Chapter 70: The Deal

Elena went to the university the next morning as if the kitchen conversation with Edward had never happened.

She parked in the same space. She walked the same corridor. She told herself the rumor would burn itself out if she simply refused to feed it. The stares were still there — in the parking lot, near the department office, in the stairwell — but she kept her face composed and her pace even. If she looked like a woman with nothing to hide, maybe the story would stay a story.

Her lecture hall was already half full when she entered.

Max and David sat in their usual places near the back. For weeks they had been different — quieter, almost careful, the extra-class hunger replaced by whatever uneasy truce had followed the last sessions at her house. Today they were themselves again. Phones out. Shoulders angled together. The same lazy, private amusement they had worn in the earliest days, before Elias, before the basketball team, before the corridor under the arena.

Elena started the lecture anyway.

She made it through fifteen minutes before the movement of their screens pulled her attention off the board. She walked the aisle without announcing it, stopped beside their row, and looked down.

"What are you doing?"

Max did not even lock the phone. He turned it so she could see.

The video was already playing.

It was shot from a slightly elevated angle near a row of lockers. The image was steady enough. Elena on her knees on tile. Five players around her. Her mouth occupied. Her breasts being used. A sixth figure at the edge of the frame stroking himself while he watched. The audio was low but unmistakable — wet sounds, a muffled moan, a male voice telling her not to forget the cock in front of her face.

Andrew's recording.

The one she had never known existed.

Max's voice was almost polite.

"We know you fucked all twelve of the basketball team," he said. "This is just the locker-room one. The other clip is in the group chat too. After the final."

David leaned in, eyes bright. "Whole roster. You weren't even trying to hide your face."

Elena's stomach dropped so hard she had to put her fingers on the back of the nearest chair.

"That's morphed," she said. The words came out too fast. "Someone is trying to ruin my image. You can fake anything now. That isn't me."

Max just looked at her.

David let out a short, incredulous breath that was almost a laugh.

No one in the nearby rows believed it. Elena could feel it without turning around. The students close enough to hear had gone still in the particular way people go still when they are watching a lie fail in real time. The video was too clear. The angle was too familiar. The woman on the screen had her mouth, her chest, her voice.

Elena stepped back from the desk.

Her mind was already ahead of the room.

If the video was in a group chat, it was already beyond Max and David. It was already beyond this lecture hall. It was already the kind of file that moved from phone to phone without needing a name attached. Edward had heard the rumor yesterday from someone. Today he would not hear a rumor. He would be sent a clip.

Someone in this class was feeding him information.

Any student with a phone and a grudge or a taste for chaos could have forwarded the file. Elena did not know who. The not-knowing sat in her chest like a second heartbeat.

She walked back to the front of the room because there was nowhere else to go.

The lecture was finished whether she completed it or not. Faces were no longer pretending to watch the board. The video had done what the joke in the previous class had only started. It had turned her from a rumor into evidence.

Elena looked at them — the full hall, the phones already lowering, the waiting.

A thought arrived that was not a good thought.

It was a solution the same way setting a building on fire was a solution to a locked door.

If the video was the problem, then the people circulating it were the problem. If the people circulating it wanted what the basketball team had already taken, then she could buy their silence the same way she had bought the roster's effort.

She heard herself speak before she had fully decided to speak.

"If everyone in this class stops circulating that video," Elena said, her voice carrying farther than she intended, "I will let all of you fuck me."

The room went silent in a different way.

Not the silence of a failed lie.

The silence of a door opening.

Max sat up slowly. David's mouth opened and then closed. A girl in the second row stared as if she had misheard. A guy near the window laughed once, sharp and disbelieving, then stopped when he realized no one else was laughing with him.

Elena did not take it back.

The same reckless logic that had made her promise the basketball team her body if they won the tournament was still running. She had already crossed the line that was supposed to be the last line. Twelve men in a concrete corridor. A janitor she had mistaken for a thirteenth. Elias on his desk the next morning, telling her he did not mind. The rumor had not destroyed her. The video might. Unless she turned the people holding it into people who had a reason to bury it.

"I'm serious," she said. "No more forwarding. No more group chats. No more copies. You stop it, and I keep the deal."

For a few seconds no one moved.

Then Max, who had started all of this weeks ago with a phone in the back row and a teacher-student clip he wanted her to see, nodded once.

"Deal."

David followed. Then another student. Then another. The agreement moved through the hall in low voices and short, stunned confirmations, the way a rumor moved — fast, hungry, already half-believed before it was finished being spoken.

Elena stood at the front of her own classroom and felt the heat of what she had just done settle over the rows like a change in weather.

She had not found the person who was talking to Edward.

She had only made the entire class into a second roster.

The video was still on their phones.

The deal was already made.

End of Chapter 70

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