August 19th. The heat clung to the skin like a secret.
As the first flame licked through the parlor curtains, Lyra turned and walked into the woods. She didn’t look back. Behind her, Marcus screamed her name—not in rage, but in wonder.
She tapped the screen. From inside the house, a fire alarm began to shriek. Red lights pulsed through the windows. -VixenX- Lyra Law - House Of Infidelity -19.08....
“Radical honesty,” Lyra said, backing toward the garden gate. “I set a fire in the library. Sasha and Jules are already out the back. Lena and Theo left an hour ago through the cellar. And the only thing the cameras will capture tonight is your beautiful, burning house of infidelity.”
It wasn't the peeling wallpaper or the floorboards that sighed underfoot. It was the covenant she’d made with three other couples to buy the old Victorian manor—a “modern experiment in radical honesty,” they’d called it. A house where no lock existed, where phones lay in a basket by the door, and where every glance, every lingering touch, was permissible. A house of confessed infidelity. August 19th
“What did you do?” Marcus shouted.
Now, she felt everything. And it was devouring her. She didn’t look back
He stood, brushing imaginary dust from his trousers. “The final phase of the experiment. Radical honesty isn’t about confession, my love. It’s about reaction. Iris is a performance artist. The letter was a stimulus. We’ve been filming your responses for a project called VixenX —a study on how fidelity dies not in the act, but in the suspicion of it.”
The others were asleep—or pretending to be. Lena and Theo upstairs, their door ajar as always. Sasha and Jules in the library, their whispers like mice behind the walls. And Marcus… Marcus was on the porch with the newest addition: a woman named Iris who’d arrived three weeks ago, claiming to be a journalist writing about “polyamorous utopias.”
“You’ve been spying on me,” Lyra whispered. “On all of us.”