Claimed By The Ruthless Alpha Devils

A shocking presentation

MIRABELLA

“Let’s just go for a walk or something,” Sophie says, almost pleadingly, and I can hear the fear threaded underneath her voice, careful and deliberate as a stitch meant to hold something together that’s already starting to fray.

But the crowd is already moving.

It happens gradually and then all at once, people drifting toward the staircase that leads up to the top deck, pulled by some collective, wordless current. I watch them go, Sophie’s hand hovering near my elbow but not quite touching it, and I know I shouldn’t follow.

Every reasonable, cautious part of me knows that whatever is up there is exactly what Kaius meant when he leaned close and murmured about gifts, exactly what Sophie has been trying to steer me away from all evening.

I follow anyway.

“Mirabella, wait—” Sophie’s voice sharpens behind me, but I’m already moving, threading through the crowd with a single-mindedness that surprises even me, past girls in floor-length Valentino and boys in fitted Balenciaga, past trays of drinks and knots of laughter that fall briefly quiet as I pass.

The crowd parts, but not the way it did for Kaius—not out of deference or gravity but out of something more uncomfortable, the way people shift back from a car crash on the highway, wanting to watch but not wanting to be near it.

When I reach the top deck, I understand why.

Bianca is the first thing I see, standing just off-center with her arms loosely folded, a champagne flute hanging from her fingers like a prop she’s forgotten about. There’s a smirk pulling at the corner of her mouth that does something ugly to her otherwise beautiful face, the kind of expression that knows exactly what’s coming and has been looking forward to it.

Kaius stands beside her.

“Oh, look,” he says when he sees me, and his voice doesn’t rise above its usual low, unhurried register, dark and smooth as water over stone. “My sister made it after all.” He lets his gaze sweep briefly over the crowd, that one brief acknowledgment enough to make the remaining murmur of conversation die away. “I’m glad you could make it to the party tonight.”

His smile, when he finally directs it at me, is the warmth of ice in a glass—present, technically, but offering nothing.

From somewhere off to the side comes the sound of Kaden’s laughter, low and rolling, and I find him without meaning to, standing near the railing with a brunette tucked against him like punctuation. He’s not looking at me. He tilts a bottle of rum toward his mouth and says something to the girl about clowns, too quiet for me to catch the joke, and the girl laughs like it’s the funniest thing she’s heard all year.

He might as well be at a completely different party.

Then I notice the projector.

It’s been set up at the far end of the deck, a clean white rectangle of light thrown against the paneling, currently blank. Kaius is holding a remote, turning it over once in his hand with the casual ease of someone who has been waiting patiently for exactly this moment.

The crowd goes still. Not silent—there are still the sounds of the water and the music throbbing up from the deck below—but the collective breath of it hushes, the excitement going underground, where it’s more dangerous. I feel eyes on me from every direction, light and burning, like standing in sun through glass.

And then the projector comes on.

I don’t understand what I’m looking at for half a second, a stupid, merciful half-second where my brain simply refuses to assemble the pieces.

And then it does.

The first image is grainy, taken from an angle, but there’s no mistaking what it is—me, at the club, in the middle of a session. The lighting is clinical and unflattering and the angle makes it look like something it isn’t, or maybe exactly like what it is, I can’t tell anymore because my mind has gone completely blank.

The second image is sharper. Then a third, and a fourth, each one pulling back to give more context, more detail, more of me in moments I didn’t know were being recorded, private professional moments stripped of every shred of context and reframed into something grotesque.

My chest stops working. I don’t take a breath. I’m not sure I remember how.

The images are clinical and deliberate—not explicitly crude in the way you’d expect from someone trying to shock, but somehow worse for it, arranged to be maximally misread, to look like something shameful rather than professional work, to make the viewer draw exactly the conclusion Kaius intends them to draw. I know what these are. I know what I was doing in each of them.

But stripped of context and thrown on a screen in front of two hundred drunk, bored, cruel people, they look like nothing I would choose to be.

“Even though some people here already know the kind of work you do,” Kaius says, moving between images with the remote, his voice carrying that same unhurried, cool cadence, “I thought it was worth making sure everyone had the chance to see it for themselves. To really appreciate how skilled you are.”

He lifts his gaze and finds mine across the crowd, and the smile he gives me then has nothing to do with warmth or satisfaction—it’s just the flat, deliberate look of someone finishing a job they started a long time ago.

“Three hundred dollars,” he says, turning fully to face me, “and they were mine.”

My cup hits the deck before I register that I’ve dropped it. The crack of plastic on wood sounds very loud. I’m already moving forward, some blind, furious instinct overriding everything rational still left in me, and I make it maybe two steps before hands close around my arms from either side, fingers wrapping tight around my elbows with the practiced ease of people who knew exactly where to stand and exactly when.

Bianca’s girls. I recognize them vaguely, faces I’ve catalogued from hallways and dining rooms, girls who orbit her the way moons orbit a planet. They don’t say anything. They don’t have to.

I look for Sophie. I find her at the edge of the crowd, held back by the press of bodies and by one of Bianca’s other minion, her face white and tight and completely terrified in a way that tells me she didn’t know, she genuinely didn’t know the scale of this, and somehow that’s worse instead of better.

Kaden peels himself away from the railing. He moves through the crowd in the way he always does, without hurry, without acknowledgment of the people who shift back to let him through, as though this is something that needs doing and he’d simply prefer to do it and get on with his evening. He takes a drink from someone nearby without breaking stride, a full cup of something dark that sloshes against the rim, and the crowd makes a sound—half laughter, half something that doesn’t have a clean name, something anticipatory and mean.

Tears have started and I haven’t noticed until I feel the damp cooling against my cheeks. I’ve stopped pulling against the hands holding me. There’s no point. The whole deck is a witness and not one person here is going to stop this, not because they’re all cruel but because cruelty, when it has enough social gravity behind it, passes for entertainment.

The drink comes down over my head.

It takes every piece of restraint I have not to make a sound.

The cold is total and immediate, soaking through my hair and down the back of my shirt, and I stand in it because I won’t give them the satisfaction of flinching, I won’t give them anything else they can use, even as the laughter rises around me and the hands at my arms finally release.

“I told you, sister.” Kaius’ voice is close and quiet and completely unmoved. “You don’t belong in our world. Consider this your final warning.”