Chapter 9 – Master of the Stage

She didn’t blink as the camera light clicked on.

Three red dots glowed on the mirrored wall before her recording her every breath, angle, micro-expression. They wanted fear. Softness. Obedience.

She gave them stillness.

And then she began to speak.

“I know what you think this is.”

Her voice was calm. Not defiant. Not trembling. Measured. Controlled. Like someone who had studied this room her whole life and was no longer willing to live inside its story.

“You think this is a confession,” she said. “Or a breaking point. A stage for submission.”

She looked directly into the lens.

“It’s not.”

Somewhere beyond the mirrored walls, Dorian sat before a bank of monitors in Velvet’s master control room, watching her like a man on the verge of combustion.

Her bare shoulders. Her regal poise. Her voice, threading danger through silk.

“Her vitals are steady,” Penelope muttered behind him, eyes darting across biometric readings. “Breath controlled. Pupils fixed.”

“She’s performing,” Dorian said softly.

“No,” Penelope corrected. “She’s writing.”

Isolde leaned forward in the chair, letting the red silk slip slightly down her shoulder.

“Do you know what I was before all this?”

She paused.

“A dancer.”

Her lips curled faintly not in amusement. In memory.

“I trained for sixteen years to make silence speak. To use control like a blade. Every movement designed. Every stillness sharpened.”

The red lights blinked.

“Velvet isn’t about pleasure,” she said. “It’s about power. And power is performance. But you already know that, don’t you?”

In the surveillance room, Dorian exhaled sharply. His hands curled against the edge of the console. His voice was rough:

“She’s not just surviving it…”

“She’s dominating it,” Penelope said.

The handler’s voice crackled suddenly across the speaker wall tight, clipped, wrong-footed.

“This isn’t your story, Wrenleigh.”

Isolde stood.

“No,” she said. “It’s hers.”

She pulled something from beneath the chair hidden inside the velvet padding.

A small flash drive.

She held it up to the camera.

“Vivienne left breadcrumbs. You wanted me to follow them into a trap. Instead, I followed them into evidence.”

The red lights blinked faster now recording, transmitting.

“In this drive,” she said, “are the names of your clients. The ones who paid for shows. The ones who bid on girls. The ones you said were untouchable.”

She stepped forward.

“My name is Isolde Wrenleigh,” she said. “And I’m not your performer.”

She placed the flash drive into the slit at the center of the glass wall.

“Consider this my audition…”

She smiled cold, bright, final.

“…for your execution.”

The red-lit control room was silent except for the rhythmic pulse of incoming feeds and the low whir of encrypted servers Velvet’s mechanical heart, beating cold and constant.

Dorian stared at the screen. At her.

Isolde. Standing there like she owned the room. Like it was hers now.

“She was never meant to get this far,” he said, voice barely audible.

Penelope didn’t look away from her tablet. “You mean she was never supposed to survive this far.”

A pause.

Dorian turned, slow and sharp. “What do you know?”

Penelope tapped a key. A new window opened a string of access logs, ID markers, encrypted timestamps.

“She wasn’t the first to walk that stage. There was another before her. Codename Astra.”

Dorian’s face didn’t change. But something behind his eyes went hollow.

“I remember.”

“She died in that room,” Penelope said. “During a test stream.”

“No,” Dorian said. “She died because I let it happen. Because I didn’t stop it in time.”

Penelope’s voice dropped. “And now the same handler is back. Using the same setup. Only this time…”

Dorian turned back to the screen.

Isolde, firelit in red silk, stood at the center of the room.

“…he picked someone who could burn the system down.”

Penelope hesitated. Then pressed a final key.

The screen flickered. A new document appeared classified, buried deep.

SUBJECT FILE: WRENLEIGH, ISOLDE

Tagged: Potential, Reserved Asset

Date Created: 6 years ago

Dorian’s blood chilled.

“She was flagged before Vivienne ever stepped foot in Velvet,” Penelope said. “Before you even knew her name.”

Dorian backed away from the monitor like it had physically struck him.

“Someone marked her.”

“They were building toward her.”

He sank into a chair. His voice cracked.

“She was never infiltrating us…”

Penelope nodded.

“…we were circling her.”

He pressed his hands to his face, like he could block out the truth but it clung to him like smoke.

“I let her walk into that room thinking she was playing their game.”

Penelope’s voice was colder than steel. “She’s not playing their game.”

She tapped the screen again, eyes narrowing.

“She’s ending it.”

The Glass Room darkened.

Not fully just enough to force attention to a single wall, where the mirror dimmed and a video began.

No warning. No preamble.

Isolde watched as grainy black-and-white footage played across the glass.

Dorian.

Younger. Standing in a control room. Eyes hollow, voice flat.

Behind him: chaos. Someone offscreen screaming.

The name whispered like wind through steel:

“Astra…”

The camera followed as he turned away from the screen. As he pressed a button. As the screaming stopped.

Recording ends.

Isolde didn’t move.

Didn’t flinch.

The handler’s voice poured through the speaker above.

“He let her die, you know. To protect the stream. To preserve the illusion.”

Silence.

“He’ll let you die, too.”

Another beat.

“And the world will call it performance.”

Isolde stood slowly, her hair falling around her bare shoulders like war paint.

She walked toward the camera lens again.

And smiled sharp, vicious, whole.

“I know about Astra.”

The lights didn’t react. But the silence shifted like even the walls were listening.

“I know she wasn’t the first, either. I know Velvet has been feeding on women like us for years. You branded us with words like potential, resilience, obedience but we were never yours.”

She held up her hand.

A flash of silver between her fingers.

A transmitter. Thumb-sized. Activated. Live.

“You wanted confession?” she said.

“Here it is.”

She tapped the transmitter twice.

“This entire session every word, every threat, every file is being streamed through a burner relay to three places: an encrypted server, an anonymous journalist at The Current, and a judge whose name you don’t even know yet.”

Her voice didn’t shake.

“This is no longer your performance.”

She stepped back into the center of the room, arms wide.

“This is your eulogy.”

The wall behind her flickered.

Red static. Scrambled feed.

The handler’s voice faint now, off-balance.

“You don’t know what war you’ve started.”

She tilted her head.

“I didn’t start it,” she said.

“I’m just the one who finishes it.”

The lights overhead flared

And went black.

The lights across Velvet flickered once.

Twice.

And then everything shut down.

Doors sealed. Screens dimmed. The hum of constant surveillance cut off like a gasp.

In the control room, Penelope’s fingers flew over the panel.

“No response from the feed. We’ve lost all interior visual.”

Dorian’s voice was taut steel. “Emergency protocols?”

“Disabled. Manual override locked.” She glanced up. “We’re blind.”

He slammed a fist against the glass. “She’s still in the Glass Room.”

A low, guttural alarm began to pulse through the building. Not a siren something more insidious. A slow, throbbing tone meant to disorient.

Penelope scanned the backup feeds. “It’s the Final Protocol. Designed for one thing: containment.”

Dorian’s eyes narrowed. “How long do we have?”

She checked the timer.

“Three minutes before full lockdown. After that nothing gets in. Or out.”

He didn’t speak.

He just turned and ran.

Down the stairs. Through the service corridor. Past locked doors and panicked whispers from masked guests stumbling into emergency exits.

“Stage Seven is going dark,” someone shouted in the distance. “What the hell is happening?!”

Dorian didn’t slow.

Meanwhile, deep in the servers beneath Velvet, Penelope traced the breach.

Her screen lit up with code stream intercepts, relay taps, a pattern she recognized.

And then a second cursor began typing over her code.

She froze.

A second user. Someone inside the system.

They typed two words:

Nice try.

Then the screen went dead.

Penelope’s heart pounded. “He’s inside. He’s watching the whole thing.”

She hit the intercom.

“Dorian there’s someone else in the system. This was never about watching Isolde. It’s about trapping you both.”

Static.

Then

“Too late.”

The hallway lights blew out.

The last thing Dorian saw before everything turned red was the word LOCKING flashing across the corridor wall.

And the sound of a door sealing.

Like the world snapping shut.

The Glass Room pulsed red.

Not light heat.

It radiated from the mirrored floor, the seams in the walls, the vents above. Subtle. Gradual. But climbing. Measured to disorient. To sweat. To panic.

Isolde sat still in the chair.

The silence wasn’t silence anymore it was pressure.

She counted her breaths. Eight in, eight out.

The walls shimmered slightly. Not from heat alone.

Gas.

A fine, invisible mist designed to fog thought, memory, obedience.

She gritted her teeth.

“This is how Astra died,” she thought.

“Not from violence. From surrender.”

Click

A door panel shifted.

Someone moved inside the room.

Not security.

Not the handler.

Dorian.

Sweat across his brow, jacket gone, sleeves rolled. Eyes wild but clear.

“Get up,” he said.

She stood instantly. “How did you ?”

“I know the architecture. I built the first kill-switch.”

He crossed the room in three strides, pulling open the central panel in the mirrored wall.

Behind it a terminal. Old. Analog. Emergency use only.

“They thought it was decommissioned,” he said. “They were wrong.”

He plugged in her flash drive the one with the client names, the threats, the footage.

“It’s going out live.”

“To who?”

“Everyone.”

She turned to him.

Their eyes met.

And for the first time, neither of them looked away.

“I was part of the machine,” he said quietly. “But I’m breaking it from inside.”

Isolde touched the side of his face. “Then let them see what happens when power loves back.”

The screen glowed.

The footage played.

The handler’s threats. The poker chips. The blindfold. The velvet-drenched lies.

It streamed across news networks, secure emails, court systems.

And into the underground world that had kept Velvet alive for years.

Outside the room, alarms began to wail.

Inside, the red lights dimmed.

The heat stopped.

Doors clicked.

Unlocked.

Smoke filtered back into vents.

Dorian stood still, breathing hard.

Isolde stepped forward, chest rising.

“They’re watching now,” she said.

He nodded.

“Then let them burn.”