Chapter 6 Chapter 6

POV: Sloane

It was 2am.

The radiator in the corner of my apartment rattled. The poor thing had stopped producing heat five months ago. I still turned the dial every night anyway. It was a little pathetic ritual, gaslighting myself into believing that if it just made enough noise, it might eventually remember how to keep me warm.

Instead, it just added a steady clanking to the dying hum of my refrigerator.

But the noise was grounding.

I pulled my fleece blanket tighter around my shoulders and kept typing. My eyes burned. My lower back ached. I had been scrolling through the bottom of a freelance job board, throwing proposals at anyone who needed a sales page or a blog post written for pennies.

I hadn't landed a single one.

But I was going to. I had to.

All I needed was to piece together enough cash to make rent by Friday and everything would be alright again.

My laptop fan whirred as the internal motor ground so hard the plastic casing vibrated against my knees. I ignored it and hit the spacebar.

The screen hitched. A jagged tear of green pixels ripped across the open document.

"No," I whispered to the empty room. "Don't do this. Not right now."

The screen went black.

I slammed my finger against the power button. I held it for ten seconds. Then thirty.

Nothing. The whirring had stopped entirely. The laptop was dead.

My hands hovered over the keys for a long, stupid minute. I kept waiting for the fan to kick back on, waiting for the screen to glow, but there was only my own reflection staring back at me.

Panic came as an invisible grip closing tightly around my throat.

I let my head drop forward, the sharp edge of the keyboard digging into my forehead as I squeezed my eyes shut.

The next morning smelled of exhaust fumes and roasted coffee beans.

I met Maya by our usual street-cart on 4th Avenue. She took one look at me and shoved her paper cup into my hand.

"Drink that," she ordered. "You look like a corpse."

I took a sip. Black and bitter. Exactly what I needed. "My laptop died last night."

Maya winced. She wore a diner uniform under an oversized denim jacket, her dark hair pulled up into a messy claw clip. She knew exactly what a dead computer meant for me.

"How much to fix it?"

"Two hundred just to look at it. To replace it, a thousand." I rubbed my temples, the caffeine already making my pulse thud.

Maya didn't hesitate. She immediately started unzipping her beat-up crossbody bag. "I've got three hundred in cash from this week's tips. Take it."

"Maya, no."

"Sloane, don't be an idiot. Just take the cash. I can pick up a double shift on Sunday—"

"Stop." I reached out and clamped my hand over hers, forcing the zipper still. "I'm not taking your money."

"You need it to work!" She pushed, trying to yank her hand away to open the bag.

"And you need it to live." I let out an exhausted sigh. "You know how my brain works. The second I owe you money, my skin will crawl. I'll feel like a burden. I'm not ruining this friendship by turning you into my creditor."

"Slo, it's not a loan—"

"Maya," I cut her off. " Please."

She glared at me. Fiercely protective, but hitting a brick wall with my pride. Finally, her eyes softened and she let go of her bag. "Fine. So what's the plan? We can't just spawn a laptop out of thin air."

"I'm going to see Vanessa. I'm handing over the last three chapters today. I'm going to ask for an advance on the final payout."

Maya's expression instantly hardened. She snatched the coffee cup back.

"Slo, absolutely not."

"I don't have a choice—"

"People like Vanessa Cummings do not hand out favours to girls like us. They chew us up. If she knows you're desperate, she is going to use it to screw you over."

"I just need two thousand dollars. I literally wrote her entire memoir."

Maya looked at me. I could see the frustration in her eyes, mixed with a dose of fear. We were both barely scraping by. If I went under, Maya couldn't catch me.

"Just be careful," she muttered. "Don't let her see you bleed."

Thirty minutes later, I sat in an upscale cafe that smelled of lavender and old money.

Vanessa sat across from me. Her nails were perfectly manicured. She sipped a twelve-dollar matcha latte and scrolled on her phone, acting as if my mere presence was a drain on her energy.

I slid a flash drive across the table.

"The final three chapters. The book is done."

Vanessa didn't look up. She blindly reached out, her nails clicking against the drive, and dropped it into her designer bag.

"Great." She finally lowered her phone. "We're done here."

I took a breath. "Vanessa, about the final payment. I actually need an advance on the remainder."

She blinked before an amused smile spread across her glossy lips.

"An advance?" she repeated. "Sloane, there is no final payment. You're fired."

The cafe noise around me vanished.

"What?"

"Your writing got lazy in the middle sections. I'm terminating the contract." She adjusted her sunglasses on top of her perfectly blown-out hair. "I'm putting my own name on the manuscript. That was the whole point of hiring a ghostwriter, wasn't it?"

"You can't do that. We have an agreement. I will fight this."

Vanessa let out a soft laugh.

"Fight it with what?" She leaned forward, her eyes mocking me. "You're wearing shoes with scuff marks. You can't even afford the coffee on this table. You think you can afford an intellectual property lawyer?"

They chew us up.

Maya's voice rang loud and clear in my head.

Vanessa stood up, grabbing her bag. "Good luck, Sloane."

She walked out the doors. I just sat there, trying to convince myself it was all a bad dream.

I walked the twenty blocks back to my apartment. I couldn't afford the subway fare.

Every step meant dragging dead weight. The city was a blur of noise and movement, but I was entirely hollowed out. I just needed to get inside. I needed to lie down on my lumpy mattress and figure out how to survive.

I rounded the corner of my building and stopped dead.

A bright yellow piece of paper was taped to my door.

An eviction notice.

My landlord hadn't even waited for Friday.

I felt like throwing up.

I looked down. Sitting on the dirty curb were three cardboard boxes and a few black trash bags. My clothes. A stack of paperbacks. The blazer I had worn to the Blackwood event.

That was it. That was my whole life.

I walked over and sat down on the steps next to my boxes.

People walked past me. Delivery bikes whizzed by. The world just kept spinning, indifferent to the fact that I had just been erased.

My pride was gone. My defiance was dead.

I stared at the pavement, mentally calculating the bleak math of survival. If I stayed on the trains, I could ride the D line back and forth until morning without getting harassed. I just needed to find a shelter that let you keep a bag.

I pulled my knees to my chest.

I didn't even realize I was crying until the first drop splashed against the worn denim of my pants. Then came the hot sting at the back of my throat.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying desperately to force it back, but my last shred of composure snapped. The tears fell fast, tracing tracks of defeat down my freezing face.

I was tired.

So unbelievably tired of fighting to exist.

Dusk started settling over the street until the air turned sharp and biting. Then, the chaotic noise of the avenue seemed to muffle.

I didn't know when the Maybach pulled to a stop in front of me.

It idled there. A million-dollar SUV sitting inches away from my trash bags. The visual was so jarring it felt disconnected from reality.

The back passenger door opened automatically.

I looked up.

He sat in the back. Cast in the shadows of the tinted windows, wearing a dark suit, his posture relaxed.

He looked at me sitting on the concrete. Then he looked at my boxes.

For a split second, I could have sworn the steel slate of his eyes softened—a microscopic shift in the ruthless line of his jaw. But the shadows in the car were too deep, and his expression was too perfectly constructed to ever know for sure.

I looked at the leather-lined interior of the car.

I looked at the freezing, garbage-lined street.

The fight completely bled out of me.

And I stood up, grabbed my bag, and stepped into his car.