The day the city learned how disposable it was began with silence.
No sirens. No warnings. Just an email sent at dawn, cold and efficient, informing eighty percent of the workforce that their services were no longer required. No severance worth the years they had bled into the concrete floors of the company. No apology. Just numbers. Just signatures at the bottom of a message that erased lives.
Her father read it twice.
Then he folded the paper with trembling hands and sat down slowly, as if his bones had suddenly remembered how fragile they were.
He had given them thirty-two years. Thirty-two years of loyalty, overtime, missed birthdays, aching lungs from factory dust, and a heart already weakened by stress and illness. And now—nothing. Discarded like a faulty machine.
She watched him cough into a handkerchief already stained with rust-colored blood and felt something inside her split open.
That was when anger stopped being an emotion and became a decision.
The protest began small. A few dozen people standing outside the steel gates of the company headquarters, holding handwritten signs with shaking hands. Mothers. Fathers. Men whose backs were bent from labor. Women whose eyes had learned how to beg without opening their mouths.
She stood among them, her voice louder than most, her sign heavier than paper should feel.
YOU STOLE OUR LIVES.
They chanted. They shouted. They cried.
By noon, the crowd had grown. By evening, the streets were flooded. News cameras came, then left. The company said nothing.
But someone was watching.
When the black vans arrived, they did not use sirens.
Men in dark clothing poured out like shadows given form. Efficient. Expressionless. They did not argue. They did not warn. They grabbed.
Hands locked around her arms. Someone screamed her name. Someone else fell. She saw her father pushed to the ground, gasping, his inhaler skidding uselessly across the pavement.
She fought.
She always would have.
That was why the blow to the back of her head felt like betrayal more than pain.
She woke underground.
The air was too cold, too clean, carrying the faint scent of metal and money. The lights above were dim and recessed, designed not to comfort but to disorient. Around her, people stirred—some crying softly, some staring blankly at nothing.
Chains were unnecessary. Fear was enough.
They called it an underground mansion.
A place carved beneath the city, hidden from laws and morality, owned by a man whose name moved through boardrooms like a curse spoken under one's breath.
Leo.
He did not arrive immediately.
First came the offers.
One by one, people were taken into private rooms and returned pale, shaking, clutching documents. Agreements. Contracts that promised silence in exchange for freedom. Never protest again. Never come close to the company. Never speak its name in anger.
One by one, they signed.
Some kissed the floor when they were released. Some could not meet her eyes.
She did not judge them.
Hunger makes cowards of saints.
When her turn came, she expected threats.
She did not expect him.
Leo stood behind a long black table, immaculate in a tailored suit that looked like it had never known dust. He was not loud. Not cruel in obvious ways. His eyes were the most dangerous thing about him—sharp, calm, endlessly patient.
He already knew her name.
He already knew her father's medical records.
"Sit," he said softly.
She did not.
That made him smile.
"You are very brave," he said. "Or very foolish."
"Your company killed my father," she replied, her voice steady despite the way her heart hammered against her ribs.
"He is alive," Leo corrected. "For now."
The words landed like a blade.
He slid the agreement toward her. The same one everyone else had signed.
"Sign," he said. "And you walk out of here. Your father receives treatment. He lives quietly. You disappear."
"And if I don't?"
Leo leaned back slightly, studying her like a problem he already knew how to solve.
"Then you stay," he said. "And you learn how small you really are."
She laughed then—a broken, desperate sound that surprised even her.
"I won't sign away my voice," she said. "I won't erase what you did."
Something shifted in the room.
Not anger.
Interest.
"Good," Leo said after a moment. "I was hoping you'd say that."
The underground mansion became her world.
Days bled into nights without meaning. She was not tortured, not beaten. That would have been too simple. Instead, she was watched. Studied. Tested.
Leo visited often.
They talked.
About power. About fear. About how companies were gods now, and people were merely offerings. He spoke of systems like living creatures—hungry, growing, impossible to starve.
"You think protest changes things," he told her once. "It doesn't. It just tells us who to remove."