Chapter 2
TWO
Rowan
I sat cross-legged on the lumpy mattress, the polyester duvet bunched around my waist like a defensive embankment.
My leather folio case lay open beside me like a portable triage kit.
Within its color-tabbed depths lay the tools of my trade: legal pads, fountain pens, contingency plans for visas, and NDAs sharp enough to draw blood.
Now, they seemed quaint. Analog relics in a digital slaughterhouse.
My laptop screen was the only light source, casting a sickly, radioactive blue pallor over my hands and the sharp angles of my suit.
I hadn't changed. I was still wearing the tailored navy blazer and the black trousers I’d put on twelve hours ago, back when I was a respected professional and not a trending topic.
Most people cry when they lose their careers. Some drink until the world softens. I don’t do soft. I create pivot tables.
My fingers flew across the keyboard, the mechanical clacking the only sound in the room besides the erratic gurgle of the radiator.
I was entering data into a new spreadsheet titled Damage_Assessment_v1.
0. It was a coping mechanism, a way to shove the screaming, amorphous chaos of the last six hours into neat, grid-lined boxes where I could strangle it.
Column A: Twitter Handle.
Column B: Threat Specificity (Low/Med/Actionable).
Column C: Designation Bias (Y/N).
Column D: Likelihood of Bot Origin.
"Come on," I muttered, my voice raspy in the stale air. I rubbed my temples, catching the faint scent of my own peppermint mixed with the graphite dust of the pencil tucked behind my ear. It usually centered me. Tonight, it just smelled like stress. "Show me the pattern."
I highlighted a cluster of sixty accounts that had tweeted the exact same phrase: Who let the librarian off the leash? They had all posted within three seconds of each other. I flooded the cells with bright, accusatory red.
Bot farm.
Probably hired by Vance’s crisis management firm, Sanitize, or whatever sleek, soulless moniker they were using to launder reputations this week. That was standard. That was just business. I could respect a good smear campaign if the invoices were clean.
What terrified me wasn't the machinery. It was the organic growth. The variable I couldn't contractually bind.
I tabbed over to the live feed, risking a direct look at the radiation core.
The hashtag #ThePaperMintBeta was still trending, currently sitting at number six globally.
But the tone had shifted. Gone was the initial shocked amusement of watching a Beta manager verbally dissect an Alpha producer.
The internet had digested the clip, metabolized it through millions of insecurity-riddled guts, and was now vomiting it back up as ideology.
@AlphaStrike88: This is what happens when you let Betas leverage legal over biology. She doesn't understand the bond. She thinks she can litigate instinct. #KnowYourPlace
@SoftKnot__2: Look at her face in the clip. So cold. She’s probably never felt a real scent in her life. Jealousy is ugly, Quill. Stick to your spreadsheets and leave the feeling to the real designations.
@VanceDefender: Doxx her. If she wants to talk about 'autonomy,' let’s see how autonomous she is without a job, a postcode, or a face.
I stopped typing. My hands hovered over the keys, trembling just enough that when I tried to type I consistently hit the wrong letters.
They had decided who I was. The narrative had calcified.
I wasn't Rowan Quill, the woman who knew how to smuggle a pop star out of a venue in a laundry cart to avoid a stalker, or the strategist who could rewrite a visa application in twenty minutes flat while sitting on a crate in a venue kitchen, or the woman that had been helping Omegas perform safely in the music industry.
I was a symbol. I was the frigid, joyless bureaucrat standing in the way of the sacred, messy, biological destiny that the world worshipped.
"I’m not jealous," I whispered to the empty, peeling room. The words died against the cheap drywall. "I’m just... accurate."
I minimized the browser. I couldn't look anymore. I opened a blank Word document. The cursor blinked at me, a rhythmic, rhythmic accusation.
Statement_Draft_04.docx
I needed to apologize. Constructing a public apology was a formula, just like a settlement agreement.
You acknowledge the impact, never the intent.
You validate the widespread feelings without admitting legal liability.
You bow just low enough to expose the nape of your neck, submissive and soft, but not low enough to get decapitated.
I typed, my fingers feeling heavy and numb,
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 hours ago, 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 number 204 in 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.