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He squeezed the back of his neck, wondering how he should respond.

It had been a while since he was first sucker-punched with the idea that he both had a mate and that he would be sharing her with his closest friends.

If he had been in love with her back then, the results would have been catastrophic.

But he had been careful not to get too close to her too fast. He only occasionally sipped at her, tasting the things about her he found the most irresistible. Her sweet nature, that savage little edge that sometimes emerged, and her clever mind.

And … yes, her lips too.

And … yes, okay, also her ass, which fit even more perfectly in his hands than it did in the perpetual rotation of tights and athletic booty shorts that she cycled through.

And okay, fine , also her tongue, which tasted like cherries and chased his with the sweetest desperation, always begging for more.

But mostly, it was just her. Who she was as a person.

Watching her grow into herself at Ironside and witnessing her carve out a place for herself within their group was a thing to behold.

She did it with such gentleness, grace, and consideration.

She did it so sweetly that the others didn’t even seem to realise that she was getting her way most of the time.

He felt doubly proud to know that they had played some small part in teaching her how to stand up for herself and advocate for her own needs, even if some of them only taught by example.

She felt like a strange amalgamation of all of them, stealing little bits and pieces of them to arrange herself into the person she wanted to be.

It was blindingly clear to him, but it had been such a slow process that he had to wonder if she or anyone else even realised it.

She was utterly and entirely herself, but in the space of a single day, she would cycle through different masks that he recognised.

His own cleverness. Theodore’s natural charisma.

Moses’ biting sarcasm. Oscar’s tacitness.

Kalen’s sense of responsibility. Mikel’s drive for perfection.

Niko’s competitiveness. Kilian’s gentle concern for others.

Gabriel’s determination to deal with things on his own.

The final influence he was a little less enthusiastic about.

It was Cian’s fault that she had embraced her sexuality to such a maddening degree.

She lived to tease them, to push them to the brink.

She wanted to do it even when she didn’t really want them to break.

Something inside her seemed to love taking them to the edge of their self-control.

Maybe she didn’t even realise she was indulging her own kink in such a big way.

“Those are some big thoughts,” she whispered, dragging Elijah out of his internal tirade.

It was easy for him to get lost like that, especially when he was short on sleep, but she never tried to push him. She was resting her chin on her knee, gazing at him.

“Want to come dance with me this morning?” she eventually asked. “We can table this and talk about it later?”

He nodded, pushing up from the bed. “Meet you downstairs in twenty.”

Ed Jones wasn’t exactly a man of principle.

He had long ago sold his scruples for a mansion and a fat retirement fund, but it seemed that the time to be concerned with the state of his morality had been left so far in the past that he could no longer recall the moment things changed.

But they had. He had. He wasn’t selling scruples anymore. No. Now, it was his soul on the line.

“Ready?” Jack asked, a grim look on his face as he strolled up to the front of the building where Ed waited, sucking on a vape.

Jack had been his friend long before they became business partners.

They grew up in the same Sussex neighbourhood where they started their podcast. They were plucked out of his parents’ garage by the Ironside scouts before they were even eighteen, and from there, everything about them had been artificially cultivated.

Their accents were dulled down, becoming less “Sussex” and more “Hollywood” with every passing month. Their smiles became brighter and wider. More permanent during the day and rarer once they returned home at night .

Their partners were chosen.

They were told when to have children.

Their hobbies were handed to them.

They were intimately familiar with the decades-long contracts that Ironside liked to force on people.

They knew exactly how the game was played.

First, they were distracted by the sparkle, the glamour, the celebrities, the big houses, the parties, the drugs.

They were made to feel like the most important people on the planet.

If Ironside said they were special, the whole world believed it.

All of those parties celebrated them. All those celebrities praised them. It was intoxicating.

And then the parties changed. They began to see things they didn’t quite agree with, but everyone was participating, and these were their peers now, right?

And then, one night, they fucked up.

That was the recipe. The timeline. The progression from scouted talent to locked-in Ironside asset. It was simply how it was done. It was how the game was played.

Recruitment, love-bombing, entrapment, blackmail. Simple as that.

Ed fucked up three years after he was recruited when he passed out in one of the rooms of the Stone Dahlia. He woke up with a woman sobbing in the corner, claiming he had raped her.

He didn’t believe it at first, but then the officials showed him a video.

There was no audio. The woman seemed to be struggling, and as completely fucked up on drugs as he was, he was still managing to hold her down.

Still, he didn’t believe it. He wasn’t that kind of man.

He claimed the video was fake, that the woman was extorting him somehow, but the officials wouldn’t believe him.

He demanded the audio, but apparently, no audio had been recorded.

It took him another year to realise they were behind it all along. It was the day after he and Jack had won their third presenting award and had decided to announce their resignation. That was the day Jack fucked up.

He never overindulged like Ed did, but that day, he somehow ended up unconscious in the Stone Dahlia.

He woke up in one of the Dahlia hotel rooms, and a man was lying dead on the floor beside him, bludgeoned to death.

A man who had, in a horrible twist of not-fate, been sleeping with Jack’s wife.

Jack’s hands had been covered in blood, the presenting trophy clutched in his gore-covered fingers.

Jack —who didn’t have a violent bone in his body—had apparently murdered a man. Bludgeoned him to death in a coked-up rage.

Jack insisted he “wasn’t that sort of man,” but the Ironside officials insisted he was.

That was what Callum Rowe did. He turned you into whoever he needed you to be by any means necessary, and then he used that against you to keep you, to control you.

There was no video of Jack’s incident, but a cleaning crew happened to walk into the scene, and the officials offered to organise their silence in exchange for an extension of Ed and Jack’s employment contracts.

Another ten years.

Like puzzle pieces falling perfectly into place, forming a scene of perfect horror.

That night, Ed and Jack walked in the desert together for hours, not saying a word. The implications were too heavy to vocalise.

They were being watched. Monitored. They had only told a small handful of people about their plans to resign.

They didn’t know who to trust anymore. They didn’t know when they were being listened to or where they were being watched.

The offices? Their homes? Their dressing rooms?

They had allowed Ironside to mould them until they were Ironside, and Ironside was them , and now they didn’t know what was real anymore.

Certainly not their accents, their voices. Their friends. Their families.

The only thing they knew for certain was that they were owned.

Evil wasn’t born. It was created.

In their case, it was carefully and meticulously crafted.

That night, after hours of walking in silence, Ed finally told Jack about his own fuck up. Jack had turned to him, eyes solemn, face lined in grave sincerity. They weren’t perfect, not even close, but it needed to be said.

“You didn’t do it.” Jack said it in a whisper. The only one to ever utter those words. The only one who believed him. “But you’ll never be able to prove it.”

The brief bubble of lightness inside Ed had burst in an instant. Knowing they had been trapped didn’t make it any easier to live inside that trap. It may have even made it harder.

He eyed the broad back of his best friend as they traversed the quiet hallway now, the brush of their dress shoes against the polished marble the only sounds echoing around them.

All the hushed conversations, gentle keyboard tapping and paper-shuffling sounds were filtered behind the sound-proofed, glass-wrapped offices.

He wondered if Jack was still fighting for his soul or if he had given up a long time ago.

“You’re late,” Callum grumbled, checking the face of his Rolex as they pushed into the conference room.

They weren’t late, but okay .