Ethan woke up and knew immediately.He didn't need to check. Didn't need to touch. He just knew.The emptiness was everywhere. A void where sensation used to live.He reached down anyway. Grabbed himself. Squeezed.Nothing.He squeezed harder. Dug his fingers in. Nothing.He lay there, staring at the ceiling, and tried to remember what it felt like. The warmth. The sensitivity. The way his body used to respond to the simplest touch.Gone.Forever.He closed his eyes. Breathed. Tried to think.He couldn't.His mind spun in circles. How could he live like this? What was the point of anything? Money, power, revenge—what did any of it matter if he couldn't feel that? If he couldn't feel anything there ever again?He thought about the future. Years of this. Decades. Never feeling that part of himself. Never knowing pleasure. Never knowing connection. Never knowing what it felt like to be touched there by someone who cared.He thought about Seraphina.The thought came unbidden. The way she

She was still going.That was the thing about Claire. She had never once in ten years known when she'd won. She'd get what she wanted and then keep pushing, like she was afraid that if she stopped talking the victory would somehow dissolve. Like she needed to grind the other person into dust just to feel certain it was real.Ethan stood there and took it.His jaw was tight. His hands were loose at his sides because if he made fists he wasn't sure he'd uncurl them. He was listening to her voice the way you listen to a fire alarm — loud, relentless, designed to be impossible to ignore — and he was thinking about exactly one thing.His body.Not in a normal way. In the way a man thinks about something he's lost. He hadn't told anyone. Not Seraphina, not a doctor, nobody. He'd woken up two mornings ago and reached for something ordinary and found nothing. Absence where there should have been sensation. A specific, private, humiliating nothing that the system had taken without ceremony and

****Ethan woke up feeling like something had crawled into his throat and died there.Not a penalty. Not the system. Just the plain, unglamorous reality of a man who hadn't slept more than five hours a night in three weeks finally running out of road. His throat was raw. His head was thick. He was hot in the specific way of someone whose body had been sending warning signals for days that he'd been too busy to read.He lay there for fifteen minutes hoping it would pass.It didn't.He called Seraphina. Told her to push the morning. Got dressed in jeans and a grey pullover and drove to the nearest hospital without thinking too hard about which hospital it was until he was already in the car park looking at the building.He sat with the engine off for a moment.Then he got out.---He didn't remember much about the last time he'd come through these doors. He'd been unconscious for the arrival. What he remembered was the ceiling. The smell. The feeling of his own body as something borrowe

****Seraphina Chen did not consider herself a nosy person.She was thorough. She paid attention because attention was her job and she was good at her job. That wasn't nosiness. That was competence. There was a difference.She told herself that as she sat cross-legged on her bed at eleven PM with her laptop open and a cup of tea going cold on the nightstand.---It had started with nothing in particular.She'd had a slow evening. Takeout eaten over a reality show she wasn't watching, a shower, the low-grade restlessness of a person whose brain doesn't know how to stop moving even when there's nothing to move toward. She'd asked him earlier if he was free that evening — dinner, debrief, the easy rhythm they'd built over three months. He'd said he had a thing.Just that. A thing.She'd gone home and eaten her takeout and tried to watch television and failed and opened her laptop without a specific destination in mind.She'd ended up on a financial news site, reading about AK Holdings th

The task had come in at 6 AM.Ethan had been awake already, standing at the kitchen window with his first coffee, watching the city come to life in the grey early morning light. The system notification had appeared on his phone without preamble, the way it always did — no greeting, no context, just the terms laid out flat and cold like a contract slid under a door.[TASK 12: Locate Benjamin Okafor. Deliver $1,200 in person. Exact amount. Nothing more. Time limit: 48 hours. Reward: $100,000,000. Penalty: Permanent loss of empathy. Irreversible.]He'd read it twice.Then he'd called Seraphina and told her he had a thing for the next day or two and to hold everything that could be held.She'd said okay. Hadn't asked. He'd appreciated that more than he could explain.He called the investigator at seven.He'd used the man twice before — quiet, efficient, the kind of professional who understood that the value of his service was in the discretion as much as the results. Ethan gave him Ben's