"Pull the camera closer—our sponsor wants a closeup!" a greasy voice barked as hands reached for her.
"Don't touch her face," Jaelynn spat, voice hoarse. Her wrists were bound tight against the mattress. Every move sent pins of pain through tendons that did not belong to her.
"She's fragile. Make it pretty," another man said, nudging a lens. Light flooded the room. Lavish, clinical, like a set dressed to sell scandal.
"Stand up," someone ordered. "Give us something."
She tried to push her palms down. The ropes bit into the wrong bone. The pressure on the left wrist was a clean, sharp fire. Memories kicked in not as thoughts but as tools: an alphabet of pain, a mapping of leverage. Her fingers found a flaw in the knot.
"What's your name, starlet?" a third man said. He hit record on his phone like he was miked to fate.
"Talk," Jaelynn said. The word was a blade.
"She'll play mute," the first man laughed. "Wyatt told us she needs to beg. Damaging but cute."
"Wyatt's orders," the man with the phone added. He tapped keys on a tablet and a headline flickered across the screen: JAELYNN ROBINSON REBOOTED—SCANDAL? THE INDUSTRY EATS HEROES.
She felt a buzz in her pocket where a phone lay. Her thumb couldn't move to it. So she moved her teeth to the rope and worked at the loop. One bite, twice. The knot loosened.
"Stop that," the second man
