Chapter 6

By 4:00 PM, the blinding hot anger that had carried me away from the plaza of the Kane Empire had settled into the center of my chest. The tears had dried on my cheeks, leaving tight, itchy tracks across my skin that I cleaned away with the sleeve of my oversized knit sweater. I didn't look in the mirror this time. I already knew what was there: a girl who had sold her dignity for a single night, now forced to pay the price in blood, sweat, and secrecy.

I had exactly seventy-two hours to find two thousand dollars, or Katherine’s entire future would be destroyed by an automated email from the private school administration.

When I walked back into our apartment, the air was still heavy with the lingering scent of her cheap hair straightener and burnt toast. She wasn't home yet; track practice ran until five, a luxury she took for granted because she didn't have to clock her hours on a plastic punch card. I stood in the small, cramped kitchen, staring at the crumpled one-hundred-dollar bill Gabriel Kane had left on my counter like a token for a broken ride.

It wasn't a tip. It was an insult. But right now, it was also five percent of what I needed to keep my sister from becoming like me.

I pulled my old, cracked leather purse onto the table and threw its entire contents out onto the scarred wood.

A small avalanche of metallic coins, lint-covered tokens, crumpled ones, a few creased fives, and my meager savings book cascaded across the surface. I opened the tiny blue booklet. 'Balance: $412.18.'

Combined with the hundred-dollar bill and the tips currently stuffed into my apron pocket, I had just barely passed the five-hundred-dollar mark. I was a quarter of the way there.

I sat down heavily in the chair, my hand immediately dropping to my lower stomach. The realization that there were two tiny heartbeats fighting to establish themselves inside my womb. My body was no longer entirely my own. It belonged to the future, to a looming, terrifying double-responsibility that I had no plans of managing.

"I am not going to break," I whispered into the quiet kitchen, the words sounding small. "I am not going to break."

There was only one option left, an option that made my throat tighten with an ancient, deeply rooted shame. I had to go to the check-cashing and payday loan outlet on the corner of 22nd and Western.

The neighborhood called it 'The Vault', but it wasn't a bank. It was a cage where desperate people traded their future security for immediate survival. My father had explicitly warned me about places like that before the accident, calling them financial quicksand.

'Once you put one foot in, Lyra,' he used to say while balancing the household checkbook at our old kitchen table, 'the ground just keeps eating you until there’s nothing left but your hat.'

But my father wasn't here to sign a tuition check, and his grand, prideful rules didn't keep the cold wind from blowing through our cracked window frames.

I changed into a pair of dark leggings and a massive, heavy jacket that completely obscured the straight, slender lines of my frame. If my body was already changing, if the early hormonal shifts were going to make me soft and vulnerable, I wanted to bury it.

The walk to Western Avenue was brutal. The late autumn sky had turned the color of a bruised plum, and the damp air smelled heavily of diesel exhaust and oncoming snow.

My stomach did another violent, nauseating flip as I passed the local fish market, the sharp, pungent scent of old ice and scales hitting my senses. I had to stop against a rusty lamppost, burying my face in the collar of my jacket, forcing my lungs to take deep breaths until the black spots cleared from my vision.

Twins, my mind whispered again. 'Gabriel Kane's twins.'

I forcefully pushed his name back down into the dark. He didn't exist anymore.

I was going to survive this without his money, and I was going to survive it quietly.

The bell above the heavy door of the payday loan outlet gave a tinny, annoying buzz as I pushed my way inside. The interior was aggressively bright, illuminated by rows of humming white fluorescent tubes that exposed every scratch on the floor and every line of desperation on the faces of the two older men sitting on the plastic chairs against the wall.

I walked directly up to the counter, my fingers tightening around the strap of my purse. Behind the thick, scratched window, a middle-aged woman with heavily drawn-on eyebrows and a name tag that read *Marisol* looked up from a stack of carbon-copy receipts.

"Next," she said, her voice entirely flat, worn smooth by decades of witnessing the worst days of people's lives.

"I need a short-term personal loan," I said, my voice sounding incredibly steady despite the frantic hammering of my pulse. "Fifteen hundred dollars."

Marisol didn't even blink. She pulled a thick, yellow application form from a slot beneath the glass and slid it through the metal tray at the bottom. "ID, proof of residency, and your last three corporate pay stubs from your primary employer."

I slid my faded Illinois driver's license and the crumpled, grease-stained pay sheets from *The Silver Spoon* through the slot. She snatched them up with practiced efficiency, her fingers flying across a dark, outdated computer keyboard with a rhythmic, deafening *clack-clack-clack*.

I stood there for what felt like an eternity, the chemical smell of an industrial floor cleaner filling my nose, making my saliva turn sour.

I kept one hand buried deep inside my jacket pocket, my thumb tracing the smooth, plastic edge of the hidden pregnancy test.

It was to remind me of the high stakes. If I failed here, Katherine was out of school by Friday morning, and the dominoes would begin to fall.

Marisol's keyboard suddenly stopped. She looked up from the glowing green monitor, her eyes shifting over my face with a look that was a terrible mixture of professional indifference and a tiny, buried trace of human pity.

"You're a tipped employee at a diner, honey," she said, leaning closer to the small circular speaker grill in the glass.

"Your base hourly wage is below the state standard because of the tip credit. Your verifiably documented income doesn't meet our minimum criteria for a fifteen-hundred-dollar unsecured advance."

The room suddenly began to lack oxygen. "I work forty-five hours a week," I pressed. "I haven't missed a single shift in four years. Check the history. I can pay it back. I'll take the maximum interest bracket if I have to."

"It’s not about the interest, sweetie. The system won't even let me generate the contract," Marisol sighed, tapping the plastic corner of her monitor. "With your current debt-to-income ratio and the utility defaults on your record, the maximum the corporate algorithm will clear you for is four hundred and fifty dollars. And that's with a thirty-two percent APR starting next billing cycle."

Four hundred and fifty dollars. It was a drop in the bucket. It left me over a thousand dollars short of the line.

"Is there any other way?" I pleaded, my voice dropping into a desperate, raw register that I hated myself for using. "An override? A manager's signature? It's for my sister's school. If I don't get the full amount by Friday—"

"The system is the manager, honey," Marisol cut me off gently, sliding my pay stubs and ID back through the metal tray. "I'm sorry. I really am. Try a credit union, or find someone with a house to co-sign the line for you."

I didn't take the four hundred and fifty. Taking that quicksand money without solving the actual crisis would just mean drowning faster. I pulled my identification back into my purse, turned around on my heel, and walked out into the freezing Chicago evening before the tears could form in front of the strangers in the lobby.