Chapter 4: A Pound of Flesh

Chapter 4: A Pound of Flesh

The silence from Mark was a judgment. Aaron texted him twice over the next two days, receiving only curt, single-word replies. The chasm of his betrayal, once a secret known only to him, was now a shared space of suspicion and hurt. The magnificent Omega on his wrist felt less like a trophy and more like a manacle, a constant, heavy reminder of the price.

Fear was a constant companion now, a cold stone in his gut. The game was no longer a contained phenomenon. It had reached out with phantom fingers and poisoned the one meaningful relationship in his life. He spent his days in a paranoid haze, jumping at every email notification, flinching at the sound of his own phone. At night, he’d sit in his stifling apartment, staring at the pantry door.

He knew he shouldn't go back. Every rational part of his mind screamed at him to run, to pack his car and drive until Tucson was a speck in his rearview mirror. But where would he go? The game’s influence felt pervasive, cosmic. And a darker, more insidious thought whispered from the depths of his addict’s logic: maybe the only way to fix what the game had broken was with a bigger prize from the game itself.

On the third night, he didn't even try to resist. The pull was gravitational. When the multicolored light bled from under the door, he felt a sick sense of homecoming. He was a moth flying back to the flame that had already scorched its wings. The pantry door no longer felt like an entrance; it was the maw of some great, patient beast, and he was walking willingly into its gullet.

He opened it.

The change was immediate and visceral. The stage was bathed in a deep, sanguine light. The brilliant golds of the arches were tarnished, darker, catching the light like old brass. The shimmering curtains behind the Hostess were the color of dried blood. The air was thick with the coppery scent of ozone and something else, something ancient and metallic. The roar of the unseen crowd was different, too—less like human cheering and more like the dry, chittering of a billion insects.

The Hostess stood center stage. Her gown of liquid gold was gone, replaced by a tailored pantsuit of the most brilliant, shocking crimson. It shimmered under the lurid lights, not with sequins, but with a wet, visceral sheen that seemed to drink the light and reflect nothing. Her smile was a slash of white in the gloom.

“I was wondering when you’d be back,” she said, her voice dripping with amusement. She saw the desperation in his eyes, the haunted look, and she savored it. “Eager to solve your little… family problem?”

Her omniscience no longer surprised him; it terrified him.

“Let’s see what we have for you tonight,” she mused, tapping a blood-red fingernail against her chin. “A REWARD to mend all wounds. The complete and unconditional restoration of a broken trust. Your brother will wake up tomorrow, the memory of that unfortunate email wiped clean, his faith in you as pure as the driven snow.”

Aaron’s heart seized. It was exactly what he wanted. It was an impossible, magical solution to a problem of his own making. It was everything. “What’s the question?” he asked, his voice cracking.

The Hostess’s smile widened. “Ah, yes. The question.” She paused for dramatic effect, letting the anticipation hang in the thick air. “For this miraculous REWARD, you must simply tell me… What was the final, whispered word of the last Vestal Virgin of Rome before she was sealed in her tomb?”

The question landed like a physical blow. Aaron’s mind, the data-sorting, pattern-recognizing machine he relied on, spun uselessly. It wasn’t a matter of trivia he might have forgotten. It was unknowable. A secret lost to two thousand years of dust and death. He could guess, but he knew with absolute certainty that a guess would be wrong. The game didn’t deal in luck. It dealt in truth.

He stared at her, his mouth dry. “I… I don’t know. No one knows.”

“Precisely!” she chirped, her delight a jarring counterpoint to his despair. “So you can’t answer. Which means… you get a choice you’ve never had before!”

The words flashed on a massive screen behind her, the letters dripping red.

RISK! OR! REWARD!

“You can’t have the REWARD,” she said, stating the obvious. “So you can either walk away, back to your sad little life and your broken relationships… or you can take a RISK.”

The unseen audience chittered with excitement.

“What… what is the risk?” Aaron asked, dread coiling in his stomach.

“Oh, it’s nothing, darling. A trifle. A little pound of flesh to prove your commitment to the game,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “A small, physical sacrifice. A token. Think of it as a souvenir from our time together. A permanent reminder of your ambition.”

A physical sacrifice. The words echoed in the cavernous space. This was a new threshold, a line he knew he shouldn’t cross. The memory and the secret had been intangible, invisible thefts. This was different. This was self-mutilation for a prize.

But he saw Mark’s face in his mind, clouded with suspicion. He felt the crushing weight of his guilt. The promise of wiping the slate clean, of having his brother back, was a lure too powerful to ignore. He was trapped. The only way out felt like it was deeper in.

His voice was a ghost of a whisper. “I’ll do it. I’ll take the risk.”

For a fraction of a second, the Hostess’s mask of performative charm dropped. Her eyes flashed with a raw, exultant hunger that was terrifying in its intensity. This was what she had wanted. The game wasn’t about the questions; it was about the risks.

“Excellent choice!” she boomed, her professional smile snapping back into place. A gong sounded somewhere in the darkness, a deep, resonant tone that vibrated through the floor. “The contestant chooses RISK!”

Aaron braced himself, expecting a blow, a cut, a burn. Nothing happened. The Hostess simply watched him, her head cocked with academic curiosity.

Then, the pain started.

It came from within his own left forearm. A searing, blinding agony that erupted from under his skin. It was not a cut or a burn; it was a white-hot poker being pressed against his bones from the inside out. He screamed, a raw, ragged sound that was swallowed by the roar of the crowd. He collapsed to the polished floor, clutching his arm as every nerve ending shrieked in unison. The pain was absolute, eclipsing all thought, all reason. It felt like his very cells were being rewritten by fire.

And as quickly as it began, it stopped.

He was left gasping on the floor, his body trembling, drenched in sweat. The crimson stage spun around him. The Hostess looked down at him, not with pity, but with the detached satisfaction of a scientist observing a successful experiment.

“There now,” she said softly. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

With a shaking hand, Aaron pushed up the sleeve of his shirt. There, on the pale skin of his inner forearm, was a scar. It was a deep, puckered red, as if freshly healed from a third-degree burn. It wasn't a random shape. It was a symbol, an intricate glyph of interlocking spirals and sharp, angular lines that meant nothing to him, yet felt imbued with a terrible, ancient significance. It wasn't a wound. It was a brand.

The world flickered. He was on his knees on his kitchen linoleum. The pantry door was shut. The only light was the weak yellow from the ceiling fixture.

He scrambled to his feet, staring at his arm. The scar was still there, throbbing with a dull, residual heat. He touched it. The skin was unnaturally smooth, the mark a permanent part of him. The watch on his other wrist was just a piece of metal. The promise of money was just paper. But this—this brand was flesh and blood. It was a mark of ownership.

The horror was no longer just in his mind or his relationships. It was in his body. The game had branded him like cattle, and he had willingly paid the price. Standing there, under the buzz of the fluorescent light, Aaron knew with sickening certainty that his goal was no longer to win. It was to survive.