Page 187 of Obey

“Sloane?” I turn. It’s Trey, running toward me, his tie loose. “Jesus Christ,” he says when he reaches me, eyes sweeping over my face. “You took off.”

“I-I needed air.”

“Yeah, well, I think we’ve exceeded what air can fix.”

A laugh catches somewhere inside the sob trying to claw its way out, and the hard lines around Trey’s mouth ease. “Come on. We’re leaving.”

“I can’t.”

“You absolutely can.”

“The launch—”

“Baby girl,” he says, voice flat and hard. “Fuck the launch.”

That shuts me up. He takes off his jacket and drapes it around my shoulders, covering as much of me as he can before guiding me toward his car.

“You don’t have to babysit me.”

“Good, because my hourly rate is outrageous.”

I sniffle as he opens the passenger door.

“Get in.”

By the time Trey gets behind the wheel, my phone has started vibrating again. Once. Twice.

Six more times, the screen lights up with their names—Nate, Elias, Jace—a frantic, overlapping barrage. I flip the phone face down in my lap, silencing them.

My mind cycles through the images—the cameras still rolling, the faces of the people who heard—until the thoughts blur into a single, hollow note.

No anger. No panic. Just a numbness too deep for tears.

Just the echo of my own voice, stolen and played for a room full of strangers.

forty-six

Loss of Control

Morning arrives like an insult.

By seven-thirty, sunlight has filled the main conference room, cutting clean lines across a table buried beneath laptops, abandoned coffee cups, legal pads, and three phones that haven’t stopped vibrating since just after midnight.

The wall screen is muted, but it doesn’t need sound to make its point.

Every few minutes, another headline crawls beneath footage from last night’s launch, my face alternating with the SOLAÉ logo and grainy clips of a ballroom I would happily set on fire if it meant erasing the last twelve hours.

Sloane’s name appears more often than mine.

That is the part I can’t look at for long.

I turn away from the screen and refresh my phone again, even though I already know what I’m going to find.

Nothing from her. No missed call. No message. Not even an angry response telling me to go to hell.

My last text still sits beneath a dozen others. Unread.

Jace sits on the edge of the conference table with his elbows braced against his thighs, staring at his own phone like he can force it to ring through sheer desperation.