I don't know if the fighting or, more generally, this raise in self-esteem will end Aiden's extortion or it will make things even worse. When I read this:
Python:
s "I told you to stay away from him! It's all already taken care of!"
dy "Yeah, yeah, whatever! I already taught one of his guys a lesson!"
s "What??? What did you do?!"
dy "Oh, nothing special. It's just that earlier, we were briefly at the public swimming pool over there on the hill where I spotted the bike of one of his guys."
dy "So I trifled a 'lil bit with his brakes *grin*."
dy "Hope he had an exciting ride back down the hill *ha-ha*."
s "Have you lost it? What if someone had caught you?!"
s "That guy could have gotten seriously hurt!"
dy "That was exactly the point of it!"
s "*Sigh.*"
s "Please don't do such bullshit again!"
This potentially could have a snowball effect to degenerate into something even more nastier, piss off Aiden and making Sophia pay for that.
I said potentially. Sophia's inner thoughts about going on with the deal to prevent exactly this, as many already said, open the path to different trajectory.
BTW what happened to the San Alejo Beavers? Did they finish their tour?
I agree, for me it is not really how likely it is to happen in real life but it's more the way the story is told.
I think we can say that there is a good character development, especially for the MC: the effort to try to give a glimpse of her inner thoughts and trying to rationalize the decisions is really what makes the difference for me. Not that it is perfect, debatable at times etc, but at least it gives some depth to the story.
Also, maybe many will disagree on this, the context and the dialogues makes the scenes/event to feel more just an erotic show. For example all the explanations about the Greek mythology are very important to set the tone of the scene, keeping alive the contrast between what could be a "normal" modeling scene involving nudity (just under a true artistic point of view) and Sophia's POV, conflicted between the shame, the pleasure of being exposed, and the fuzzy line between being used and getting excited by the situation. Sure, at times the dialogues feels a bit too much or too long, but I think overall he did a great job researching the subject and set up the event like that.
Actually 3, because if she doesn't pose as Aphrodite nothing happens with Aiden. And if she doesn't allow Ares to touch her breast she doesn't know he is Aiden. In a way we have a similar setting as Larry, depending how far she goes there might be different scenarios down the road.