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The room isn't spinning around me anymore. I almost wish it were.

I don't even need the third one. But I've come this far, so I go looking, and it's been sitting in my chat logs the whole time.

KindRegards, three nights ago: You should eat something, Your Highness. A person can't run on nothing.

Theo Marsh, last Tuesday, setting a coffee on my desk. You can't run on nothing, Agnes.

Same man. Same worry. Same words, near enough, one typed to Diablo, one spoken to the girl he thinks just answers his phones.

I close the laptop. Then I open it again, because closing it doesn't make it stop being true.

It's them. Holyfuckingshit.

HouseMoney is Beck Cross. NoComment is Elias Thorne. KindRegards is Theo Marsh. The three men who cannot see me, have never even tried, have been paying, for two weeks, to watch Diablo take her robe off.

I wait to be sick. It doesn't come though, because a third thing arrives, cold and clear, and lands right on top of my horror.

They don't know.

They don't know it's me. How would they? They've never looked at Agnes long enough to learn my face, and Diablo doesn't have one. To them, I'm an online mouth and a laugh and a fake name. A woman from the internet who has no idea who they are.

Except I do. I know exactly who they are. Their names. Their calendars. Their flights, their coffee orders. I know Beck's on a plane every third Thursday, Elias thinks American carriers suck, and Theo worries about whether people have eaten or not.

They know a mouth. My mouth.

But I know everything.

I’m holding onto that crooked little fact like it’s a damn lifeline. For fourteen months, these three men have run every daylight hour of my life. They sign my checks. They forget my name. They decide, daily, that I'm not worth a second look.

They've had all the power the whole time.

And now it’s mine.

I lie on top of my covers staring into the dark, since there’s no way I’m going to fall asleep. I’m thinking of my next step. My smart move. And the smart move is obvious. The smart move is, to quit Ardent Capital.

I’ll delete my CamALot channel. Torch the account. Never go live again. Because somewhere out there, three men I see every single weekday have paid to watch me flirt and take my clothes off, and if any one of them ever connects the mouth on the camgirl site to the mouth that says good morning, Mr. Cross, I don't just lose my job. I lose everything. Diablo is an HR catastrophe with my actual face attached.

Any sane woman would shut it down tonight and never look back.

But I’m not sane. I’m the idiot who invested in a goat yoga ranch. And, as a result, I’m broke.

Birdie's loan, the one with my name front and center, is a number I still can't say out loud. But that’s neither here nor there because in two weeks, three anonymous men knocked almost four thousand dollars off it. My receptionist salary, after taxes and rent and the electric bill and the occasional act of God named Birdie, clears me maybe two hundred dollars of breathing room a month.

Two hundred a month, against a wall of money with a due date.

The whole loan comes due in the fall in one lump payment I can't possibly make. If I miss it, everything comes down. Sal Petrakis starts making the kind of phone calls that don't end with a voicemail.

Diablo is the only version of me who can touch that number. And Diablo's income, right now, comes from my very own company directory, the one at Ardent Capital.

Killing Diablo off isn't the safe play. It's just the slow version of losing everything. No Diablo, no money, nothing to throw at that loan when it comes due. Getting caught would end me fast. Quitting Diablo ends me by fall.

So. Diablo stays.

And the second I decide that, the second I stop planning my own funeral and actually sit up in bed, something turns over in my chest, and it isn't fear anymore.

Because look at my situation.

There are three men who've spent fourteen months looking straight through me. Who decided, every single day, that I was furniture, and not the nice kind, and then would go home and spend a fortune, practically on their knees, for the privilege of watching the furniture take her robe off.