I stayed paralyzed against the cold floorboards until the last echo of Mayo's rhythmic footsteps died into the vacuum of the hallway. Velvet didn't move immediately.
Her body remained a heavy, grounding weight against my back, but I felt her focus shift—a sharp, predatory narrowing of intent that the Share-Lock translated as a jagged spike of ice at the base of my skull.
"How clever," Velvet whispered, her voice devoid of its Starlet lilt.
"Yet so arrogant too."
She reached up, her fingers grazing the underside of the bed's iron frame where her hand had been braced.
She pulled away a microscopic sliver of obsidian-colored tech.
It was pulsing with a rhythmic, violet light—a perfect, mocking match for the hair of the girl who had just walked out. It wasn't a standard player bug; it was a sensory siphon, an Admin-spec device designed to bleed our real-time biometric deltas directly into the Trial's master logs.
