Chapter 179 First Clean Cut

Chapter 179 First Clean Cut
I took her upstairs.

The bedroom at the end of the hall was exactly as I had left it: lit red lamp, empty bed, door that locked. I closed it behind us and let the mask stay on. Anonymity was the only reason she was still here. Removing it would have ended the experiment immediately.

What happened next was not part of the original plan.

I had intended conversation. Pressure. A few carefully chosen questions that would tell me how much she already suspected about the Fund and how close she stood to Pastor Whitaker.

Instead I got the heat of her mouth, the way her body answered before her mind could catch up, and the unwelcome recognition that she felt like Sophia in ways that had nothing to do with posture or scoring sheets.

I took my time anyway.

I learned the sounds she made when she stopped thinking. I learned the exact way her thighs trembled when she came the first time under my mouth. I learned that she laughed when she accidentally used too much teeth, and that the laugh made something in my chest tighten against orders.

When I finally pushed inside her she was tight and wet and shaking, and for a dangerous second the years and the names and the mission blurred into a single, stupid thought: ‘I could keep this one.’

I did not keep it.

I fucked her the way the night required — thorough, attentive, anonymous. I gave her three orgasms because leaving her half-finished would have made her reflective, and reflection was the enemy of the version of her that had walked upstairs with a stranger.

When she rode me at the end, slow and lost in it, I watched the masked face above me and forced the comparison with Sophia into a shape I could use instead of one that could use me.

She was supposed to be the cleanest girl in town. Highest Purity Score. Untouched. The Fund’s own files had marked her as exactly that.

Yet when I pushed inside her she was soaked and open, and later she climbed on top of me like she had been waiting for permission to lose control.

I knew why.

Hours earlier I had handed a bartender a small vial of ‘Red Pulse’ — a clear, tasteless stimulant that flooded the body with heat and stripped away hesitation, and told him to make sure the next drink that reached the girl in the ivory-and-gold mask contained it.

Another means to an end. I needed her pliable. I needed the night to move past conversation.

It had worked.

Still, the feel of her around me — tight, scorching, clenching like she never wanted to let go—surprised me more than it should have.

She collapsed onto my chest after the last one. We stayed like that, still masked, still unnamed, while the music thudded dully through the floor.

“I don’t want to go back yet,” she said.

I held out my hand.

“Then don’t.”

She looked at it.

Then the alcohol and the adrenaline and whatever else she had been carrying finally caught up. I saw the exact moment her balance went —eyes losing focus, body listing sideways.

I caught her arm before she could hit the floor, guided her down onto the bed, and checked her pulse with two fingers against her throat.

Steady. Strong. Just a blackout.

I sat on the edge of the mattress for a long minute, listening to her breathe, and felt the cold purpose settle back into place over the heat that had tried to stay.

Abigail Thompson was unconscious in a locked room on the far side of town, mask still on, dress pushed up, thoroughly used and temporarily unreachable by anyone who might look for her.

The first real move was complete.

Now I had to decide what the second one looked like.

I stood, straightened my clothes, and looked down at her one last time.

The resemblance to Sophia was still there, quieter now that her face was slack with sleep.

I ignored it.

Then I locked the door from the inside, left the key on the nightstand where she would find it when she woke, and went downstairs to make sure no one came looking before I was ready for them to.

Outside, the night continued like nothing of consequence had happened.

Inside, the board had finally begun to move.

Fucking Abigail Thompson was never the point.

It was the first clean cut.

She was the highest-scoring girl in the system, the future stepdaughter of the man who sat at the head of the Fund, and now she had spent hours in a locked room with a stranger whose face she still could not name.

That single night gave me leverage no file or anonymous post could match. When the time came to pull the first real thread, she would already be tied to me in ways she did not understand and could not easily explain.

Sophia had been taken without ever getting the chance to fight.

This girl would help me burn the machine that took her, whether she ever knew it or not.

The first move was complete.

The rest would follow.