Cassidy’s stomach did something complicated at the image.

She’d seen the costume during the dress rehearsal. She’d seen Isaiah standing at the espresso machine with his sleeves rolled up and his dark hair pushed back and a cape draped over his shoulders like he’d been born in a gothic romance novel instead of a Kensington apartment. He’d looked like someone had taken all the attractive qualities of a brooding manga love interest and poured them into a real human body without checking whether that was legal. When he’d glanced up from the milk steamer and caught her staring, the corner of his mouth had twitched in that way that meant he knew exactly what she was thinking and found it funny.

She hated that twitch.

She also wanted to bite it.

Her phone buzzed again. This time it was the group chat, which Cassidy had not named and would deny naming under oath despite the fact that "Isaiah’s Owners" was clearly her handiwork and everyone knew it.

Vivienne: "Reminder that tomorrow’s call time is 8:00 AM sharp. Not 8:01. Not 8:03. Not whenever Cassidy decides gravity applies to her."

Harlow: "viviiiii be nice its friday!!!! also isaiah said he’ll wear the fangs during service hours!!! VICTORY"

Sabrina sent a single bat emoji. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

Cassidy typed back: "i’ll be there at 7:59 just to watch your left eye twitch"

Vivienne’s response came in four seconds: "My eye does not twitch."

Three people started typing at once.

Cassidy smiled, and because nobody was watching, she let the smile stay. It felt foreign on her face in a way that should have been sad but wasn’t. A month ago she couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled at her phone. Smiling was something Harlow did. Smiling was something that happened to other people, people who didn’t carry a 2.4 GPA and a reputation for making grown men cry and the memory of a father she couldn’t say goodbye to because she was too busy getting in trouble to be there when it mattered.

Then Isaiah spilled coffee on her shirt on the first day of school and everything went sideways.

She walked to her car in the student lot, the red Toyota Supra that was hers in a way that nothing else in her life was. Not the Valentine name, not the manor, not the company, not the brand, not the quarterly projections or the V-Girl campaigns or the photoshoots where she was told to look rebellious on command like rebellion was a product she could sell in thirty-milliliter bottles. The Supra was purchased with birthday money she’d saved since she was twelve, and she’d done the maintenance herself because her father taught her how engines worked before he taught her how to serve a tennis ball, and the car didn’t care about her GPA or her mother’s expectations or which Valentine sister got to kiss the boy first.

Cassidy sat in the driver’s seat and did not start the engine.

Tomorrow.

The festival. The cafe. The costume. Isaiah in a cape and fangs, serving drinks to teenagers while Harlow bounced around in a vampire maid outfit that was specifically designed to make his brain short-circuit. Vivienne would be there in some perfectly tailored version of the costume that somehow looked like it belonged on a Vogue editorial spread. Sabrina would sit in a corner reading and occasionally make a comment so devastating that it rearranged everyone’s understanding of the situation.

And Cassidy would be there in whatever outfit Harlow had built for her, serving drinks alongside the boy she’d just threatened with ownership, the boy who let her yank his tie and get in his face and whisper promises she fully intended to keep.

The bet.

God, the bet.

She’d lost on purpose and they both knew it. A sixty-two on the test when she’d been hitting ninety on practice quizzes, when she’d been studying until 2 AM and working through problems she would have set on fire a month ago. She could have passed. Maybe not with a ninety, maybe not clean, but she could have scraped a seventy and technically won the wager and made Isaiah her pet for twenty-four hours.

But that wasn’t what she wanted.

What she wanted was the other side of the coin. What she wanted was to lose the bet so completely that the terms activated in reverse, the terms she’d proposed herself in her bedroom with her heart slamming against her ribs and her voice coming out steady because steady was the only gear she had when vulnerability got too close. If Cassidy failed to get a B, she became Isaiah’s for a day. Whatever he wanted. No complaints. No attitude. She’d offered to wear a collar and she’d meant it in a way that still made her face hot when she thought about it, which was approximately every fifteen minutes including during sleep.

And Isaiah had looked at her and said yes.

Not with hesitation. Not with the cautious professionalism he’d used during the first week when she’d been a problem to solve and he’d been a scholarship kid terrified of losing his paycheck. He’d looked at her with something dark and warm and completely in control and told her she should think about what color collar went with her hair.

Cassidy pressed her forehead against the steering wheel and made a sound that was not a scream and was not a whine and was definitely not the noise a person makes when they remember someone saying something so devastatingly attractive that their higher brain functions shut down like a power grid during a hurricane.

The steering wheel was warm from the sun. It felt good against her burning forehead.

Two weeks. The festival tomorrow, and then fourteen days until the bet activated. Fourteen days during which Sabrina would have Isaiah for the first rotation, which meant fourteen days of watching Sabrina do her quiet devastating thing where she appeared out of nowhere and said something that peeled back your skin and looked at the insides and somehow made you grateful for the examination. Fourteen days of Sabrina reading books on Isaiah’s shoulder and making him prepare midnight ramen and probably kissing him in dark hallways with her cool fingers on his jaw and that expression that said she’d already calculated every possible outcome and found them all acceptable.

Cassidy’s grip tightened on the wheel.

She wasn’t jealous.