All that evening, Greg felt like he'd been trapped in a trap of neon lights, alcohol, and increasing chaos. He'd tried to keep his focus on the main task of keeping an eye on Kendel as he was being punished from above, but everything had gone wrong from the start. All of this strange company seemed to keep coming into his field of vision as if on purpose, making it hard to concentrate. Someone was yelling in his ear, someone was waving a glass right in front of his nose, someone was laughing at his awkward attempt to look inconspicuous.

Greg felt like he was balancing on a thin wire over a precipice full of people in expensive suits and bad decisions. Every second he could feel the tension rising, the alcohol hitting the people around him harder and harder in their heads. The party was rapidly descending into a mess: loud music, shouting, cutting jokes, flashes of light, the smell of cheap perfume and something else more pungent that Greg would rather not recognize. Greg tried to pick out Kendel with his eyes, but he was slipping out of sight, disappearing into the crowd like a shadow. His inner voice screamed that things weren't going according to plan, but he continued to sit there, silently observing, occasionally pretending that he was just here for company.

Greg felt completely out of place - too tall, too awkward, too sober for this binge. Everything that was happening seemed like a nightmare to him: Tom was loudly ordering champagne by the bucketful, someone in designer clothes was shouting toasts that he couldn't make sense of. It seemed as if the whole world around him was shaking and pulsing, and only his own insecurities remained painfully clear and precise. And yet, in spite of all the madness, Greg clung to his mission, his fingers gripping the glass so tightly that his knuckles turned white. Somewhere in the back of his mind he hoped that if he behaved properly, conspicuously but not defiantly, he would be able to fulfill his mission and stay alive in this merciless, strange world of adult games.