The Price of a Soul
Sterling Vega confronts Ariadne Dauphin—seeking dominance, finding only clarity, and learning the cost of power when it can’t be bought.
Sterling didn't sleep the night of BLICKFANG. Not after the keynote. Not after the parking lot humiliation. Not after the look Ariadne gave him—direct, knowing, obscene in its serenity.
He left the restaurant vibrating with rage. Refused the car. Walked half the city in leather shoes meant for lounges, not cobblestone. Every step on the medieval stones felt like a penance he didn't deserve.
She was nothing. A mid-tier academic with delusions of grandeur. The Mireille thing was for show—rich women collecting exotic pets to display their sophistication. He'd seen it before. Performative rebellion against men like him.
But that look. That fucking look through the car window.
He replayed it obsessively as he walked. The clinical interest. The way she'd studied his reaction like he was a specimen. No anger, no triumph—just… observation. As if his humiliation was data worth collecting.
His phone buzzed. Emma.
"Sir? Your car is—"
"I'm walking."
"To the hotel?"
"To think."
He hung up and kept moving through Zurich's narrow streets. Past medieval towers and modern glass, past couples walking hand in hand, past everything that reminded him he was alone.
The look wasn't rejection. It couldn't be. Women didn't reject Sterling Vega—they just hadn't been properly approached yet. Ariadne was playing hard to get. Testing his resolve. Maybe even impressed by his persistence.
That composure of hers. The way she'd controlled every interaction, every gesture, every moment of their dinner encounter. The way she'd made the entire restaurant revolve around her. Just who the hell did she think she was?
I will put her in her place.
As he walked, his rage began to shift. The humiliation still burned, but underneath it, something else was growing. Fascination. A hunger he couldn't quite name.
By the time he reached his Tesla, his fury had crystallized into something sharper. Purpose.
* * *
ETH Campus. Ariadne’s office building. Third floor. Corner office. Light still on at nearly midnight.
He stood in the hallway for a full minute, collecting himself. That was his first mistake.
The second was expecting Ariadne Dauphin to be surprised.
"Mr. Vega," she said without looking up from her papers. "How predictable."
He strode in, suit still sharp despite his trek through the city. His hands had stopped trembling.
"We need to talk."
"We really don't."
"You think you can humiliate me in public, parade Mireille around like some trophy—"
"Sterling," she said, finally looking up. "Don't make the mistake of assuming I think of you at all."
That stopped him. Just for a moment. Long enough for her to gesture lazily toward the chair across from her desk.
"Sit."
"Fuck off. You don’t get to talk to me like that."
"You're already crumbling. Might as well do it comfortably."
His eyes narrowed. "Mireille's just your latest acquisition. You are an out-of-control woman collecting interesting pets."
"Is that what you think?"
"She was mine first."
"No," Ariadne said calmly. "She was yours temporarily. There's a difference."
He took a step forward. "You don't know what you're playing with."
"Power? Ego? Men who confuse ownership with intimacy?"
"This isn't a game."
"Oh, Sterling. For you, it never was."
He stood there, vibrating with renewed anger. Wanting to slap her. Wanting to fuck her. Wanting, for once, to be seen as more than a damaged boy in a billionaire's suit.
She let the silence settle. Her expression remained perfectly neutral.
"If you're used to buying everything," she said softly, "I imagine genuine choice feels confusing."
Sterling’s breath hitched. A different kind of anger, more bitter, welled up. “You remind me of my mother,” he said, the words surprising even him. “Cold. Disciplined. Strong-willed.”
Her eyebrow lifted. “You are an excellent judge of character, Sterling.”
“Don’t. Don’t talk down to me. You are not my mother.”
“Thank goodness for that.”
“Do you know what I am capable of? One word from me and you will lose everything.”
“You don’t scare me, Sterling. But a man like you reaching the heights you have reached makes me despair for humanity.”
“You have not seen me truly angry, Ariadne. I will take everything from you. Your cushy professorship, your consulting gigs, your house. Even your reputation. Everything.”
“And none of that will bring Mireille back to you. And none of that will affect me in the slightest. Because the only thing that I truly own—the only thing that I absolutely cannot live without— is my own integrity. Everything else is just stuff."
They stared at each other across the desk. Sterling felt something shifting in his chest—not attraction exactly, but recognition. A hunger he'd carried since childhood.
"You're frustrated," she observed. "Because your usual methods aren't working."
He began pacing, anger building again. "You think you're better than everyone else. Above it all."
"I think I understand the difference between earned authority and purchased compliance."
"You don't inspire loyalty either. You just collect broken women who need structure."
Ariadne's smile was razor-thin. "My women choose me from positions of strength. Can you say the same?"
The pacing stopped. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"When was the last time someone served you who didn't need your money?"
The question hung in the air like smoke. Sterling's throat worked.
"You'd make a great mother, you know," he said almost wistfully.
The words came from somewhere deeper than thought. Ariadne went very still.
"Excuse me?"
"You'd be perfect. Cold. Disciplined. Strong-willed. You’d teach your sons how to be strong men."
Ariadne laughed. “No, Sterling. I’d be a fucked-up mother. Because I am cold, disciplined, and strong-willed. And I know exactly how to break a child without ever raising my voice."
Sterling's breath caught. The admission should have horrified him. Instead, it made his pulse quicken.
"That's..." he started.
"What you want," she finished. "Isn't it? Someone who won't abandon excellence for sentiment."
He studied her face, searching for the faintest crack. Nothing. She could have been marble. And yet the idea formed, dangerous and inevitable. Still, he hesitated—the way a man does before pushing all his chips into the pot.
"Fifty million pounds," he said, his voice dropping to a low, conspiratorial murmur.
Ariadne blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"Untraceable. Swiss account. For one night with me. To produce a child." He took a step closer, his eyes intense. "You and me. To create something exceptional. A child with your intelligence and my... resources. It's an act of racial purity. A step toward a new, improved humanity."
Ariadne froze, her expression shifting from cold contempt to pure revulsion. "You're not serious."
"I want to preserve superior intelligence. The elite genetics. Our children could be the start of a better world."
"My children," she repeated, her face betraying no emotion. "Not your children. Mine. You really think biology determines worth?"
She rose slowly from her chair. Sterling took an involuntary step back.
"I have two women who serve me voluntarily," she said quietly. "One is smarter than you; the other is more talented. Both kneel because I've earned their devotion. Not because of a Swiss bank account or a shared heritage, but because I am worthy of it."
Her eyes narrowed as she looked him up and down. "You believe in 'superior intelligence,' but you fail to understand that genuine value can't be bought. It's earned through character, not genetics. You believe in 'elite' people having children, but you are the very proof that breeding for power only produces more broken boys with expensive toys."
"You want to create a legacy? You want to build a better world? You could start by learning how to inspire respect instead of just purchasing it."
He swallowed hard.
"You don't inspire loyalty, Sterling. You purchase it. And when it leaves you, you tantrum like the child you never stopped being."
His voice cracked. "You don't know what it's like. To be born into power and still feel empty."
She paused. Something shifted in her expression.
"You think I don't?" she asked quietly.
Then she leaned close enough that he could smell expensive perfume and the memory of another woman's desire.
"But I earned mine through becoming worthy. You're still trying to buy it."
He looked at her then—truly looked—and saw not cruelty, but clarity. Not contempt, but distance. She didn't hate him. She just didn't need him. And that, more than any rejection, was what undid him completely.
"I would've paid anything." he whispered.
"I know."
She returned to her chair, dismissing him with the gesture.
"You may go."
He hesitated at the door, pride and humiliation warring in his chest.
"You didn't have to destroy me like that. At the restaurant. You didn't gain anything."
For the first time all evening, Ariadne didn't speak immediately.
"You think I did it for sport."
"Didn't you?"
"No," she said softly. "I did it because you destroyed seventy-three people to get my attention. Because you bought and gutted a company I helped build from nothing. Because you treated my silence like consent."
She stood again, moving around the desk with a steady grace.
"And because I wanted you to feel, just once, what it's like to be powerless."
Sterling looked down, heart pounding.
"You think I'm the villain."
"No," Ariadne murmured. "I think you're a very small boy with very expensive toys who never learned the difference between fear and respect."
"This isn't over."
"Of course not," she said. "Men like you never know when you've lost."
She returned to her papers, already dismissing him.
He left without another word.
Ariadne sat in the silence for a long moment, then picked up her phone.
"Sarah?" she said. "We have a problem to solve."