Jordan whistled as he walked back to his Civic.

The night air hit his face, warm and thick with the smell of Cane’s chicken from across the lot, and he thought about nothing in particular. Lila was sexy. Obviously. The corset alone could cause traffic accidents, and the way she’d sprawled across that bed would have broken a lesser man’s resolve like a dry twig. But Jordan McKnight was not a lesser man. Jordan McKnight was a guy who’d learned, painfully and expensively, that mixing business with pleasure before the ink dried on contracts was the fastest way to torch everything you’d built.

Besides, she’d been testing him. He wasn’t stupid.

The fake drunk act. The wandering hands in the car. The calculated vulnerability designed to see if he’d take the bait and prove himself just another predictable predator. He’d clocked it somewhere around the second shot of soju, when her pupils stayed too sharp for someone supposedly wasted, when her balance never actually wavered even in those platform boots that could double as murder weapons.

Lila Martinez thought all men were the same.

Jordan planned to prove her wrong by being exactly what he said he was: a guy who wanted her on his roster because she could make them both money, not because he wanted to add another notch to his bedpost. The bedpost was already getting crowded, frankly. Chloe and Kumiko kept him plenty busy, and Maya had started looking at him during clinch work in ways that suggested she might want to add bruises in locations that had nothing to do with boxing.

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

He ignored it. Probably another system update tracking some percentage he didn’t care about right now. The golden app could wait. Everything could wait. He’d done what he came to do tonight, secured Lila for Nova Network, fed his team expensive meat, and carried an ungrateful goth girl up a flight of stairs without touching anything she clearly expected him to touch.

Twenty-five dollars, he thought. She actually owes me twenty-five dollars.

He unlocked his car. Slid into the driver’s seat. The leather was still warm from the drive over, and the faint scent of Lila’s perfume lingered in the passenger seat, something dark and sweet that reminded him of Halloween stores and bad decisions.

The drive back to Cooper Garment Lofts took twenty-three minutes through mostly empty streets. Costa Mesa at eleven PM was all closed storefronts and distant neon, the occasional Uber idling at a red light, drunk couples stumbling out of bars with their arms around each other. Jordan watched them through his windshield and felt nothing except mild amusement. Three weeks ago, he would have envied them. Three weeks ago, he’d been the guy who paid for everything and got nothing, who watched other men kiss the girls he’d funded, who stood in parking lots crying while his life collapsed around him.

Now he was the guy with two girlfriends, a business, a hot springs resort he refused to think about, and a boxing coach who might want to murder him or sleep with him or both.

Progress, he thought. Weird progress, but progress.

He pulled into the parking garage beneath his building at 11:47 PM. The concrete echoed with his footsteps as he walked toward the elevator, and he found himself humming something from his workout playlist, the same bass-heavy track that had carried him through six hours of cleaning his disaster apartment what felt like a lifetime ago.

The elevator deposited him on the fourth floor. He walked past Unit 403, Chloe’s place, and noted the strip of light beneath her door that suggested she was still awake. Probably editing content or answering DMs from her subscriber army. The girl never stopped working. It was one of the things he admired most about her, even if it meant she sometimes forgot to eat and he had to physically put food in front of her face.

His own door opened with the familiar click of his key, and Jordan stepped into the space that had once been a biohazard and was now something approaching civilized. The concrete floors gleamed. The kitchen counters sparkled. The massive factory windows let in enough moonlight to navigate without hitting the lights, though he hit them anyway because he had work to do.

Sponsorships.

The word had been bouncing around his skull since Chloe’s presentation at dinner. Cross-promotion was great, audience overlap was great, but at some point they needed actual revenue streams beyond percentage cuts of direct earnings. Sponsors paid real money for brand exposure, and Lila’s seventeen thousand followers represented exactly the kind of engaged, spending-capable demographic that gaming companies loved to target.

Jordan dropped onto his couch, opened his laptop, and started digging.

The Twitch sponsorship landscape was a jungle of predatory contracts and mediocre offers, but Jordan had spent enough time researching Chloe’s OnlyFans strategies to know how to spot the difference between legitimate opportunities and exploitation. He pulled up spreadsheets. Cross-referenced company names with Reddit threads about creator experiences. Checked follower engagement ratios against the minimum thresholds most sponsors required.

Thirty minutes in, he found something interesting.

GamerFuel. A gaming supplement company that had exploded over the past year, positioning itself as the cool alternative to the big energy drink brands. Their ambassador program specifically targeted mid-tier streamers with dedicated audiences, offering both per-stream fees and commission on affiliate codes. The contract terms were surprisingly reasonable, with talent approval clauses and no exclusivity requirements that would prevent creators from stacking multiple sponsorships.

Jordan bookmarked the page. Opened a new tab. Started drafting an outreach email that positioned Nova Network as a collective rather than individual talent, emphasizing their combined reach and cross-promotional capabilities.

His fingers moved across the keyboard with a focus he hadn’t possessed three weeks ago. The old Jordan would have procrastinated this task into oblivion, convincing himself that tomorrow was fine, that next week was fine, that eventually was fine. The new Jordan understood that eventually was the graveyard where dreams went to rot.

The front door clicked.

Jordan didn’t look up from his screen, because he already knew who it was. Only two people had keys to his apartment, and Kumiko would have announced her presence with approximately seven thousand words before she even made it through the threshold.

Footsteps crossed the concrete floor. Soft. Deliberate. The familiar sound of Chloe’s white sneakers on the polished surface he’d scrubbed until his knees ached.

Then warmth pressed against his side.

Chloe slid onto the couch next to him, her body fitting into the space between his arm and his ribs like she’d been designed to occupy it. Her head dropped onto his shoulder, and the blue streaks in her hair caught the laptop glow as she tilted her face to look at his screen. She smelled like her usual skincare routine, cucumber and something floral, mixed with the faint lingering scent of Korean barbecue.

"Working," she observed.

"Working."