The bathroom tiles are cold against my knees.
I don't remember how I got here—don't remember choosing this building, this floor, this particular stall with its flickering overhead light and graffiti scratched into the metal door. My lungs refuse to work properly, each breath catching halfway down my throat before reversing course, and the hyperventilation makes the room spin in nauseating circles.
Breathe. You have to breathe.
But I can't. The images keep cycling through my skull on endless repeat—my face on that screen, the photographs arranged like evidence at a trial, twelve thousand viewers watching me unravel in real time. And worse than any of it, worse than the exposure and the humiliation and the journalist's satisfied smile: three men standing in silence while I burned.
The bathroom door creaks open.
I press my hand against my mouth, trying to muffle the ragged sounds escaping my chest. Maybe if I'm quiet enough, whoever it is will use one of the other stalls and leave without noticing the man having a breakdown three feet away.
"Well, well." The voice slides through the crack beneath the stall door like something venomous. "I was wondering where you'd run off to, Hale. The presentation hall cleared out so fast after your little exit, but I had a feeling you wouldn't make it far. Men like you never do."
Hargrove.
My stomach turns to ice.
"You should have seen your face up there," he continues, and I hear him settle against the sink counter with casual satisfaction. "That exact moment when you realized the whole world was watching you fall apart—I've been waiting months to see that expression, and it was even better than I imagined. The way your color drained, the way your hands started shaking, the way you looked at those Varkas brothers like they might actually save you from what was coming."
"Please." The word scrapes out before I can stop it. "Please just leave me alone. You got what you wanted—my career is over, my reputation is destroyed. What more do you need?"
"What more do I need?" His laugh echoes off the tile walls. "Oh, Ethan. This was never about what I needed. This was about teaching you a lesson that your father clearly failed to finish, and I don't intend to leave until I'm certain you've learned it."
The stall door rattles as he tests the lock, and I scramble backward until my spine hits the wall.
"I know you're not going to open this door voluntarily, and that's fine—I don't need to see your face to say what I came here to say. You can listen from in there, cowering on the floor like the pathetic little creature you've always been, while I explain exactly how thoroughly you've been destroyed."
"You did this." The accusation tears out of me with more force than I expected. "The photographer, the journalist, all of it—you've been planning this since I got promoted, haven't you? Since the moment you realized I was rising beyond your reach."
"Promoted," he spits. "Is that what we're calling it now? Let me tell you exactly what your promotion was, Hale. It was payment for services rendered, compensation for spreading your legs whenever those billionaire brothers snapped their fingers. I watched you for months, cataloguing every lingering touch, every knowing glance, every moment that reeked of something that had nothing to do with quarterly projections. The photographer I hired confirmed what I already suspected, and the journalist was more than happy to expose the kind of corporate misconduct that sells papers."
"That's not what happened. My work spoke for itself—the Pemberton crisis, the quarterly analysis, everything I accomplished was earned through competence and nothing else."
"Did you really think fucking your way to the top wouldn't catch up with you?" His voice drops to something intimate and ugly. "Did you honestly believe that three of the most powerful men in this industry would risk their reputations for someone like you unless you were giving them something worth the risk? I've seen your type before, Ethan. Pretty boys who think their bodies can substitute for talent, who use whatever assets they have to climb over people who actually deserve to succeed."
"You don't know anything about my relationship with them. You don't know anything about me."
"I know everything about you." The satisfaction in his voice makes my stomach turn. "I know that you're a faggot, Hale—a pathetic, desperate, cock-hungry little faggot who couldn't even keep his perversions private long enough to maintain the illusion of professionalism."
The words land like fists, each slur finding the exact places my father's voice has carved into my psyche. I press my hands against my ears, but they can't block out what's already inside my head.
"The best part of watching that presentation wasn't the photographs, though those were certainly satisfying. The best part was watching those three men you've been whoring yourself to just stand there while you burned. Not one of them opened their mouths to defend you. Not one of them stepped forward to claim their little toy was worth protecting. They let you hang there, exposed and humiliated, because at the end of the day you were never anything more than a convenient body to them—something to use until the cost of keeping you became too high."
"Stop." The word comes out broken. "Please stop."
"Why? Does the truth hurt, Ethan? Does it sting to realize that the men you trusted to protect you watched you drown without lifting a finger? They're probably already strategizing their damage control, figuring out how to distance themselves from the scandal you've created. By tomorrow morning, you'll be nothing but a cautionary tale they tell at board meetings—the desperate analyst who thought spreading his legs could substitute for actual value."
I'm sliding down the wall before I realize my legs have given out. The tile is cold against my back, cold against my palms, cold against every inch of skin that feels too exposed for the world.
"Your father was right about you," Hargrove says, and the words drive through my chest like a blade. "Whatever he tried to beat out of you, whatever he saw in you that disgusted him so deeply he couldn't stop himself from trying to fix it—he was right. You're broken, Ethan. You've always been broken, and no amount of expensive suits or executive positions or billionaire attention will ever change what you fundamentally are."
The bathroom door swings open and closed. His footsteps fade down the corridor.
I'm alone.
Disgusting.
The voice in my head doesn't belong to Hargrove anymore. It belongs to my father, to the man who stood in my bedroom doorway when I was fifteen and saw exactly what I was trying to hide.
Worthless.
The scar on my cheekbone throbs like a fresh wound, like the ring that cut me is pressing against bone all over again.
Wrong.
I curl into myself on the bathroom floor, knees drawn to my chest, forehead pressed against cold tile. The hyperventilation has stopped, replaced by something worse—a stillness that feels like drowning from the inside out.
Three men promised I would never face anything alone, and when the moment came, they stood in silence while I burned.
My father tried to beat the wrongness out of me, and he failed.
Hargrove finished what my father started.
You're broken. You've always been broken.
This time, I believe them.