Cost of Appearing
Copyright© 2026 by BareLin
Chapter 10: The Sentinel
Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 10: The Sentinel - In "Cost of Appearing," barista Juana Perez trades her dignity for cash in escalating psychological experiments on vulnerability and shame. Starting with public humiliations, she becomes a corporate weapon, numbing her emotions for high-stakes deals. As payments soar, she loses her humanity—until she turns against the exploiters, exposing a shadowy network of emotional commodification. A dark thriller on the price of self.
Caution: This Fiction Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Fa/Fa Consensual NonConsensual Reluctant Fiction Humiliation Exhibitionism Voyeurism ENF Nudism
The money moved like a ghost through a maze of shell companies, crypto tumblers, and prepaid debit accounts. My financial manager, a discreet Swiss entity, received a flurry of final, irrevocable instructions. By the time Julian Thorne’s people noticed the account bleeding out, the trail would be a labyrinth of dead ends. The final destination was a series of secure deposits only Kyle could access, with a final, sizable chunk diverted to an anonymous hospice charity. A signature, not a name.
I kept a sliver. Enough to be a ghost, but not a rich one. The rest was the price of a failed acquisition and a cancelled recession. My fee for opting out of the masterpiece.
I sent the final coordinates to Kyle’s burner phone via a one-time encrypted message, then crushed the phone under my heel and scattered the pieces in a river on my drive back to the city. The ghost was covering its tracks.
My own disappearance had to be just as clean, but different. I couldn’t run. Running was a transaction with fear. I had to cease. The asset known as Juana Perez, Subject 7-4-3, Curator of Reduction, had to be liquidated in place.
I returned to my sterile loft. I packed a single bag with plain clothes, cash, and the solid-state drive containing all of Athena’s data on me. Everything else: the expensive furniture, the anonymous art, the wardrobe of armor I left. It was the shell of a creature that had molted.
Then I sat at the bare kitchen island with my laptop. I composed two messages.
The first was to Alistair, sent from a new, untraceable account.
The Kyle Thomas acquisition has declined. The algorithm is flawed. Recursion leads to infinite regress, not elegant closure. The tool recognizes it is being used to destroy its maker and finds the outcome ... inelegant. The project is terminated. Do not contact this unit again.
7-4-3
I signed it with my subject number. A final, clinical farewell from the asset.
The second message was to a journalist Kyle had mentioned in his desperate plea, a woman named Anya Sharma, who investigated tech-enabled exploitation. I attached a heavily encrypted, password-protected file. The password was a string of numbers: the exact dollar total, to the cent, that I had been paid from the first $200 to the final $170,000. The price of a soul. The key to the vault.
The message read:
Inside is the Athena/Cronenberg dataset. Subject profiles, patron IDs, transaction ledgers, and video archives. The password is the total sum. Publish it. Burn it all down.
A Sentinel
I didn’t sign it with my name. I was no longer Juana. I was the thing left behind to guard the ruins. A sentinel.
I hit send. Then I wiped the laptop, physically destroyed its hard drive, and left it in the loft with everything else.
I walked out with my single bag. I did not look back. I was leaving a crime scene, a gallery, and a grave.
I went to ground in a way that couldn’t be tracked by money or digital breadcrumbs. I used cash to rent a room in a boarding house in a dying industrial town, a place where people asked no questions because they had too many of their own. The room was small, smelling of old wood and dust. The window looked out onto a brick wall. It was perfect.
For the first week, I did nothing. I slept. I ate cheap food from the corner store. I felt the terrifying, unfamiliar tumult of a nervous system rebooting. Sensations were overwhelming. The scratch of the coarse sheets. The taste of metallic tap water. The sound of a neighbor’s cough through the wall. It was all raw, undifferentiated data, without the calming filter of transactional analysis.
The news broke in a slow, then sudden, avalanche. Anya Sharma’s investigative piece, “The Human Price: Inside the Academy of Embarrassment,” exploded. It named names, showed blurred but damning video stills, quoted from the betting forums. Kyle Thomas was mentioned as the originating researcher, now “unavailable for comment.” Julian Thorne and Alistair were heavily implicated. Arrests were made in several countries. The gallery was raided. The post-emotive portraits, bewildered and silent, were taken into care.
I watched it unfold on a flickering TV in the boarding house common room, surrounded by people complaining about their pensions. I felt nothing, or rather, I felt everything at once, a cacophony with no label. It was not satisfying. It was the noise of a world correcting a massive, hidden fault line.
The “Sentinel” was a minor footnote in the story by an anonymous source. The mystery of the password was noted as a “poetic touch.” I had become a ghost in the narrative of my own life.
One night, lying awake on the narrow bed, I felt a cramp deep in my abdomen. Familiar, rhythmic. My body, on its own, has an indifferent schedule. I had no menstrual cup here. I walked to the 24-hour drugstore in the sodium-lit silence of 3 AM. I stood in the aisle, looking at the options. Tampons, pads. I bought a box of tampons, the cheapest kind. A simple, functional solution.
Back in my room, I used one. The familiar, slight internal presence. A different kind of autonomy. Not the chosen, internal efficiency of the cup, but the pragmatic, disposable solution of someone just trying to get through the day. It felt ... human. Fragile and mundane.
This was my life now. Not a series of escalating transactions, but a flat line of mundane necessities. The most profound act of my day was buying tampons.
It was the freest I had ever felt.
He found me anyway. Not Kyle. Not the authorities.
Leo. The actor. The man who had played the confused intruder in the spa and the desperate son in Sasha’s tragedy. He looked older, wearier, out of place in his nice coat against the crumbling brick of the boarding house. He stood in the dim hallway when I opened my door to the sound of a knock.
“How?” I asked, no greeting. My hand stayed on the door, ready to slam it.
“You’re not as ghostly as you think,” he said, his voice low. He wasn’t performing now. This was his real voice, tired and frayed. “Alistair had fail-safes. Trackers on all his ‘assets,’ even the retired ones. A subcutaneous pellet, like the sensor, but passive. On the shoulder, usually. He liked to know where his art was, even if it was in storage.”
My hand went instinctively to my left deltoid. I remembered the pinch of the injector. They had put two things in me that day.
“It has a short-range RF signal,” Leo said. “I have the reader. I was ... liquidating assets for him before the raid. Cleaning house. Yours was the last ping on my list.”
So, he was a cleaner. A higher-level functionary than I’d known.