Chapter 7: Chapter 7
The words on the comm-slates screen seemed to pulse with a malevolent light. Seduce my brother. Secure a tangible proof. Immediate. Luke stared until the letters blurred into black worms crawling across the glass. The physical ache from Leo, the psychic vomit from the performance, the cheap-whiskey and cheaper-sex haze—it all condensed into a single, cold point in his mind.
No.
The word was quiet, absolute. It didn’t feel like rebellion; it felt like the last functioning piece of a machine clicking into place. Elara had used his love for Leo as a lever. She had used his fear for Will as a choke chain. She had turned his own body into a weapon against itself in a filthy bathroom. But this command presumed a passive, endless absorption of her will. It presumed he had no core left to resist.
He did. It was small, shattered, and currently smeared with guilt and other men’s sweat, but it was there. He would not let Kya be another tool turned against him. He would not become the pawn in her forced seduction. He pushed himself off the wall, his body protesting. He had a plan. It was a terrible plan, born of exhaustion and despair, but it was his.
First, he needed to not be found. The palace was a labyrinth of old stone and older secrets. He thought of the Royal Game Room, but that was Elara’s domain tonight. The gardens were too exposed. His own apartments were a trap.
He went to the only person he thought might be left untouched, or at least, angrily neutral: Will. He moved through the servants’ passages, the narrow, unadorned arteries of the palace, feeling the chill of the stone through his thin formal jacket. He arrived at the door to the small suite granted to Will, a space that always smelled of hemp string and citrus oil.
He knocked softly. No answer. He tried the handle; it was unlocked.
Will was inside, but he wasn’t alone. Kya was there. They stood close in the centre of the room, locked in a fierce, silent embrace. Not romantic. Desperate. Will’s face was buried in her shoulder, his body shaking. Kya held him, her eyes open over his shoulder, sharp and dry and fixed on Luke as he entered. Her expression wasn’t surprised; it was calculating, reassessing.
So she had come here first. To leverage Will, perhaps. To gauge his state. To prepare.
Will pulled back, saw Luke, and the vulnerability on his face hardened into a mask of pure contempt. “Get out.”
“I need to speak to Kya,” Luke said, his voice steadier than he felt.
“You’ve done enough speaking,” Will spat. “Your words ruin things. Get. Out.”
Kya gently disentangled herself from Will. “It’s alright, Will. I’ll handle this.” Her voice was low, measured. The street-queen assessing a new threat. “Wait for me in the practice room. I won’t be long.”
Will shot Luke a final, blistering look and left, the door slamming behind him.
The room was suddenly very quiet. Kya leaned back against Will’s cluttered worktable, crossing her arms. She still wore her performance clothes—tight black leather trousers, a simple tank top. She looked like a blade resting in its scabbard.
“Elara sent you a command,” Luke stated.
“She sends everyone commands,” Kya replied, her eyes never leaving his. “Comes with the territory of having a soul, apparently.”
“You don’t have to do it.”
A faint, bitter smile touched her lips. “You think I want to fuck you, Prince? After what you just let happen to Leo? You think the idea turns my stomach any less than it turns yours?”
“Then don’t.”
“The command has a penalty for non-compliance,” she said, her voice dropping. “It’s not spelled out. It never is. But the last person who publicly defied her was that junior diplomat from the Southern Reach. He was found floating in the Silver Canal two days later. His death was ruled an accident. It wasn’t.”
“I know the stakes,” Luke said, stepping closer. The air between them was charged, not with attraction, but with the deadly static of mutual survival. “I’m not asking you to defy her. I’m telling you I will defy her. You can report that. You can tell her I saw the command, and I refused you. That I’m resisting.”
Kya studied him, her head tilted. “Why? You’ve rolled over for every other order. You signed the Glick revocation. You made Leo play that song. You watched Rowen drop the ring. Why draw the line here? Because your precious pride can’t take being a target instead of the weapon?”
“Because it’s the only move I have left that’s mine,” he said, the raw honesty of it startling them both. “She’s taken everything else. Let her take this because I choose not to give it, not because you managed to pry it loose. Tell her I’m broken, grieving, revolted. Tell her whatever you want. But we don’t have to do this.”
He saw the conflict in her eyes. The fierce loyalty to her band, to Will and the shattered Leo, warred with the instinct for self-preservation. Elara didn’t just target individuals; she targeted connections. Refusing the command might save Kya, but it might also bring Elara’s focus directly onto Will.
“She’ll just find another way,” Kya said finally. “A worse way. For me. For him.”
“Maybe,” Luke conceded. “But this way, she doesn’t win this. We deny her this specific, petty conquest. It’s a small thing.”
“Small things are all we have left,” Kya murmured, almost to herself. She pushed off the table. “Alright. We resist. But it has to look attempted. I can’t walk back to her and say you just said no. She’ll know I didn’t try. There has to be… evidence of an effort.”
Luke understood. Theatre. The foundation their world was built on. “What do you need?”
“A struggle. A rejection. Something she can see.” Kya’s gaze swept over him, pragmatic. “My lip needs to be split. Or my cheek bruised. You’re a distraught, violent prince who lashed out when a commoner tried to seduce him. That’s a story she’ll believe.”
The cold logic of it was impeccable. “I’m not going to hit you, Kya.”
“Then it won’t work.” She stepped right up to him, into his space. She smelled of stage-sweat and leather. “Do it. Make it good. Then get the hell out of here and go somewhere very, very public and very drunk. Be seen. Alibi yourself.”
He felt the weight of the request. Another violent act to layer upon the others. But this one would be a choice. A collaboration. He nodded, his jaw tight.
“Okay.”
“Make it the cheek. Better for staging,” she said, turning her head to present the clean line of her face. “And for fuck’s sake, don’t pull the punch.”
Luke balled his fist. He thought of the Archivist’s stamp, of Rowen’s smirk, of Leo’s hollow eyes on stage, of the copper coin. He channelled all of it not into rage at Kya, but into the motion. He swung.
The crack of his knuckles against her cheekbone was a sickening, solid sound. Kya’s head snapped to the side. She staggered back a step, her hand flying to her face. When she looked back, her eyes were watering with the shock of pain, but they were clear, focused. A thin trickle of blood seeped from the corner of her mouth. She dabbed at it with her fingers, looked at the crimson smear.
“Good,” she said, her voice slightly thickened. “That’ll sell. Now get out. Go to the Rose and Thorn tavern in the low city. Be seen brawling or weeping or both. I’ll send my report in an hour.”
He didn’t thank her. There was no thanks for this. He simply left, the bones of his hand throbbing in time with his heartbeat.
He followed her instruction. He went to the Rose and Thorn, a rowdy, smoke-filled pit where his face was known but his title was often ignored. He bought a bottle of the roughest gin they had and took it to a shadowed corner. He didn’t have to fake distress; it radiated from him like a fever. He drank until the world softened at the edges, until the memory of Leo’s broken voice and Kya’s head snapping back blurred into a single smear of pain.
He was loudly, messily drunk when a pair of city watchmen, clearly tipped off by someone, found him. They were deferential but firm. “Your Highness, your father requests your return to the palace. It’s… unseemly.”
He let them haul him up, putting on a show of belligerent resistance, slurring curses about heartbreak and betrayal. They half-carried him through the tavern, a perfect spectacle of princely downfall. The whispers followed him out into the night.
They delivered him not to his father, but to the doors of his own apartments. He stumbled inside, the act falling away, leaving only the genuine, staggering exhaustion. He made it to his bedroom, to the edge of his vast, cold bed, and sat down, his head in his hands.
The comm-slates buzzed on his nightstand. He didn’t want to look. He looked.
A message in the group thread. From Kya.
Kya: Player: Kya. Command: Seduce the Crown Prince. Proof: Attempt made and physically rebuffed. Subject is in extreme emotional distress, volatile, and has retreated to low city tavern. Recommend further commands leverage his current state of instability. Asset not secured.
There was a pause. Then, Elara’s response.
Elara: Noted. Inefficient. Player status: WARNING. Accumulated deficiency may incur recompense.
It wasn’t praise, but it wasn’t a failure for Kya. She had survived the round. And he had resisted. A small, hollow victory in a war of attrition.
He was about to drop the device when a new, private message flashed, from an unknown sender. The header was a string of numbers. He opened it.
It was a video file. Grainy, dark, but clear enough. It showed the hallway outside the Jade Serpent’s restroom. It showed him, dishevelled, following the guardsman inside. A time-stamp in the corner ticked forward. Ninety-seven seconds later, it showed the guardsman leaving, adjusting his uniform. Then, three minutes after that, it showed Luke emerging, his face ashen, his steps unsteady.
The message below the video contained only five words: The game sees everything, Prince.
Luke’s blood turned to ice. It wasn’t enough to play the rounds Elara dictated. The game was the entire board. Every secret, every shame, every desperate, hidden transaction was a piece in play. His resistance tonight was just another move on a board he couldn’t even see.
He had planned to resist Kya. And he had. But as he sat in the crushing silence of his room, the phantom taste of gin and vomit in his mouth, the ghost of the guardsman’s thrusts in his muscles, and the digital eyes of the unseen videographer burning into his soul, he understood a new, more terrible truth.
Resistance was just another type of play. And the game was infinite.
And the game was infinite.
It was Will’s comm-slates that buzzed next, a sharp, insectile vibration against the drum machine he’d been mindlessly disassembling. The practice room was a tomb of discarded sound, reeking of ozone from overloaded amplifiers and the sour tang of spilled beer. He stared at the device, his hands stained with grease and the phantom feel of Leo’s shaking shoulders.
He already knew. News travelled through the palace’s nervous system faster than light. Leo had been broken on stage. Luke had vanished into the low city. Kya had come back with a split lip and a warning in her eyes. He thumbed the screen open, his heart a dull, aching stone in his chest.
Elara: Player: Will. Command: You will provide sexual relief to Leonard Glick within the next 12 hours. The act must involve penetration. Proof: Audio verification. Use your comm-slates to record a minimum of sixty seconds of unambiguous activity. Submit the file. Ensure he is a vocal participant.
Will’s breath left him in a sudden, painful rush. He read it twice, three times. The clinical phrasing made it worse. Provide sexual relief. Like he was a fucking service droid. Unambiguous activity. Vocal participant. She wasn’t just demanding a fuck. She was demanding he make Leo perform again, in the most intimate way possible, and then hand her the recording.
His first, white-hot reaction was to find Elara and smash the device into her smiling face. His second, cold and slithering, was understanding. This was the penalty for Kya’s “inefficiency.” This was the recompense. Elara had failed to get to Luke directly, so she was going through the people he loved, turning their comfort into a commodity, their affection into a task.
Leo was in no state for this. He was a raw nerve, a collapsed star of humiliation and anger. The idea of going to him, not out of love or shared grief, but to execute a command… It was a new kind of violation.
But the alternative was unthinkable. The warning was clear. Accumulated deficiency may incur recompense. If he refused, what would she take? His place in the band? His family’s precarious standing in the low city? Kya’s safety? She would break something else, something just as precious.
He found Leo in the abandoned solarium, a glass-walled room now choked with the shadows of dead plants. He was sitting on the dusty flagstones, back against a withered orange tree, the bottle of gin from backstage now three-quarters empty. He didn’t look up as Will entered.
“Go away, Will.”
“I can’t.” Will’s voice sounded foreign to him.
“Everybody else has.” Leo took a swig, the liquid sloshing. “Luke ruined me. My father’s packing our shame into trunks. You should run, too. I’m fucking poison.”
Will knelt in front of him, the dust puffing up around his knees. He took the bottle from Leo’s loose grip and set it aside. “You’re not poison.”
Leo’s laugh was a dry crack. “Then what am I?”
“You’re my friend.” The lie was necessary, and it tasted like ash. “And you’re hurting. Let me… let me be here for you.”
Leo’s eyes, bloodshot and impossibly weary, finally focused on him. “I don’t want to be talked to. I don’t want to be understood.” He leaned forward, his breath sour with gin and despair. “I just want to feel something that isn’t this. Can you do that? Can you just make me feel something else?”
It was an opening, sickeningly perfect. Will’s comm-slates felt like a lodestone in his pocket. He reached out, cupping Leo’s cheek, his thumb brushing the tear track he hadn’t known was there. “I can try.”
He leaned in and kissed him. It wasn’t like their past kisses, the playful, tipsy things born of shared laughter and Luke’s delighted encouragement. This was desperate and searching, a mouth trying to swallow a scream. Leo responded with a sudden, hungry violence, his hands fisting in Will’s shirt, pulling him closer as if he wanted to climb inside him.
“Yeah,” Leo gasped against his mouth. “Just like that. No thinking.”
They wrestled with clothes in the dusty half-light, a frantic, graceless struggle. Buttons tore. Fabric ripped. Will’s mind split in two. One part was here, feeling the heat of Leo’s skin, the desperate clutch of his hands, the terrible need pouring off him. The other part was already in the future, listening to the recording this would become, imagining Elara’s cold review of the audio file.
He got Leo onto his back on the cold flags, the dead leaves crunching beneath them. He was naked now, pale and slender in the murky light, his cock hard against his stomach. Will fumbled with his own trousers, his fingers clumsy. He had a packet of lubricant in his wallet, a habit from life with Luke. He tore it open with his teeth.
“Just fuck me,” Leo begged, his voice ragged. “Don’t be sweet. Don’t be anything. Just get inside me and make it stop.”
Will coated himself, the gel cold. He positioned himself, pushing Leo’s thighs apart. He met his eyes. “I need you to be loud, Leo.”
It was a subtle nudge, the first step of the betrayal. Leo just nodded, his head falling back, exposing the long line of his throat. “I won’t be quiet.”
Will pushed in. Leo was tight, tense, still raw from Luke’s angry taking hours before. He hissed, his body arching, his nails digging into Will’s forearms. “Fuck… fuck…”
Will began to move, setting a deep, relentless rhythm. Each thrust was an act of violence and consolation, a physical scream to match the one trapped in Leo’s chest. He bent his head, biting at Leo’s shoulder, leaving marks that would bloom purple and blue. “Is this what you want?” he grunted, the words torn from him.
“Harder,” Leo choked out, his heels digging into Will’s back. “Don’t you fucking hold back. Use me.”
So Will did. He slammed into him, the sound of their bodies meeting a wet, brutal slap that echoed in the glass cavern. He fucked him with a focused, driving intensity, trying to lose himself in the mechanics of it, in the sheer physical overwhelm. Leo’s cries were raw, unfiltered, a chaotic mix of pain and catharsis. He chanted filthy, broken phrases. “Yes… right there… make me feel it… make me forget…”
Will’s hand snaked between them, fisting Leo’s cock, stroking him in time with his thrusts. It was crude, efficient. Leo’s breath hitched, his back bowing off the ground. “Will… I’m gonna…”
“Come on,” Will urged, his own climax coiling tight in his gut. His mind was a blank static, overwhelmed by sensation and the deafening sound of Leo falling apart. “Let me hear you.”
Leo came with a shattered cry, his release hot and sudden over Will’s hand and his own stomach. The convulsive clenching of his body pushed Will over the edge. He drove in one last, final time, burying himself to the hilt as his own orgasm ripped through him, a wave of blinding pleasure that felt indistinguishable from punishment.
He collapsed on top of Leo, both of them slick with sweat and spend, breathing in ragged, discordant gasps. The silence that followed was heavier than the noise.
In that silence, Will’s other mind reasserted itself. The command. The proof. He had left his comm-slates on record, placed on a stone bench just feet away. He could only pray the microphone had picked up enough.
He shifted, pulling out slowly. Leo winced but didn’t speak, his eyes closed, his chest still heaving. Will stood on trembling legs. He walked to the bench, his movements robotic. He picked up the device. The recording timer showed four minutes and seventeen seconds. He stopped it.
He didn’t play it back. He couldn’t. He navigated to the group thread with numb fingers. He attached the audio file. He typed the required message, each letter a nail in a coffin.
Will: Player: Will. Command: Provide relief to Leonard Glick. Proof: Audio file attached. Duration: 4:17. Asset secured.
He hit send. The whoosh of the transmission seemed to suck all remaining warmth from the room. He stood there, naked, filthy, holding the device that now contained the sounds of his best friend’s broken ecstasy, a prize for a princess.
From the floor, Leo’s voice came, quiet and drained. “Thanks, Will. I… I needed that.”
Will turned. Leo had pulled his knees up to his chest, looking small and young in the gloom. He had no idea. The shame that crashed over Will was a tidal wave, so profound it nearly brought him to his knees. He had done it to protect them, to pay the debt, to keep the game’s worse horrors at bay. But as he looked at Leo, he knew with chilling certainty that he had just become another one of the horrors.
“Yeah,” Will whispered, the word scraping his throat raw. “Any time.”
He gathered his clothes, not bothering to dress. He fled the solarium, the ghost of Leo’s cries already haunting the empty halls of his mind, another file now stored in the game’s infinite archive.