I didn't sleep much that night, and when I did, the throne didn't come — just Ashford's face, unhurried, watching me fail to move him, over and over, until my alarm finally put me out of it.
I spent Sunday the way I usually spent the days after something rearranged the furniture in my head: quiet, useful, giving my family exactly the version of me they expected so nobody had a reason to look closer. Breakfast with my parents was the usual — my dad complaining good-naturedly about a work shift, my mom asking if I'd slept enough, both of them entirely unaware that their son had spent the previous night failing to enslave a man in a basement study across town.
"You look tired," my mom said, sliding eggs onto my plate.
"Late night with the guys," I lied, easy as breathing.
"Which guys? I feel like I haven't heard you mention Ivan or Danny in weeks."
The question landed somewhere I didn't want it to. "Just some new people I've met through the business stuff."
She didn't push, which was its own kind of mercy, and I ate in a silence that felt heavier than it should have, turning over how many versions of "the truth" I was currently juggling at a single breakfast table.
I gave Santiago a rematch on the console that afternoon, and let him win once, generously, then lost twice more legitimately, which annoyed me far more than losing to Ivan on day one ever had, because at least back then I'd had the excuse of a decade of rust.
"You're getting worse," he said, delighted, dropping his controller with the specific smugness only a younger brother can produce.
"I've had a stressful week."
"Selling chocolate that stressful?"
"You have no idea," I said, and meant it in a way he'd never understand, and he laughed like I'd made a joke.
"You've been weird lately," he added, out of nowhere, setting his controller down and looking at me with the specific, uncomfortable directness only a younger sibling ever bothers to aim at you. "Like, more than usual weird. Mom noticed too. She just doesn't say it 'cause she doesn't wanna freak you out."
"I've got a lot going on."
"The business stuff?"
"The business stuff." I kept my voice light, easy, the same register I'd used a hundred times to close a door before it opened too far. "It's a lot of responsibility. I'll be better once things settle down."
"You always say that." He picked the controller back up, already half-distracted by the menu screen, and I let the moment pass without pushing it further, filing away the fact that even my brother — fourteen years old, entirely wrapped up in his own small world of girlfriends and video games — had noticed something was different about me these last few weeks. If Santiago could see it without knowing what he was looking at, I needed to be more careful about what showed on my face at the dinner table.
I thought, watching him mash buttons with the easy, unguarded focus of a kid who genuinely had nothing on his mind bigger than whether he'd unlock the next character skin, about how much simpler that used to be for me too — not just in this life, in the one before it, back when the biggest thing keeping me up at night was whether a deadline would slip a week. I didn't miss it, exactly. But I noticed the absence of it the way you notice a missing tooth with your tongue, an emptiness that kept finding new ways to remind you it used to be full.
I called Emma in the afternoon and let her talk for twenty straight minutes about a party post-mortem — who'd hooked up, who was mad at who, whether Kyle had texted anyone an apology, which he hadn't.
"He's telling people you sucker-punched him," she said, half-annoyed, half-amused. "Which, I mean. Kind of true? But also kind of not the full story."
"Let him tell it however makes him feel better."
"You're being weirdly chill about this."
"I've got bigger things on my mind."
"Oh yeah? Like what?"
I almost told her the truth, just to see what her face would do with it — I met a man last night who can stop me from doing the one thing that's never failed me since the day I woke up in this body — and instead said, "Business stuff. Boring."
"You and your mysterious business stuff," she said, but let it go, and I found the ordinary noise of her voice strangely grounding after a night spent hitting a wall inside my own ribs.
But underneath all of it, the same four words kept surfacing, uninvited, every time I let my attention slip.
It can be stopped.
I'd built the last several months of my life on a single, unspoken assumption: that the only limits on what I could do were the limits of my own imagination and my own nerve. Every homeless man, every teacher, every armed stranger Doug had walked through my door — every single one of them had simply given way, the way water gives way to a hand pushed through it, and somewhere in that unbroken streak I'd let myself believe, quietly, without ever saying it out loud even to myself, that the streak was the rule rather than the circumstance.
Ashford had shown me, in about four seconds and without breaking a sweat, that the streak was the circumstance.
That should have scared me more than it did. Instead — and this was the part I sat with longest, cross-legged on my bed Sunday night with the porcelain mask on the desk in front of me, catching the last of the evening light along its painted stars — instead, it felt like being handed a map I hadn't known I needed. A power with no limit isn't a story. It's a cheat code, same as I'd called it myself back when this was all still new enough to be fun. A power with a wall in it, a wall I could maybe, someday, with enough leverage and enough of the right kind of practice, learn to push through anyway — that was worth working for.
I opened my laptop and started a new note, the same way I had the very first week of this life, sitting at this same desk trying to figure out what kind of business could make me rich.
Things I need, in order:
1. More information on Awakened resistance. Is it universal, or specific to trained Awakened? Ashford said "training most Awakened never bother to seek out" — implies untrained Awakened might not have the same wall.
2. A way to test #1 safely. Someone Awakened, low-stakes, expendable if it goes wrong.
3. Muscle that doesn't rely on hypnosis holding. Doug's crew is loyal because I rewired them, not because they're actually strong. If I meet someone like Ashford under worse circumstances, I need people who fight, not just people who obey.
Loyalty without capability was a liability wearing the costume of an asset, and I'd built almost my entire operation on exactly that trade so far, because it had been easy and because nothing had ever pushed back hard enough to expose the weakness in it. Ashford had pushed back. I didn't intend to let the lesson go to waste.
I stared at the third line a long moment before I kept typing.
4. Yankovic. Doug still owes me that meeting.
That last one, at least, was already in motion, and it was the one thing on the list I could actually push forward on a Sunday night instead of just thinking about. I picked up the burner phone, the one with the number Doug called on, and typed out a message before I could talk myself into waiting until it felt more comfortable.
[Jester: Any word from your boss? I was patient once. I'm less interested in being patient a second time.]
The reply came back faster than I expected, which told me either Doug slept with that phone in his hand or the hypnosis had left something in him permanently attuned to a message from me the way a dog's ear turns toward a specific whistle.
[Doug: She's agreed to come herself. Wednesday night. She wants to see the operation in person before she commits real money — no offense, but she doesn't trust reports secondhand, even mine.]
[Jester: None taken. Tell her to come to the new location. I'll have it ready.]
[Doug: She's bringing two of her own people. I told her you'd want to know in advance rather than be surprised.]
I sat with that for a second, weighing it. Two of her own people meant two more sets of eyes on my operation, two more variables in a room I was going to want fully under my control before anyone walked into it. It also meant Yankovic wasn't fully convinced Doug's account of me was accurate, which was smart of her, and which meant I was dealing with someone who thought instead of someone who simply reacted — a rarer and more useful kind of person to have across a table from you, even when it made the table itself more dangerous.
[Jester: Good. Bring them. I like an audience.]
I meant it, too, in a way that surprised me a little when I noticed it. Six weeks ago the idea of a crime boss walking into my warehouse with backup would have put a very reasonable fear in my chest. Tonight, coming off the single most humbling twenty minutes of my second life, it barely registered as a threat worth losing sleep over. Yankovic's people had guns. Ashford's world had walls I couldn't push through yet. Those were two very different categories of danger, and I was starting to understand, with the cold clarity of a man recalibrating a map after finding out the scale was wrong, that I needed to stop treating them like the same kind of problem.
I closed the laptop, set the porcelain mask carefully back into its box, and lay back against my pillow with my hands behind my head, running the last week over one more time before I let myself sleep.
Kyle, frozen mid-swing in front of a crowd. A raven-feathered woman reading me like a book from across a room. A wall behind a stranger's eyes where a door should have been. A crime boss agreeing, for the first time, to look me in the face instead of sending someone in her place.
Recalculating, I thought, and meant it the way you mean it standing at the base of a mountain you'd assumed, right up until this exact moment, was a hill.
I thought, too, about how strange it was that the fear I should have been feeling kept arriving late and leaving early, like a guest who couldn't commit to the party. A wall in my chest. A woman who could read me from across a room. A man who could break necks with a thought. Any one of those, laid out plainly on paper, should have been enough to make a reasonable person reconsider the entire direction of his life. Instead I lay there cataloguing them like assets — obstacles, sure, but obstacles were just problems that hadn't been solved yet, and I had never once in either of my lives met a problem I didn't eventually find a way around. I wondered, distantly, whether that confidence was earned or simply the last habit left over from thirty-one years of never having lost anything that mattered enough to teach me otherwise. It occurred to me, right before sleep finally took me, that Ashford had said almost exactly that — that recklessness feels like the only proof you have that you actually matter — and that I hadn't disagreed with him in the moment because some part of me had already known he was right, and had decided it didn't care.
I fell asleep faster than I expected to, and if the throne came for me that night, I didn't remember it in the morning.