Stan exhaled slowly. ’Fine.’
He wasn’t going to stand here and argue with a man who was, by his own logic, trying to protect his sister’s dignity. It wasn’t a fight worth having in front of a crowd.
He turned to leave.
[Warning: Items purchased for a designated consumption target must be delivered to the intended recipient. Failure to do so will result in a penalty of 100× the purchase price. Please proceed with caution.]
Stan’s foot froze mid-step. ’A hundredfold penalty.’
The number detonated silently in his head.
He’d spent one hundred and thirty million dollars on that building. One hundred tis that was, he didn’t even want to finish the calculation. Thirteen billion dollars. A number so large it stopped being money and started being a concept. Even if soone liquefied every asset he owned, sold every share, drained every account, and auctioned off his own organs, he still wouldn’t co close.
The system wasn’t bluffing. It never bluffed.
’I have to give her that building. There is no alternative.’
He took a slow breath and recalibrated.
Arnold was standing between him and a direct handoff. Sophie had been willing, eager, even, but her cousin had physically blocked the exchange and wasn’t going to budge. Forcing the issue here, in front of multiple witnesses, would only escalate into sothing ugly.
’Fine. Then I won’t do it here. I’ll find another way. Her dorm. A mutual contact. A delivery. Sothing.’
The building had to reach Sophie Youngs. The thod was negotiable. The outco was not.
Stan gave Arnold a final, unreadable look, nodded once, and walked away without another word.
Behind him, Sophie watched him go.
The brightness that had been in her eyes a few minutes ago had dimd into sothing quieter and sadder.
When Stan had appeared across the square this morning, waving casually, walking toward her like it was the most natural thing in the world, she’d felt sothing lift in her chest.
Sothing she hadn’t felt in a long ti. She hadn’t even needed to hear about the house. She’d been ready to say yes the mont she saw his face.
And then Arnold had appeared. Out of nowhere. Like a wall dropping from the ceiling.
"Brother," she said, her voice tight with restrained frustration. "You went too far."
Arnold turned to her, his expression softening but not yielding.
"Sophie. Think about it clearly." His voice was gentler now, but no less firm. "No matter how beautiful you are, you’re a person, not a product. Not sothing anyone gets to put a price tag on. You told that boy to buy a house in exchange for your Snapchat. Think about what that sounds like. Think about what it ans."
He held her gaze.
"If you attach a price to friendship, to sothing as simple as exchanging contact information, then what makes that different from a transaction? What ssage does that send to every other man who cos after him?"
Sophie opened her mouth to argue. Then closed it.
The frustration was still there, hot and sharp and directed squarely at Arnold’s terrible timing. But beneath it, reluctantly, she could feel the logic of what he was saying settling into place like a stone dropping into still water.
He wasn’t wrong.
She shouldn’t have said the Four Seasons Garden thing in the first place. It had been impulsive, a blurted defense chanism, born out of the panic of being publicly asked out by a man who’d actually made her heart skip, in front of a crowd she couldn’t afford to show vulnerability to.
She’d ant it as an impossible task. A polite wall. A way to protect herself without having to say ’I’m scared of what I’m feeling.’
Instead, it had turned into a transaction. And Arnold was right, that was a line she never should have drawn.
She should have just given Stan her Snapchat that first evening. No gas. No conditions. No performance for the crowd.
Now the mont was gone. Stan was walking away. And the warm, lifting thing in her chest had settled back down into sothing heavy and still.
Sophie looked down at her phone, the QR code still open on the screen, unscanned, and let out a long, quiet sigh.
Then she turned and walked in the opposite direction, her steps slow and deliberate, her expression distant.
She didn’t look back.
.....
anwhile, Stan couldn’t afford to wait.
The system’s penalty hung over him like a guillotine with a tir, a hundred tis the purchase price, triggered by failure to deliver. Thirteen billion dollars.
The kind of number that didn’t punish you so much as erase you. Every hour that passed with those deeds still in his hands was an hour closer to financial annihilation.
He tracked down Sophie’s off-campus address through Zack, who produced it within twenty minutes through the kind of secondhand social network mapping that only a dedicated roommate could pull off. By six o’clock that evening, Stan was standing outside a modest apartnt door in a quiet residential block a few streets from campus, a thick manila envelope tucked under his arm.
He knocked three tis.
The door opened halfway.
A girl with cropped short hair and a skeptical expression looked him up and down with the weary efficiency of soone who had perford this exact assessnt hundreds of tis before.
"Let guess." Her voice was flat. "Another gift for Sophie Youngs."
She didn’t phrase it as a question.
"She won’t accept it. She never does. Have a good evening."
The door was already swinging shut.
Stan caught it with his palm before the latch could click.
"Just hand this to her. That’s all I’m asking."
Claire Reid, Sophie’s best friend, roommate, and self-appointed gatekeeper, studied him through the narrowing gap with the particular exhaustion of a woman who fielded this exact interaction a dozen tis a day. Flowers. Jewelry. Love letters written on expensive stationery. Teddy bears the size of furniture. She’d seen it all, refused it all, and thrown most of it away without Sophie ever knowing it existed.
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