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By lunch, I've tried every one of them, and every single one is still locked. I’m fucking stuck.

Door one: make Sal's money by tomorrow night. I ran Diablo hard last night and pulled four hundred dollars. Four hundred. On my best night before the guys split, I could clear that in minutes. Now, the men who used to hand me a fortune won't get in the same room to do it, and the room was my whole strategy. My escape hatch. I could go live every hour between now and Friday and still not come close to what I owe. No matter how I cam the nights between now and then, I come up way short.

Door two: get the money somewhere else. But from who? Birdie doesn't have forty dollars, let alone the rest. The bank stopped taking my calls months ago. And the only men on earth with that amount of money to spare are sitting behind glass doors twenty feet away with no idea of the mess I’m in. I cannot walk into Beck Cross's office and ask him to spot me a loan-shark payment. There is no version of that sentence that doesn't end my life as I know it.

Door three: run. From a man who has my address, my sister's address, and, for all I know, my mother's address. People who run from Sal don't get out of it, though, this much I know. They just get found somewhere worse, later, with a story that gets told to the next person who's late paying what they owe.

Door four: this is the one I keep circling back to, not because it solves anything but because I'm exhausted and it's the only one that sounds like quick relief. Just quit. Kill Diablo tonight. Wipe her, delete her, walk away from all of it.

Except quitting Diablo was never actually a way out, and I know it before I've even finished the thought. Diablo is the only thing paying Sal. Kill her, and I don't just miss Friday, I make sure Friday can never get paid at all, and hand Sal a reason to come collect in person. And the one thing walking away might have bought me, my secret staying buried, isn't available anymore, because the secret's already out. Deleting Diablo doesn't erase Birdie’s or anyone else’s memory, that quiet little Agnes is also a ball-buster camgirl. They still know. They’ll always know. You can shut off the tap. You can't put the water back.

So door four isn't a door at all. It just gets me to the same dead end faster.

Three real doors, then. Three locks. And a clock that now says Friday.

"You look like hell," Sloane says.

I didn't hear her come up, that's how gone I am, and here’s Sloane Whitaker, in four-inch heels and I didn’t hear her coming. She sets a coffee on my desk, the good kind, from the place several blocks over she has no reason to walk to.

Something’s up.

"Long week," I say, forcing a bright smile.

"Mmm. I hear that." She leans a hip against my desk and looks at me, and her voice drops into something quieter and harder to lie to. "Agnes. I'm going to say a thing, and you can tell me to mind my business. Something's wrong. Has been for a while. You've gone from a woman I never worried about to a woman I think about on my drive home."

What the fuck? My heart is going so hard, I'm surprised she can't see it in my throat. I don’t know whether to tell her to mind her damn business or throw my arms around her neck and start to sob.

"I'm fine," I tell her. "Money's tight. That's all it is."

"Okay." She doesn’t push. Then she does the worst possible thing when I really want to tell her to leave me alone and go away, which is be nice. "I don’t need to know what’s up, Agnes. But I do hope you’d tell me if you were in over your head with the wrong person. Or something like that.”

For one insane second, I almost tell her. The whole thing. It's right there, at the back of my throat, wanting out so bad my eyes sting.

I shrug. "I'm not in over my head, Sloane. I’m good."

She studies me a moment longer. Then she straightens, smooths her skirt, and says, light again, "You know where my office is if you ever want to talk." And she walks back to it, and I sit there with a coffee from the fancy place and the understanding that the one person in this building who might actually help me is also the one person sharpest enough to bury me, and I can't tell which she'll turn out to be.

A bunch of shitty options disguised as doors and now a fifth I don't dare open. The Sloane door.

I get through the rest of the day on muscle memory. Route the calls. Refill the beans. Say good night to the sides of three faces. And the whole time, under it all, the same sentence goes around and around in my head.

There's no way out of this. None.

Somebody else is going to pick it for me. Soon. And all I can do is sit at this desk and wait to find out who.

By Friday morning I've done the one thing I swore Diablo would never do.

Last night, at the very bottom of the barrel, I broke her only real rule, nothing for free, and never, ever let them see you need it, and I sent my whales a message. All three. Not a tease. Not a booking. An ask.

I'm in some real trouble and I need a big night, tonight. Name your number and I'll earn every dollar of it. I wouldn't ask if I weren't desperate. — D

I hit send before I could talk myself out of it, and then I sat there and hated myself, because Diablo begging is just Agnes begging in better lipstick, and begging has never once in my life gotten me anywhere.

By morning, nothing. Not one word. HouseMoney, silent. NoComment, silent. Even KindRegards, my Theo, my rescuer, nothing. The only time I actually reach out, every last one of them goes dark on me.

So there's my answer, in the only language I really trust. I'm on my own. I always was. And tonight, Sal comes for money I do not have.

I go to work anyway, because the alternative is lying on my bathroom floor until he does, and I've already tried the floor. I sit at the front desk and count down the hours and build my case for tonight. Here's four hundred bucks as a show of good faith, and please don’t break my leg because then I will really, truly, not be able to pay you back.