
I drop them into the trash chute.
Lunchtime, a courier brings the cardamom buns from the Pioneer Square bakery I love.
I hand them to the receptionist.
Evenings he is waiting outside the Pace Capital lobby. The temperature dropped to forty. He's in a thin overcoat. His face is sicker than usual.
Sloane is next to him in a coat that costs more than the car. Her eyes are pink.
I come out of the elevator with Atlas.
Carson straightens. "Wren."
Sloane: "Carson has been waiting three hours."
"His legs work."
He ignores it. He is holding a ceramic mug.
I know the mug.
Session 16, the platform pushed a shared hobby sub-arc and routed both of us into a Pioneer Square pottery studio twice a week. Earth glaze. Lopsided. I left my thumbprint on the inside of the lip when the clay was still wet.
He took it home. He gave it to Sloane the next week to hold paperclips on her desk.
This mug is the same glaze. Smoother. Professionally thrown. No thumbprint.
He had it commissioned from a photo.
A man who spent a hundred sessions calling me dirty has paid a stranger to fake the smudge my hand left in clay.
He is holding it out toward me with a kind of unpracticed care.
"It's cold tonight."
I don't take it.
Atlas coughs at my elbow. Pete unwraps a wool throw and arranges it across his shoulders.
Atlas looks up at me.
"Wren. I'm cold."
I —
Carson's voice cracks. "What does it matter to her if you're cold."
Atlas, very serious: "She told me to stay out of the wind."
I have not told him any such thing.
He glances up. His eyes are pale and steady. "Yesterday. You said I shouldn't be in a draft."
I had said that because he had been coughing as if he was going to come up a lung.
Carson takes it as gospel.
His hand tightens on the mug. His voice drops into the soft register he kept in reserve for emergencies.
"Wren. You used to fuss over me like that."
I look at him.
So I used to be unlucky ninety-nine times.
Carson does not know what ninety-nine means.
But AURA knows.
She warns me in my ear that night: Maren. Do not provoke male lead memory recall.
My chest tightens.
"He has memory."
She doesn't answer.
I understand.
This is the truth she has been keeping. He is not a clean slate every cycle. He is a locked file. Drop the right key on him and he opens.
If Carson remembers the ninety-nine times he killed me, can he still go to bed at night with the version of himself that says I love you?
I get a new plan.
That night, Atlas comes to my father's brownstone with the Westside paperwork. He is in a good mood. Pete sets him up at the desk in the study.
He looks at the legal pad next to my elbow.
I have written:
Stairs.
Sedative.
Basement fire.
Town car on the I-90.
Hypothermia, Pioneer Square bench.
Open water, Bainbridge crossing.
Operating table.
He scans it.
The half-smile slips.
"Each one of those."
I nod.
He is quiet for a long moment.
"Did it hurt."
I stop my pen.
In ninety-nine sessions no one has ever asked me if it hurt. AURA only reads the milestone. Carson only said I love you. My parents in the original script were always running late.
I say, "I don't remember."
He doesn't call it.
He pulls a pill out of his pocket.
"Take it."
"What."
"Painkiller."
I frown. "I'm not in pain right now."
"You will be."
I don't take it.
He adds, "It tastes like strawberry. They cap it."
"You're handling me like a child."
He bows his head. He pinches off the sugar coating with his nails. He puts half in his mouth, chews. His eyebrows pinch together.
"Lying," he says. "It's awful."
I laugh before I can stop.
It's the first real laugh I've laughed in a hundred sessions.
He looks up at me.
His eyes are smiling.
Then he is coughing into his hand. Hard. Two, three deep coughs and he is folding forward.
His palm comes back wet with red.
My color drops. "Pete — !"
Pete is already there with a glass and a syringe. He has done this a thousand times.
Atlas catches my sleeve. His voice is low.
"Wren. Don't be afraid."
"I'm not going anywhere."
Atlas takes a guest suite at the brownstone. The pretext is project velocity.
Carson smashes half of his office that night.
Sloane comes for me at the Pace Capital lobby in the morning. Eyes swollen. The Axios reporter she comped a coffee with the day before is at the corner of the lobby pretending to scroll on his phone. Two associates have their phones up.
She has chosen the room.
Session 31, she chose a charity gala to do this same routine. She cried in front of two hundred people that I was abusing Carson with my coldness. Carson asked me, in front of all of them, to apologize to her on my knees. I knelt. He patted my hair like a dog. Good.
I look at her now.
"How am I torturing him."
She catches a sob beautifully. "Carson hasn't slept. He hasn't eaten. And you're walking the lobby of his office building hand in hand with his brother."
I tip my head. "Yes."
"You loved him. Why are you weaponizing the relationship."
I almost smile.
"Sloane. You're hoping I love him."
Her face goes a little still.
I step closer. I drop my voice for the phones. "When I loved him you stood at his elbow and helped him hurt me. The minute I stop, you're scrambling to push me back. Are you in love with Carson, or with the chair next to Carson."
The blood goes out of her cheeks.
The lobby is quiet. The reporter has stopped pretending to scroll.
She backs up. "I haven't — "
I take my phone out. I hit play on a Signal recording.
Sloane's voice fills the marble.
The worse Pace Capital gets, the more Carson needs a fiancée he can manage. Just keep them moving on Westside.
She lunges for the phone.
I lift my hand and her own momentum drops her on the floor.
Behind us the elevator opens.
"Enough."
Carson.
She turns up to him on her knees. "Carson — Maren forced me — "
He does not bend toward her.
He looks at the phone in my hand. The recording is still playing.
His face changes a degree at a time.
"You were involved in the Pace Capital short."
She is panicking now. "I was helping you."
His voice goes cold in a way I have never heard him use on her.
Building security takes Sloane out through the service hall.
She drags her gaze across me on the way past. She is calmer than I expected. The hate is intact.
"You think he loves you," she says.
"I know he doesn't deserve to."
She laughs short. "What about Atlas. You think he's clean."
I don't answer.
At the freight elevator she turns and screams at the ceiling.
"He came for you because he knew you were going to die!"
The doors close.
Carson looks at me. "She's lost it."
I don't look at him.
"You participated, didn't you."
He stops.
"Bryce. Sloane. The Pace short. You weren't out of the loop. You let it happen."
His throat moves.
"Wren. I didn't mean to hurt you."
There it is.
He has said this to me at the bottom of every staircase, after every fire, on every operating table.
I didn't mean to make you hurt. I didn't mean for you to die. I only love you too much.
I walk into him.
"Carson. You want to know why I keep saying ninety-nine."
In my ear, AURA breaks her register. Maren. Stop.
His eyes lose focus a degree.
"Session 1. You put me down a stairwell."
His face goes white.
"Session 2. You poured me a glass of wine."
His breathing speeds up.
"Session 3. You locked me in a wine cellar and walked away from the smoke alarm."
He steps back like he has been struck by something he can't see.
AURA is shrieking through bone now. Warning. Male lead memory lock failing.
I keep going. "Session 54. You killed our child."
His pupils contract.
He puts both hands to his temples. The veins on his forehead push against the skin.
"Stop — "
I look at him doubled over and I find I am not enjoying it.
It isn't enough.
He goes down on his knees. His voice is shaking in a way I have never heard it shake.
"Wren. I see them. I see I killed you."