Page 88 of Bloom in Darkness

“Fine,” I mutter as he follows us upstairs with the kit, none of us bothering to argue anymore about who’s taking care of whom.

Astra

Three days after Rourke brings a gun into the Forge and charges me, I sit in a hotel lounge with a folder thick enough to qualify as a weapon and stare at a nine-dollar glass of water. Caelan told me this morning Lorcan finally had the records he needed to put a real number on the debt.

I told him he wasn’t paying some mystery number and coming home to announce I was free. He agreed immediately, which was disappointing because I’d prepared at least another minute of arguing.

Now Bryn’s on my left, Caelan’s on my right, Forrest and Lorcan are across from us, and Sabine’s empty chair waits at the end of the polished table. A man I don’t know sits two tables away with a tablet and a tiny cup of coffee. He looked at Caelan when we walked in. Caelan looked back.

I lean toward Caelan, nodding at the unfamiliar Alpha two tables away. “Who is that?”

“Later.” He takes another drink like that ends the subject.

“I hate when you do that.”

“I know.”

Before I can keep pushing, Bryn slides a pastry in front of me. “Eat.”

I look between him and Caelan. “I’m busy being suspicious.”

Bryn nudges the plate closer. “You can manage both.”

Sabine arrives seven minutes late in a dark suit and heels that click sharply across the floor. She notices the fading bruise near my wrist, looks once at Bryn, then chooses the chair farthest from him.

She sets a leather folder on the table. “I assume this can be quick.”

Lorcan opens his own folder. “That depends on how attached you are to the numbers you brought.”

Sabine pauses at that before pushing a statement toward him. “Astra’s current balance, including missed bookings, contract breach penalties, event losses, wardrobe replacement, administrative costs, and legal expenses incurred because of outside interference.”

I glance at the total and laugh once. I can’t help it. “You found another eight grand.”

“Actions have costs,” Sabine says.

Bryn shifts beside me, so I put my hand on his thigh before he can say anything. Lorcan pulls the statement closer and starts at the top.

He refuses to let Sabine turn the meeting into an argument. She tries to jump ahead twice, and every time he brings her back to a line number, a date, an invoice, or the lack of one. A cancellation fee for a room I never worked disappears first. Then a costume charge.

I stop Lorcan with one finger pressed to the costume charge. “That one was promotional. Sabine told me the designer comped it because I wore it in the launch photos.”

Sabine folds her hands. “The club fronted the expense.”

Lorcan checks the invoice before turning it toward me. “The club paid forty percent of what you were charged.”

Heat crawls up my neck as I remember working eleven nights in a row that month only to watch the balance barely move afterward. “Take it out.”

Lorcan draws a line through the charge. “Already did.”

The longer we go, the angrier I get. I remember shoes I was required to wear and never got to keep, an advance I spent months paying down that appears again under prior adjustment, money taken before I ever saw it. None of it feels surprising anymore. It just feels deliberate.

Forrest turns his laptop toward me when Lorcan asks him to. A total sits at the bottom of a spreadsheet, and I stare at it until the digits blur.

“That’s what I paid?”

Forrest nods. “That’s what we can document. Sixty-eight thousand three hundred and change.”

My stomach turns. “And I still supposedly owed almost ninety?”