Page 28 of Branding the Bat

"The workshop," Sero said. "The door you wouldn't open. That's where you keep it. The equipment, the serum, whatever you refine it into."

"Yes." Trevor's voice was behind him. Close, but not approaching. He had the sense, at least, not to touch.

"The sharks." Sero turned around. Trevor flinched. "You have a client. Someone dangerous. He buys the serum. And whatever you've been making from me is better than what you've been giving him."

Trevor nodded. He looked sick. Actually, physically sick, gray beneath his skin, his jaw tight, his hands shaking at his sides.

"And now he wants more." Sero didn't need Trevor to confirm it. The tells were all there. The tension that had been building. The reason Trevor stood in his living room confessing instead of waiting until he was ready. Someone had forced a timeline. "Which means eventually he's going to want to know where it comes from. Which means he's going to want me."

"That's why I'm telling you. Because they're going to—"

"Don't." The word came out sharp enough to cut. Sero held up a hand. "Don't frame this as you protecting me. You're not telling me because you want to keep me safe. You're telling me because Amani made you."

Trevor went still. "How did you know that?"

"Because you would have told me on Saturday, in the bath, when I asked about the workshop. You said you needed time. You didn't come here tonight because you decided the time was up. Someone else decided for you." Sero's voice was shaking now, the level facade cracking at the edges. "Amani. He's the only person with enough leverage over you. He told you to confess or he'd do it himself."

Trevor said nothing. Which was an answer.

Sero turned back to the counter. The mango blurred. He was not going to cry. He was not going to give Trevor the satisfaction.

"I need you to leave," Sero said.

"Sero—"

"Now."

"Please let me—"

"There is nothing you can say right now that I want to hear." He didn't turn around. He couldn't. If he looked at Trevor, at those blue eyes, at that face that had looked at him with wonder while secretly cataloguing his output, he was going to either hit him or break down, and he refused to do either. "You harvested my body without my consent. You sold pieces of me to a stranger. And you did it while I was in the most vulnerable state I've ever been in. While I was in the space. While I was trusting you."

His voice broke on the last two words. He heard it break and hated it.

"I know," Trevor said. His voice was wrecked. "I know what I did. I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm asking you to let me help keep you safe, because the Grizzly—"

"Get out."

Footsteps. The door. A pause, Trevor standing in the doorway, and Sero could feel him there, could feel the weight of everything unsaid pressing against the threshold.

"I destroyed the machine," Trevor said quietly. "Last night. After I talked to Amani. I took it apart and I burned the components. It's gone."

Sero said nothing.

"And I haven't sold your vials. Either of them. They're still in my workshop. I couldn't—" His voice fractured again. "I couldn't sell them. From the beginning. I tried to make myself and I couldn't."

Sero said nothing.

"I'm sorry. I know that's not enough. I know sorry is just a word and what I did isn't something a word can fix. But I'm sorry, Sero. For all of it."

The door closed.

Sero stood at the counter for a long time. The mango sat in its bowl, bright and untouched. Through the windows, the Strip cycled through its colors, red, gold, blue, indifferent to everything happening in the apartments it illuminated.

He didn't go to work. He called the casino's scheduling line and said he was sick, which was technically true if he defined sickness broadly enough to include the feeling that his internal organs had been rearranged without anesthesia.

He shifted. He hung in the closet. He didn't eat.

The dark was the same dark it always was, small, enclosed, the echo of his own breathing bouncing off the walls and coming back to him in the shape of the space. But the dark felt different. It felt like the inside of a machine he hadn't known he was in. A device designed to look like pleasure and feel like trust and produce, without his knowledge, something that could be extracted and sold.