Chapter 3

The knock on my door was a bit of a surprise. I yawned, getting up off the chair and wandered over.

I’d been three hours deep into a ranked session, one eye on the encoding preview running on the secondary monitor—the gaming channel had developed enough of an audience that I’d started treating every session as potential content, which changed the way I played in ways that were mostly positive. More deliberate. More aware of the narrative arc of a match. Forty thousand subscribers didn’t need perfection; they needed someone who made the game feel legible, and NZT had made legibility my natural register.

The finance channel was newer and growing faster than I’d expected. I talked through positions, walked through balance sheets, explained the logic behind decisions I’d already made and banked. It was a smaller audience than the gaming channel but considerably more engaged—people who paused, rewound, came back three days later with follow-up questions in the comments. The kind of viewers who actually did something with what they watched.

The portfolio itself had compounded quietly over twelve months into something I couldn’t have conceived of when Eddie Morra had pressed that fifty-pound note into my palm in a hotel corridor. Diversified properly—equities across four sectors, two index positions I treated as ballast, a commodities allocation I’d built slowly after six weeks of reading I wouldn’t have had the patience for before the pills. Nothing reckless. The sort of construction that doesn’t photograph well but sleeps easily.

The drop-shipping had long since ceased to require much of me. Three months of intense infrastructure work—supplier relationships, automated inventory management, a fulfilment pipeline that ran on scheduled scripts and required my intervention roughly twice a week—had produced a business that generated a dependable monthly figure and asked almost nothing in return. It was, in the most literal sense, money working while I did other things.

The flat reflected all of it in aggregate—not ostentatiously, but unmistakably. The rig. The monitors. The acoustic treatment on the back wall that had taken an afternoon to install and had immediately improved the channel’s audio in ways the comment section noticed within forty-eight hours. A better coffee machine. A standing desk I’d built into the corner for the hours when I needed to think on my feet rather than sit. The kettlebells lined up neatly by the window in ascending weight, the heaviest of which I hadn’t owned six months ago.

I pulled open the door.

“Hello James.”

“Mr Morra.”

“Eddie, please.”

“Sir, why don’t you come in.”

Eddie grinned and nodded, stepping through. Behind him, two security detail positioned themselves in the corridor with the practiced stillness of men who did this for a living—neither of them looked at me, which I understood was the point. I closed the door.

He moved through the flat the way he moved through every space I’d observed him in—methodically, those pale scanning eyes cataloguing everything with an unhurried thoroughness that felt less like curiosity and more like professional habit.

There was plenty to catalogue. The living room had been rebuilt from first principles over the course of twelve months. The 55-inch television dominated the far wall, flanked by a surround sound system whose rear speakers were mounted at precise angles I’d calculated with embarrassing rigour. The cabinet beneath housed DVDs arranged by director rather than title, games stacked in a separate column by platform. Bookshelves ran along two walls—proper floor-to-ceiling ones I’d fitted myself—and they were full, genuinely full, not decorative. Programming textbooks spine-to-spine with neuroscience, economics, linguistics, fiction in six languages. The room had a particular quality to it, a deliberate arrangement of furniture and light sources that I’d arrived at through three separate configurations before it felt right. Uncluttered sightlines. Everything within reach of everything else.

The bedroom, visible through the open door, told a different story—organised chaos with clear intent. The secondary gaming setup dominated the corner: monitor arm, headset stand, capture card, a stream deck I used for content transitions. Controllers racked on a wall mount. Posters that had been there since before the pills, kept for continuity rather than sentiment.

Eddie paused at the bookshelf. Ran one finger along a row of spines without quite touching them, reading the titles in sequence.

“Nice setup,” he said, that charming smile landing wider than I remembered it. There was something else behind it too—recognition, maybe. The particular appreciation of someone who understands exactly what they’re looking at and what it implies about the person who built it.

“It’s come along,” I said.

He turned from the shelf and looked at me directly then—the full version of that assessment, unfiltered, the way he’d looked at me across the hotel reception desk in what felt like a different lifetime. Except now the geography had changed. He was in my space, not his. That shift registered in the air between us like a barometric change.

“A year,” he said.

“Just over.”

He nodded slowly, glancing once more around the room—the books, the screens, the quiet evidence of compound effort accumulating in every corner.

“You’ve made a lot of progress.”

I shrugged. “Done a little of this, and a little of that.”

“Are you kidding,” Morra grinned, “I was at the last poker game, you checked his ass all the way until the end.”

I hadn’t seen him there. I’d scanned the room on arrival the way I always did—sightlines, exits, faces—and Eddie Morra hadn’t registered. Which meant he’d wanted it that way, tucked somewhere in the periphery, watching. I filed that detail away and focused on the memory itself, which was a good one.

The opponent had been a semi-professional from Bristol, well-regarded on the regional circuit, the kind of player who’d developed enough genuine skill to become dangerous and just enough ego to become exploitable. I’d flopped the nut straight on a board that looked innocuous enough to disguise it entirely, then spent the next four streets constructing a fiction—a careful, internally consistent story about a hand I didn’t have—that he’d bought completely. By the river he was convinced he’d cornered me. The relief on his face when he pushed all-in was the giveaway: the relief of a man who thinks it’s over. It wasn’t over. I turned my cards and watched the colour leave him.