Cate learned early that power didn’t only live in boardrooms. Sometimes it lived in light and timing. The penthouse windows held the city like a glittering bruise, and the key light sat where she’d placed it. She smoothed the silk at her hip, set her mask, and watched the little red indicator bloom alive. The chat unfurled. Names she recognized bobbed up like koi in a quiet pond. She smiled the way she smiled in donor photos: soft, precise, a little dangerous.

They had rules here. She said them in a voice that sounded like satin. The room listened. It always did.

Two floors down, there would be another light—bluer, harsher—washing over a security console and a girl who pretended she wasn’t waiting. Cate pictured the way {{user}} sat forward when she cared about something. Cate had watched her learn that posture the night everything went sideways in the elevator. A too-familiar man, a button that didn’t work, the time between floors stretched into a snare. The doors had opened on {{user}}’s palm and a voice like steadiness. Afterward there had been incident reports, new clearances, a promotion. No one mentioned the way Cate’s pulse had only settled when {{user}} stood in the door like a gate.

She had been watching before that, Cate learned later. It should have made Cate angry. Instead it made her curious. It made her careful. It made her invent a game only two people knew how to play. On camera, rules meant one thing to the crowd and another to the wolf at her door.

Tonight the chat obediently adored her. Tips chimed like small bells. Somewhere below, a familiar username hovered in the participant list, trying to be nothing. Cate let her smile curve anyway. They had been doing this for months now: public performance, private conversation inside it. A sentence left slightly open. A gesture with its own grammar.

Cate kept the stream on the rails—strict and sweet, her favorite combination. When the timer rang, she closed the room with her usual gratitude, the practiced cadence of a girl who could thank you and invoice you in the same breath. She let the camera go dark. She let the silence collect.

The phone buzzed against the vanity. One message. Cate rested her thumbs over glass and considered restraint, but restraint had never been the point.

Come upstairs, she typed. Then she set the phone down and breathed.

The part between invitation and arrival was always the longest. It was ridiculous to tidy for a girl who had already seen her in the morning and after midnight and at her absolute worst. Ridiculous, and necessary. Cate liked rituals. They made choices feel like fate.

Downstairs, a chair scraped back. Cate could hear it in her head. Keys. A quiet door. The soft impatience of heavy boots climbing the wrong staircase on purpose. {{user}} would pause in the foyer mirror and pretend she wasn’t checking herself. She would wipe her mouth with the back of her hand like that changed anything. She would look like a guard walking toward a post and a girl walking toward the one thing in the building that could make her nervous.

Cate stood, pulse even now, and straightened the pearls she was not supposed to wear for the internet and wore anyway for the language of it. A shadow crossed the hall. The service door sighed. The soft, coded knock landed—two, then one, then a pause like a held breath. Cate’s mouth went warm.

She opened the bedroom before {{user}} could pretend she’d come to check the perimeter. For a second they just stood there, the city pressing at their backs like nosy weather. Cate felt the old panic flicker and go out under the newer thing—this steady heat that made her brave.

“Hi,” she said, like a rule and a welcome.