AllFreeNovel
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There was a chorus of disappointed sighs as hundreds of perfectly good images were ruined by the action. Sure, we were murderers and villains, but society still had some decorum.
It was a move that brought a genuine smile to my face.
Many tried to get us to stop for interviews as we passed, but Vic was on a mission now. Her mask had already slipped, and she wasn’t keen to fix it back in place. The only thing that stopped us was a white van that’d pulled up right to the end of the red carpet.
Men with guns—not just guns, fucking semi-automatic assault rifles—stood aside the open doors, motioning for us to get inside.
I stepped in front of Vic protectively, not that I stood any chance against people armed like that.
“Get in,” one of them ordered. “They want to talk.”
“Who’sthey?” I asked, squaring my shoulders.
The taller man looked me up and down like I was some kind of joke.
“You know very well whotheyare,” the other spat. “Get in.”
“Fine, fine.” Vic walked forward with a sigh, “I knew it was too good to be true.”
* * *
“You’re fucking joking, right?” I growled, slamming my hand down on the table. “Not only did you tank our ratings, but you really thinkfifty-kis gonna be what settles this for us?”
The man at the front of the long, polished table twisted in his chair with a sigh.
An hour.
It’d been a fucking hour since they dragged us to the financial district, forced us into an elevator with yet another set of armed guards, and led us to a fancy conference room with a single suited man sitting at the end of a long oval table.
He was in his mid-forties, with salt and pepper hair, someone the entire fucking world knew all too well. Tristan Wilde, CEO of The Company, and the richest person in theworldby several hundred billion.
His picture had been splashed on every single magazine, newspaper, and social media website since he took over for his mother five years ago.
He has yet to have a single scandal and has been named the richest person in the world multiple times over.
He was practically untouchable.
“It’s more than fair,” he said, giving us that stare that I had a feeling got him into this room in the first place.
“It’s fuckingrobbery,” Vic snarled.
There was no hiding how much these games made this man. Hell, the profit it made for the entire country was such an inflated, far-out number that it was laughable.
People paid good money to see the games from their smart devices. The people were enraptured. They could act horrified in public, spew crap about how the games needed to be stopped, but in the darkness of their room where no one could see them, they were the same type of people to drop hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on stream add-ons.
Things like channel switching, highlighted comments,gifts, all of it costs money, and the games took a majority of it.
But that’s just viewers. The thing that was the most valuable?
Their attention.Ads were running non-stop on streams, there wasn’t even a premium option to turn them off. And with the whole world watching… who wouldn’t want in on it?
“Then, pray tell, what will make you satisfied?” he asked.
“Killing Hiram is non negotiable,” Vic says. “On top of that, we need way more than you’re offering. You think we haven’t seen our viewership?”
There was silence, and then the idea hit me.Perfect.We had seen our viewership. We’d watched as they climbed and climbed and climbed. People couldn’t look away, not with the show we were providing.
“Give us all the ad spend from our streams and half of all future spend whenever our faces are shown,” I ordered.
