"David, come on—"

"I'll pay you. Actual money. Right now."

"I'll do your fucking homework for a month."

"I'll tell you what really went down at the Ashford gala—the real version, not the sanitized one."

David raised one hand. Composed. Serene. The quiet arrogance of a man sitting on a royal flush while the table thinks they're still playing Go Fish with jokers wild.

"I'll tell you what's in it," he said, each syllable slow, deliberate, rolled around his tongue like vintage Bordeaux he was in no hurry to swallow, "if you swear—on your mothers' lives—not to breathe a word."

Mark, Jonathan, and Tony-or-Tommy-or-who-the-fuck-ever exchanged glances. Grave nods. Solemn as pallbearers.

"Promise."

"Not a soul."

"Secret dies with us."

David bit the inside of his cheek to keep the laugh from escaping.

Who were they fooling?

Their mouths leaked at exactly the same pressure as his—which is to say, zero containment, zero remorse. The four of them had been fused at the gossip gland since freshman orientation precisely because they were all terminal addicts to other people's ruin. "Don't tell anyone" wasn't a boundary.

It was liturgy. A sacred performative bullshit they recited before the real sacrament began.

Their private signal for go ahead and skywrite this bitch across the athletics field in flaming jet fuel.

They knew it. He knew it. They knew he knew it.

Tradition. Practically holy.

"Alright." David glanced left, right—pure theatre, utterly pointless in an empty corridor, but David fed on drama the way plants feed on sunlight and normal people feed on oxygen. "Come here. Closer. Can't risk some stray ear catching this."

He herded them toward the nearest classroom door. Closer. Closer still. His final steps measured, deliberate, positioning them with surgical precision—exactly outside that particular door.

They didn't notice it. Of course they didn't. They were too busy drooling over the promise of carnage.

"So." David leaned in, voice dropping to the intimate rasp of a man confessing war crimes over cognac. "Renee Harlow caught Derek with something cataclysmic. Not career-ending. Existence-ending. The kind of dirt that makes people liquidate assets, burn passports, and relocate to non-extradition islands under new faces."

"What kind of—"

"She called him to confirm. Professional courtesy, the way she does. Gives them one last chance to grovel before the guillotine drops."

"That's… almost decent of her?"

"It's not decent, Marcus. It's sport. She shows them the jaws closing before she lets them snap shut. Heightens the terror." David's eyes glittered like wet obsidian. "And she played him the evidence. Five separate clips. All saying the same thing."

"Five?"

"Of what?"

"What the fuck did he do?"

David let the silence stretch. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Watching their faces contort—curiosity curdling into desperation, desperation into physical agony at the withheld knowledge. Beautiful. Exquisite. He could watch this particular torture forever, the way junkies watch the needle being prepped.

"Boys." He shook his head, slow, almost mournful. "Boys. Are you actually this fucking dense? Did your last two functioning neurons finally fuck off and die? Have you somehow forgotten who Renee Harlow is?"

"She's a journalist—"

"She is not a journalist." David's voice dropped to something colder, quieter, more lethal. "She is the journalist. Woman doesn't need money—she has more than a god. Legacy families flinch when her name crosses a dinner table. She's buried C-suite titans. Made senators resign in tears. Forced actual billionaires to sob on live television like toddlers who dropped their ice cream. Do you comprehend what I'm telling you?"

"I… yeah?"

"No. You clearly don't. So let me make it crystalline." David raised one finger like a blade. "Whatever she has on Derek? That isn't the story. That isn't even the teaser. That's just the bait."

"Bait?" Jonathan's brow furrowed so hard his eyebrows nearly met in the middle. "Bait for what?"

David smiled.

The smile of a man who has already won and is now deciding how much to enjoy the victory lap.

Began to tap on his phone.

Mark, Jonathan, and Tony-Tommy-whatever held their collective breath. Here it was. The moment. The undisputed sovereign of scandal was about to unveil his crown jewel, his One Ring, his sanctified chalice of pure, uncut gossip—

David's Samsung Z Fold unfolded with a crisp, expensive click. The screen bloomed wide, bright, obscenely high-resolution—like someone had stolen a cinema projector and shrunk it into a pocket. The kind of device existed solely to remind everyone else how far behind they were.

He tapped play.

"Okay." David slipped into the cadence of a match analyst dissecting fourth-quarter footage—absurd, theatrical, and somehow pitch-perfect. "This is their second sit-down. Watch here—" He jabbed the screen. "She's queuing up video number three. Those evidence bags? Tangible proof of something Derek did to a girl. Details still fuzzy, but look at his face. Man's watching his own autopsy being performed live."

The footage rolled. Derek's posture crumbled frame by frame: defiance bleeding into defeat bleeding into the frantic, darting calculation of a rat that's just realised the trap has teeth.

"Now here—" David scrubbed the timeline forward with surgical precision "—is where it turns exquisite. Audio's pristine. Listen."

Derek's voice crackled through the speaker, tinny but razor-sharp:

"Fine. I'll give you everything on Brett and Anderson's little… thing. I don't know what the fuck you want with it, but if you swear not to run the story on me—"

He pushed back from the table. Started to rise. Started to walk.

Renee's hand lashed out and clamped around his forearm like a vice wrapped in silk.

"Where the fuck do you think you're going?"

"What more do you want? You said you needed dirt on Brett and Anderson. I'm giving it. At my convenience."

Her laugh sliced through the speaker—clean, crystalline, vicious enough to shave bone. The laugh of someone who has heard every plea, every threat, every breakdown, and long ago stopped finding them novel.

"You legacy spoilt brats are all the same, huh. Why would I settle for scraps when I already have the entrée?" Her tone dropped to velvet over razor wire. "I want everything. Every filthy secret. Every felony. Every sin they've buried so deep they think the dirt forgot. Or—"

She leaned in, voice softening to something almost maternal "—I can have one other little Legacy lapdogs deliver it instead with a few threats, and by breakfast tomorrow you'll be trending with those two for all the wrong reasons. The kind that follow you to new countries and new names."

"Fuck you!"

The outburst detonated. A torrent of venom—bitch, cunt, manipulative whore—slurs stacking like cordwood, every syllable soaked in the impotent rage of a boy who'd finally understood he was prey.

Renee stood motionless. Smiling. Patient. The way a predator waits out the thrashing of something already bleeding out.

When the tirade finally guttered—Derek panting, flushed, hollowed—:

"Are you finished?"

Silence. Thick. Suffocating.

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