Burning Choice (Trevor's Harem #3)

by Aubrey Parker

  CONTENTS

  The Burning Choice

  Chapter One - Daniel

  Chapter Two - Bridget

  Chapter Three - Bridget

  Chapter Four - Daniel

  Chapter Five - Bridget

  Chapter Six - Daniel

  Chapter Seven - Bridget

  Chapter Eight - Bridget

  Chapter Nine - Daniel

  Chapter Ten - Bridget

  Chapter Eleven - Daniel

  Chapter Twelve - Bridget

  Chapter Thirteen - Bridget

  Chapter Fourteen - Bridget

  Chapter Fifteen - Bridget

  Chapter Sixteen - Daniel

  Chapter Seventeen - Bridget

  Chapter Eighteen - Bridget

  Chapter Nineteen - Daniel

  Chapter Twenty - Bridget

  Chapter Twenty-One - Bridget

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Daniel

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Bridget

  Chapter Twenty-Four - Bridget

  Chapter Twenty-Five - Bridget

  Chapter Twenty-Six - Daniel

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - Bridget

  FIND OUT HOW IT ENDS!

  THE BURNING CHOICE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Daniel

  “Unacceptable.”

  The man with the mustache is muttering, his hands palms up in a gesture of generalized rage. He’s pointedly speaking to no one — mouthing his complaint into the aether. He’s acting as if the room itself (or possibly God and the Universe) is against him, but I know he’s speaking to me.

  It’s weak, the way he’s refusing to meet my eyes. He and the other members of the board are thousands of miles away, on the other side of my screen. But one of Eros’s partners makes these send/receive surfaces where you can look directly at the other person’s image and the software adjusts it so everyone ends up eye to eye. They didn’t create the technology for business, but for our main line of work, improving person-to-person distance seduction. Long ago, scientists figured out that more eye contact means additional oxytocin release. More oxytocin, especially paired with the opioid and dopamine hits that accompany orgasm, means more bonding. Our company took the ball the rest of the way and added the chain’s final link: more bonding keeps wallets open longer, and raises the price of our stock.

  The human animal, duly subdued. Love and lust reduced to chemistry.

  If the man with the mustache would make eye contact while he accuses me, at least I’d respect him. He’s not talking to the room, or upset with the general situation. He’s angry with me. If he’d just admit it and meet me iris to iris, we could address his accusations like men. The screen technology wouldn’t help us with oxytocin bonding — in this case, there’d be adrenaline. Vasopressin. That might not be good for him if we were face to face because I’m the alpha between us.

  The board talks and talks about how the girls are all puppets, how half the point is to demonstrate that free will is mostly illusion. But it’s a double-edged sword — because men are ruled by chemistry, too. It wouldn’t be hard for my amygdala to see him as competition, as a rival trying to poach my mate.

  “What’s unacceptable, Victor?”

  “Bridget Miller.”

  I feel my lip curl. It wants to lift, to show this man my canines. But I stuff my response down. We’re not lab animals. We’re human beings. It doesn’t matter that he’s just convinced my brain’s aggression center he’s trying to take away what’s mine. I can reason through this — reason conquering instinct. I can play my part and pretend my interest in all that’s gone wrong is strictly professional.

  There’s a longer game here, I tell myself. With the board. With Eros. With Trevor.

  And yes, with Bridget by my side.

  “I don’t understand,” I lie.

  “You administer the tests. It’s your laboratory.”

  “Stop calling it a laboratory.”

  “It’s your experiment.”

  “Stop calling it an experiment.”

  Now he finally meets my eyes. My hands form fists. I almost reach for the screen, to address his challenge directly. But I force myself to calm. There’s a longer game here.

  “You are an employee in this situation. Do you understand me, Mr. Rice?” he says.

  “That’s a matter of perspective,” I respond.

  “Puff your chest all you want. Go ahead and complain. Whine and bitch about what’s fair and what isn’t. But I’m sure you don’t need to be reminded that you can be fired at any moment.”

  I laugh.

  “You know what the contracts stipulate,” he says.

  But the bastard has been looking into my eyes too long. I watch him back. Bridget flits into my mind. She’s the subject, even as we spar over corporations, experiments, and who, technically speaking, is required by circumstances to report to whom. It’s trite, but I draw strength as I imagine her face. As I imagine her touch. As I picture Victor taking her from me not by executive order but using his own hands. And finally, he looks toward the tabletop, away from me.

  “Of course I do,” I say.

  “Then you know that falsification of — ”

  “Of what, Victor? Of individual test results? Is that what you think — that I’m sitting here with a pencil and an eraser, changing answers on a bubble sheet? What do you think this is, a high school standardized test? How would that not be discovered, if I’d fudged something? Is Halo that easy to fool?”

  “Now hang on a minute,” says Welty, sitting two chairs down from Victor. Welty is a psychologist with a twisted reputation, and Halo is his child more than anyone’s. Programmers wrote the code, but the research was mostly his. “Halo’s predictive ability has been verified repeatedly by dozens of — ”

  “And that makes it immune to falsified test results, if Daniel were playing favorites?”

  Alexa speaks up from beside Welty. “Settle down, Victor. Daniel is right. The algorithm would know if he were tampering.”

  Victor snorts back at Alexa. “Because it’s infallible.”

  “It’s as close to infallible as is reasonable to expect,” Alexa says.

  “Welty said himself that it only makes guesses, and — ”

  “I said it’s heuristic!” Welty blurts. “That’s the fucking H in the acronym!”

  “Calm down,” Alexa says. And she kind of pats the air as Victor and Welty both turn to look at her. “We all know this isn’t an exact thing. From what I understand, we can only look for patterns.”

  “Which is what Halo is for,” Welty says, like a petulant child.

  “And he’s right,” Alexa continues, now speaking to Victor. “Nobody can feed bogus information into Halo without setting off some alarm bells. The results must be internally consistent, or they’re discarded as anomalous. I don’t believe that Daniel — or anyone, for that matter — is feeding Halo anything inaccurate.”

  But Alexa gives me a moment’s hard stare after she finishes defending me, and in that stare I see that she doesn’t entirely trust me, either. Given the situation, there’s really no way the board and I wouldn’t be enemies. We have been since before the first of our test subjects were selected for this whole supposed Billionaire’s Bride competition. They want what I have. I want what the board has. We work together like gangsters in a standoff, guns fixed at each other’s heads.

  “Miller was his selection,” says the fat man on the screen’s other side.

  “Which I was against, for the record,” Welty says.

  “I did my due diligence to — ”

  “Knock it off, Daniel,” Alexa cuts me off. “We all knew what she was to you. It’s cute that you seem to have thought we’d let it go. ‘Oh,
our project administrator has suddenly and inexplicably tossed some random girl we’ve never heard about and have virtually no data on into the subject pool? No, let’s not look her up. Let’s not see her preexisting ties to Daniel.’” Alexa scoffs as if I’ve insulted her intelligence. Of course I have — stupid to think I’d slipped anything by her.

  I consider protesting and saying that Bridget and I don’t have any history, overt or assumed. But Alexa is one person I don’t want to anger.

  She goes on.

  “But it’s fine. You should have your way a little, considering all the fun Trevor’s having and will continue to have. With a dozen girls in the competition, there was room for her to skate by. The first round was always about wild cards. Erin, for instance. Or Ruby. Both failed their first time through Halo’s predictions, based on data Eros had gathered on the girls as consumers. They were sexy. And surprisingly sexual. But look at Erin that first day. She never saw Tony coming.”

  Welty giggles. Alexa snaps her head to look at him, and his immature smile vanishes like a school kid caught talking in class.

  “You know what I mean,” Alexa goes on. “She failed to predict his motives. She got lost in him.”

  “So they can’t enjoy fucking?” Welty says.

  “My point is that she was good enough. Both of them were, Erin and Roxy. The first round was always about getting to the second, so the serious work could begin. Let me remind you that the original intention was always to start with six girls. We only expanded to twelve so we could include some of the marginal candidates and look for surprises. Just in case the field data was wrong, we thought one might turn out to be a diamond in the rough.”

  “Which is what happened,” I say.

  The board’s heads all turn to look at me, as if they’ve forgotten I was here.

  “That’s not what happened,” said Victor. “You wanted Miller in the house, to live out some teenage fantasy. You knew she wasn’t cleared; I knew it; we all knew it. We let you bring her in because, as Alexa said, the first round didn’t matter. But if you think we’re going to believe that somehow, some way, she — ”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I say. “Halo cleared her to advance.”

  “Erroneously.”

  “Halo doesn’t make errors,” Welty says to Victor, squaring his shoulders.

  Victor points at the screen. It looks like his finger is right in my face. “Then he tricked it.”

  “And it can’t be ‘tricked,’” Welty echoes, saying the word like he might say feces. “Let me remind you that this company has a substantial investment in Halo, and that the one thing — the one thing! — we can be sure of is that the algorithm that underpins this entire experiment is — ”

  “Look, nobody’s questioning the selection algorithm,” Alexa says, pacifying. “And I know everyone here understands that it’s a bit more complex than ‘garbage in, garbage out’ and can’t simply be fooled by faked data.” Alexa raises a hand to the screen, stopping me from protesting the falsified-data accusation before I can open my mouth. “The only conclusion is that for some reason we don’t understand, Bridget Miller is a genuine candidate.”

  “Ridiculous,” says Vincent. And as absurd as it is, I have to push down an urge to say, Easy. That’s my woman you’re talking about.

  “We built Halo because it can make the selections better than this board could by a show of hands. Sure, it’s heuristic. But it learns, too. I know we split hairs, but … ”

  “It’s not an AI,” Welty says as she pauses.

  “But it’s damn close. It’s more than an algorithm for sure. The only reason Halo won’t pass a Turing test is because there’s no point in making a pretty user interface to ask it questions. But the guts for, say, a ‘quasi AI,’ are there, and we’ve seen how greedy Caspian White is to get a look and unleash it on his dataset. It’s irrational to distrust Halo at this point. We put our faith and substantial economic resources behind it. So, strange as it seems that it’s chosen Miller to advance, the only thing stranger would be to assume we know better and countermand its decision.”

  Alexa looks at each of the other board members then turns to me.

  “I have this fear,” she says.

  She actually waits, meeting my eyes with far less intimidation than I saw in Victor, until I nod for her to continue.

  “My fear is that my compassion and sense of understanding will come back to bite me.”

  Again, she pauses until I nod.

  “I get the feeling that a lot of people talk behind my back. Say I’m superstitious. That the initiatives I propose aren’t that far from faith healing. Or cult thinking. But because I’m right more often than I’m wrong, even people like Caspian White tend to listen. Yet I still have this insecurity. Do you know what I mean, Daniel?”

  I remind myself: This woman is not my boss. Even if I lose this gambit and she takes it all away, there are ways to recover. And I’m playing a very long game. With two women by my side. But it barely works, and I still swallow hard as I meet her gaze. I think of Bridget, and it’s like Alexa is seeing her inside my mind. It makes me think of what’s truly at stake, and the risks I’m taking. At how far upside-down Bridget has turned me, and what her mere presence here will force me to do.

  “So right now,” Alexa goes on, “I’m afraid. I’m afraid that somehow, you’ve tricked me, even though you couldn’t have. I’m afraid that somehow — as impossible as it seems — you’re trying to play me for a fool. And that right now, I’m looking at you and you’re nodding back at me … but that while I’m saying, ‘Daniel is right; Halo sees something in Bridget that we didn’t and she is a candidate after all,’ you’re secretly laughing at how gullible I am. Superstitious Alexa, an idiot like always.”

  “I don’t — ”

  Alexa severs the end of my sentence as sharply as if she’s done it with shears.

  “I’m choosing to believe this is all according to plan. But I want you to know about my fear. That I recognize it, and see what it’s about. And that if I’m wrong, for the record, a part of me saw it coming.”

  After I’m sure she’s finished, I say, “Of course, Alexa.”

  “She ranked sixth of the six,” Welty says. “So if predictions hold, she won’t survive the next elimination.”

  “And if she does,” Alexa adds, still watching me carefully, “I will be … even more surprised than I am right now.”

  “I would be too,” I say. But also, maybe I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

  “I’ll remind you,” Victor says, “that although Miller’s impact on this study was minimal when there were twelve contestants and we could therefore afford to indulge your childish impulses and neuroses, she’s now holding a valuable spot. One of only six potentials for an asset that stands to make this company hundreds of billions of dollars. Trillions, in time.”

  “If she’s still here when Caspian White visits … ” Welty says, trailing off.

  “Hey,” I say, trying on my best attempt at a casual smile, “tell it to Halo.”

  Alexa nods. So does Victor, and every member at the table.

  Then the feed shuts off without a single goodbye or good luck, and even after the screen’s gone dark, I feel like I’m being watched.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bridget

  I pace when nervous.

  Animals in the zoo do it, too. When you see a tiger repeatedly plodding the same path inside his enclosure, back and forth and back and forth, he’s not behaving like a castle guard, making sure you and the other visitors know this is his turf and that you’d better stay off. He does it because he’s uneasy. Neurotic. Losing his mind in his little cell, day by day by day.

  Someone, somewhere, might be watching me, on the cameras that are everywhere, subtle enough to stay invisible. Maybe it’s Daniel’s eyes all over me. Maybe he’s in that little closet where I Skyped Brandon, where Daniel fucked me on the sly while I made my brother as nervous as I am now. Or maybe it’s someone
else watching. Trevor, who seems far too nice to be running … whatever this twisted game is. Maybe it’s one of the hired studs, who thanks to weeks of unending exposure I now think of as friendly assistants … who will use their cocks to improve your mood if asked. Or maybe it’s someone else. One of the single-serving helpers. I think of the names I’ve heard: Sammy, whose jobs include slipping envelopes under our door. A man named Chuck, whom I’ve heard mentioned like an errand boy. Unseen eyes I can only sense. Daniel acts as if he’s hiding from a higher power. Hiding me. Us. Logic says that the power must be Trevor, but he doesn’t act like a power. And, if I had to guess, Trevor is hiding from something too.

  The other day, before the elimination, I was talking to Trevor, and I’d swear he had ADD, the way his eyes kept flitting away, as if he needed to be elsewhere, even though he’d chosen to come and sit by me.

  He asked me how things were going.

  He asked if I was comfortable.

  He asked if I’d seen the original Star Wars trilogy — a strange thing for a guy to ask a girl out of the blue, especially since chatting on the films’ finer points isn’t something most girls have much interest in. But I grew up with Brandon, and he made me watch those movies dozens of times once we were in a place that finally had a VCR and owned the tapes. It was as if Trevor somehow knew.

  Trevor told me, off the cuff and trying to sound blasé even though he wasn’t, that he thought the contest was going well.

  And then he told me about lab experiment where rats were wired so they could press levers to stimulate their own brains’ pleasure centers. The same centers that are stimulated by sex and orgasm. The rats enjoyed pressing the levers so much that they ignored food and sleep, continuing to press the levers until they died. I don’t remember my reaction except that I giggled, both at the mental image and the fact that he’d thought to tell me about that, of all things. But Trevor didn’t laugh back. He just met my eyes, his attention still somewhere else. “Humans aren’t rats,” he said, before he got up and walked away.