THE ALGORITHM KNOWS MY NAME

Chapter 1 - The Hundredth

Los Angeles smelled like flash powder and wet stone.

I had been on my knees for fourteen seconds.

Long enough to straighten the train of Victoria Sterling's silver gown. Long enough for the cameras to keep firing at the right angle and never once dip low enough to catch the woman at her feet. Long enough to understand, with the exhausted clarity that comes right before something breaks, that this counted.

Ninety-eight had been the hotel balcony in Toronto, when Auston let a director decide I was "bad luck" and left me outside in the cold for three hours because making a scene would hurt the film.

Ninety-nine had been three days ago, in his publicist's office, when she called me "the assistant" and he had not corrected her.

This was one hundred.

It did not feel dramatic. That was the strange part. I had always thought the last one would announce itself. Trumpets. Lightning. Some visible crack in the architecture. Instead, there was only marble under my knees, the smell of expensive perfume, and Auston's hand sliding around another woman's waist while I fixed her hem like I had been born on the floor.

"Ivy," Auston said, smiling for the cameras. "A little faster."

His voice was warm enough for microphones, careless enough for me.

I looked up just enough to see him in profile: blue eyes, perfect jaw, the face America had decided meant sincerity. Best Actor this season. Beautiful in the way a polished blade is beautiful.

One year ago, in a small chapel off the Strip in Las Vegas, he had asked me to keep our marriage secret.

Just for now, Ivy. For my career. For us.

I had said yes because I was twenty-three and stupid with love, because when I was twenty-two and alone and trying to make a life out of work and cheap coffee and grief, he had looked at me like I was not already half gone. He had been the first warm thing to happen to me in years.

So when the warmth started to leave, I made myself a promise I never told anyone.

I would let him hurt me one hundred times.

Not because he deserved it.

Because once, before all of this, he had held the worst parts of me as if they were not ugly. Because I thought mercy should count for something. Because if I left at twenty, or forty, or sixty, I knew I would always wonder whether I had gone too early, whether I had walked away just before he remembered who he had been with me.

One hundred felt like a number big enough to mean I had tried.

Tonight, on the marble, with Victoria Sterling's gown in my hands, I reached it.

The heel came down before I could move mine away.

Pain arrived first as pressure, then as a sound.

A small wet click low in my left hand, the kind of sound a body is not supposed to make in public.

I went still.

Victoria did not.

"Whoops," she said brightly, smiling at the photographers. "Watch your hands, sweetheart."

She had stepped directly onto my index finger with a needle-thin stiletto. I felt the metal punch through skin and catch on bone. Then she shifted her weight, just slightly, to settle herself more comfortably against my husband.

My vision flashed white.

I did not scream. The cameras were still going off. Auston was still standing above me, one hand at Victoria's waist, guiding her into the angle that said publicly in love.

He still did not look down.

The pain was bright enough to bleach thought for a second. When thought returned, it returned the way it always did when my body stopped being trustworthy: in fragments. Impact angle. Weight shift. Bone versus shoe. Blood moving warm through the cuff of my white shirt faster than I would have guessed.

One sharp beat. Then I lost the numbers again.

Good, I thought wildly. Good. Human first.

Victoria pressed harder.

I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste iron.

"Ivy." Auston bent at the waist, but only for appearances. To anyone watching, he was whispering something intimate into the ear of the woman kneeling at his feet. His mouth barely moved. "Don't make a face. You're staff. If you ruin her dress, you can't afford the cleaning."

Then he straightened and led her away.

That was all.

No glance. No wince. No startled apology to cover the cruelty. Just the casual certainty that I would stay where he put me and continue bleeding as quietly as possible.

My hand shook when I pulled it free.

The finger was already swelling. The nail bed had gone dark under the skin. I had dislocated joints before; every dancer has. This was different. This was going to need a doctor, money, and an explanation, and I had exactly none of those things available to me in any form that did not humiliate me further.

My lanyard had slipped out when I fell. It lay half-curled on the wet marble in front of me.

**CRESCENT TALENT MGMT - IVY CARTER - PERSONAL ASSISTANT**

The letters blurred for a second.

Personal assistant.

Not wife.

Not dancer.

Not the girl who still had a terminal window open in her apartment almost every night, where numbers moved the way other people prayed.

Just staff.