Chapter 28 #2
The word son lands in the room like a blade laid flat on a table. Mysk’s gaze sharpens with immediate, predatory interest, and I hate myself a little for giving it shape in front of him. But it’s too late to pull back now. The safest thing I can do with a line once drawn is make it unmistakable.
“Ah,” he says softly. “There it is. You have grown roots.”
I ignore that. “Answer the question.”
His smile returns, slower this time. “Essentially right, yes. Though I prefer the phrase mutually beneficial restructuring.”
“Of course you do.”
He spreads his hands. “You are in no position to pretend outrage, Bron. Men like you built my business. Vanity, appetite, debt, one more night at the table because surely the turn is coming. I merely propose a cleaner ending than the one currently waiting for you.”
The old version of me might have been tempted for a half-second by the simplicity of it.
Lose the final. Walk away breathing. Spare myself the debt and tell myself later that the contest was rigged anyway, that everyone manipulates everything and I merely entered the economy honestly.
That version of me is not fully dead; I know that because I can still hear the cynical arguments it would make.
Easy money. Controlled failure. No blood.
But then Jesse’s small hand closes around my fingers in memory.
Tilda’s face in the corridor when she first started believing I might actually choose them on purpose.
The fossil in my pocket, cool and rough and absurdly holy.
And beneath all of that, a fact so obvious it almost embarrasses me that I ever lived differently: there is no version of this where I keep my soul and do what Mysk is asking.
“No,” I say.
He blinks once. “No.”
“No.”
The word steadies me. I say it again, slower. “I’m not throwing anything.”
Mysk’s expression remains smooth, but the room changes all the same. The air seems to harden. The playfulness thins into something hungrier.
“You may wish to think more carefully.”
“I’ve thought.”
“Then think harder.”
“I’m done thinking about this part.”
His jaw tightens almost invisibly. “Bron, your debt is not a metaphor. It is not a moral exercise. It is a number attached to consequences. Cooperate and it vanishes. Refuse and I continue collecting, which is unpleasant enough under normal circumstances. Now, given your new domestic entanglements—”
I move before the sentence finishes.
Not far. Not wildly. Two sharp steps and one hand around the front of his coat, shoving him back into the steel support column hard enough to rattle the diagnostics panel.
The Odex outside the door slam against the threshold at once, but the door doesn’t open quickly enough for them to reach us before I lean in close enough that Mysk can smell exactly how little of the old game is left in me.
“You say one more word about them,” I tell him, voice quiet enough to be lethal, “and I will drag you through this compound by your imported lapels and hand you to every camera in the building while you explain your gambling scheme to the galaxy.”
Mysk’s breath catches. Not in fear, exactly. More in surprise. He did not expect this version of me. Good.
The door hisses open halfway behind us. One Odex shoulder jams through the gap.
I release Mysk before the move becomes stupidity and step back on my own terms, palms open, heartbeat steady.
The enforcers fill the doorway now, enormous and ugly and very ready for a reason.
Mysk smooths the front of his coat with furious precision.
“There he is,” he says softly. “I was wondering how long the animal would stay house-trained.”
I smile without warmth. “Try me.”
For a second I think he might order the Odex in anyway.
If he does, the prep bay becomes a blood problem immediately, and while I’m no longer the idiot who thinks every fight is improv theatre, I am still extremely capable of making this expensive and loud.
But Mysk calculates faster than his temper.
He glances at the door, the corridor beyond, the cameras that probably cover at least three approach angles, and decides—correctly—that open violence inside the compound is less profitable than threat.
So he adjusts his cuffs and returns to menace.
“You overestimate the usefulness of exposure,” he says.
“Do you imagine these people care? The producers? The corporate sponsors? They are bathing in the same river as the gamblers, Bron. Everyone profits from uncertainty. Everyone skims from chaos. Show them a criminal scheme and they will ask whether it can be branded.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Still not throwing it.”
His eyes go flat. “Then you are choosing pain.”
“No,” I reply. “I’m choosing not to be owned by the stupidest man in a five-system radius.”
That gets me the flash I wanted. His composure cracks for just a heartbeat, and in that heartbeat I see the petty vanity beneath the operation, the little frightened tyrant who built a mythology out of curtains because his actual soul lacked the architecture for grandeur.
He takes one slow breath and smiles again, but now it is all teeth.
“You will regret this.”
I shrug. “Probably. My life is very consistent that way.”
“I can be patient.”
“That’s the first funny thing you’ve said all night.”
His gaze drifts, just once, toward the inner corridor leading deeper into contestant housing. Family wing is not visible from here. Neither is the lounge. But the implication is enough. He doesn’t have to say the name. We both know which fear he is trying to touch.
“You won’t touch them,” I say.
Mysk’s brows rise. “Won’t I.”
And there it is. No more polite dance. No more pretending the conversation is only about me.
I step toward him again, slower this time, making sure every word lands exactly where I want it.
“Listen carefully. If anything strange happens tomorrow—anything—if a route glitches wrong, if security turns lazy in the wrong corridor, if somebody so much as breathes toward the family sector with your cologne on them, I won’t wait for proof. I will come straight through you.”
The Odex at the door tense, but Mysk lifts one finger without looking and they hold. He studies me for a long second, perhaps recalculating whether the threat in front of him is still useful as a debtor or only as an obstacle.
Then he smiles thinly. “Fatherhood has made you melodramatic.”
“Fatherhood has made me efficient.”
That lands. I can tell because something in his face cools into true dislike, stripped of the theatrical pleasure he usually takes in our exchanges.
“Very well,” he says. “Keep your principles. Keep your romance. Keep your touching little family ideal. Tomorrow, when the costs arrive, remember that I offered elegance.”
He turns toward the door.
I don’t move.
At the threshold he pauses and looks back over one shoulder. “You should sleep if you can, Bronwyn. Finals are exhausting. Regret more so.”
Then he is gone, the Odex filing out after him in a wall of muscle and old blood smell and boot-thuds heavy enough to vibrate faintly through the floor. The service door seals with a hiss that sounds far too neat after a conversation like that.
For several seconds I just stand there listening to the silence he leaves behind.
Then I breathe.
Once.
Twice.
The prep bay smells different now, or maybe I do.
Adrenaline, anger, the metallic edge of almost-violence.
My palms ache. I look down and realize I have clenched them hard enough for the nails to mark crescents into the skin.
Somewhere outside, a lift passes with a low mechanical rumble.
The compound keeps moving. Doesn’t it always.
The machine never pauses just because one man’s life has become more dangerous.
I slip a hand into my pocket and feel the fossil Jesse gave me.
The stone’s rough edge anchors me instantly.
All right.
Mysk is here. Mysk is serious. Mysk thinks the final can be manipulated and that I am still enough of the man I used to be to accept that offer when pressed hard enough.
He is wrong.
But wrong men with money and access remain dangerous.
Which means the rest of the night is no longer theoretical.
I need to move. Quietly. Fast. I need to verify whether his entry was a one-time breach or evidence of a compromised access route.
I need to decide whether telling Tilda everything now would help or only fracture the focus we need tomorrow.
I need to warn someone—but not just anyone.
Production would bury it if it threatened the event.
Compound security might already be blind in selective directions.
Brautigaum would probably turn a crime alert into a sponsorship slogan.
My jaw tightens.
No. I cannot assume the system will save us. That is the first rule. The second is even simpler: if Mysk wants tomorrow to become chaos, then tomorrow stops being a game.
I kill the diagnostics screen, unlock the prep bay’s emergency schematic overlay again, and start walking.