SYMMETRY
POV: Silas Vane
She was vibrating.
From where I stood, fifteen feet away in the shadows of the living quarters, I could hear it. Not a sound, exactly, but a disturbance in the air currents of the room. A kinetic tremor. She radiated anxiety the way a decaying isotope radiates heat.
"Turn around," I said.
She jumped. A messy, inefficient spasm of muscle.
She turned slowly, her eyes searching the gloom. I hadn't turned the overheads on; I rarely did. The light from the city below—millions of watts of wasted energy—was enough to illuminate the Penthouse. It washed over her in pale blue bands, dissecting her.
My eyes dropped instantly to her feet.
She had removed the boots. Good. But the socks…
They were mismatching greys. One was ribbed wool, worn thin at the heel. The other was cotton, darker, and on the left foot, the big toe poked through a frayed hole. The sight of it—the raw, pink skin intruding on the uniformity of the fabric—made a muscle in my jaw jump.
It was an error. A flaw in the presentation.
I walked forward, stepping out of the shadows.
Her eyes went wide. I saw the moment she registered me. Most people flinched when they saw me up close. It was a combination of my height—six-four, without shoes—and the face. I had been told my features were severe. High, sharp cheekbones that caught the light, a mouth that didn't naturally curve upward, and eyes that people often described as "dead" or "shark-like." They weren't dead. They were just objective.
I stopped four feet from her. The safe distance. The perimeter where her chaotic particles couldn't infect my personal space.
"Sit," I commanded, gesturing to the solitary Barcelona chair in the center of the rug.
"Mr. Vane, I—"
"Sit."
She swallowed. The sound was audible in the silence. She moved toward the chair, her gait uneven, hesitant. She sat on the edge of the leather, her knees pressed together, hands clutching the bag in her lap like it contained a bomb.
I walked around her, circling. Like a buyer inspecting a structural anomaly in a support beam.
"You are wet," I noted.
"It's raining," she said. Her voice was scratchy. Dehydrated.
"Marcus was instructed to take your coat. He failed to ensure you were dry." I made a mental note to dock Marcus's pay by the precise cost of dry-cleaning the leather chair she was currently dampening.
I came to a stop in front of her. I leaned back against the edge of my obsidian desk, crossing my ankles, folding my arms over my chest. The silk of my suit whispered against the fabric of my shirt.
"Do you know why you are here, Ms. Rostova?"
She gripped the strap of her bag. Her fingers were pale, the nails bitten down to the quick. Jagged edges. Another imperfection.
"You want a biography," she said, lifting her chin slightly. "And your assistant said you bought my debt."
"I asked if you knew why you are here. Not what the transaction is."
She blinked, confused. "Because I'm a writer."
"There are ten thousand writers in this city. Half of them are currently serving drinks in Williamsburg. The other half are writing press releases for startups that will fail in six months. Writing is a common utility. Like tap water."
I watched her face tighten. The offense sparked in her eyes—a flash of amber heat. Good. She wasn't entirely broken yet. There was still a support structure holding up the ruins.
"If I'm just tap water," she snapped, "then why spend two hundred thousand dollars on me?"
"Because you are honest," I lied. Or, it was a partial truth. "And because you are desperate. I require a specific kind of focus, Elena. The kind that only comes when a human being is backed into a corner. When survival is the only metric that matters, the mind becomes… sharp. It sheds the unnecessary."
I pushed off the desk and walked toward the massive glass wall. The view was panoramic. To the south, the Freedom Tower; to the west, the dark expanse of the Hudson.
"My architecture is not about comfort," I said, my back to her. "People look at my buildings and they feel cold. They feel small. They call it brutalism, but that is a lazy word. It is truth. The world is indifferent to you. Gravity does not care if you are loved. Concrete does not weep when you fall. I build structures that reflect the reality of existence: symmetry, order, hierarchy."
I turned to face her again.
"Most biographers try to humanize their subjects," I continued. "They want to find the childhood trauma, the weeping mother, the lost dog. They want to explain why I am this way so the reader feels safe. 'Oh, Silas Vane isn't a monster; he's just misunderstood.'"
I took a step closer, encroaching on her space.
"I don't want to be understood, Ms. Rostova. I want to be recorded. I want you to document the structure. Not the feelings inside it."
She was staring at me. Her breathing had hitched.
Then, she did it.
Her right index finger began to tap against the leather of her bag. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. A frantic, uneven rhythm.
I stopped. My vision narrowed, focusing entirely on that finger.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
It was off-beat. It was chaos. It was like a pickaxe chipping away at the silence I had spent millions to perfect.
"Stop that," I said. My voice dropped to a register that was barely a growl.
She froze. "What?"
"Your finger. You are tapping. It is asymmetrical."
She looked down at her hand as if it belonged to someone else. She curled her fingers into a fist, hiding them.
"Sorry. It's a… a tic."
"Fix it," I said. "Self-control is the difference between a building that stands and one that collapses under its own weight."
I walked back to the desk. The sheer disorder of her presence was beginning to itch under my skin. I needed to sign the papers. I needed to bind her, box her, and then send her to the decontamination showers so she ceased to be a variable and became an asset.
I picked up the black folder resting on the obsidian. I slid it across the surface. It glided smoothly, stopping exactly six inches from the edge near her.
"The contract," I said.
She stood up. Her knees popped. She walked to the desk, her socks sliding on the stone. She looked down at the document.
"Read it," she whispered.
"You can read it. But the terms are non-negotiable. Clause 1: You reside here for the duration of the project. Estimated three months. Clause 2: Total isolation. No phone, no internet access without supervision. You are to be immersed in my world. Clause 3: Absolute confidentiality. You do not speak of what you see here to anyone outside these walls. The penalty for breach is…"
I paused.
"Is what?" she asked, her eyes scanning the text.
"Total ruin," I said calmly. "I will not sue you, Elena. I will dismantle you. I will ensure you cannot get a library card in this country, let alone a job."
She looked up. Fear. It was distinct now, sharp and sour.
"And the debt?"
"Page four. Upon signature, Vane Holdings assumes the entirety of the liability to the Volkov syndicate. The fifty-thousand-dollar signing bonus is wired to an account of your choice for personal expenses. You are free."
She laughed. It was a dark, wet sound. "Free? This isn't freedom. This is a transfer of ownership."
"We are all owned by something, Elena. Some by banks, some by biology, some by God. I am simply a more… efficient master than the Russian mob. I will not break your kneecaps because you are late with a chapter. But I will expect perfection."
She looked at the pen—my pen. A weighted Montblanc fountain pen, sitting on a square marble rest.
"Why me?" she asked again. "Really."
I looked at her. I really looked at her. I cataloged the shadows under her eyes, the erratic pulse visible in her neck, the desperate hunch of her shoulders. She was a ruin. A beautiful, tragic ruin.
I had an urge, sudden and violent, to walk around the desk, grip her chin in my gloved hand, and force her to look at herself in the glass. To show her that she was already broken, and I was just the scaffold.
"Because," I said softy, "I hate mess. And you, Elena, are the messiest thing I have ever seen. I have a compulsion to fix things. Consider this… a renovation."
She stared at me for a long time. I could see the wheels turning. She was thinking about the apartment with the peeling floor. She was thinking about Nikolai's hand on her face. She was weighing two different kinds of hell.
One hell was cold and wet and violent.
My hell was warm, rich, and silent.
She reached for the pen. Her hand trembled. She uncapped it.
"Does it write in blood?" she asked, a spark of dark sarcasm surfacing.
"Black ink," I corrected. "Standard archival quality."
She bent over the desk. The sound of the nib scratching against the paper was loud. Scritch. Scratch. She signed her name with a flourish—a loop on the 'R' that was entirely unnecessary.
She set the pen down.
"Done," she breathed.
I reached out and took the folder. I closed it.
"Marcus," I said to the empty air.
The voice-activated intercom chimed. "Yes, sir."
"Escort Ms. Rostova to the East Wing. She is to be stripped of all personal effects. Clothes, phone, bag. Burn them."
"What?" Elena stepped back, her eyes snapping to mine. "No. You can't—"
"Contamination," I said simply, picking up the folder. I didn't look at her. "You are entering a sterile environment. You will be provided with appropriate attire. Your belongings smell of mold and fear. They do not belong in the Spire."
"My laptop," she panicked, reaching for her bag. "My notes!"
"We will extract the data. The hardware is trash."
"You can't do this!"
I looked up. I hit her with the full weight of my gaze. The ice in my eyes against the fire in hers.
"I just paid a quarter of a million dollars for the privilege, Elena. I can do whatever I want."
I nodded to the elevator doors, which opened silently to reveal Marcus waiting.
"Go shower, Ms. Rostova. Wash the world off your skin. We begin work at 0600 hours."
She stood there, vibrating again. Shaking with rage or terror, I couldn't tell. Then, she turned. She grabbed her bag tight, as if she could save it, and marched toward Marcus.
She didn't look back.
As the elevator doors sealed shut, swallowing her into the belly of my house, I looked down at the desk where she had been standing.
A small smudge of dirt from her bag was left on the polished obsidian.
I stared at it. I pulled a silk handkerchief from my pocket.
I wiped it away until the black stone reflected my face perfectly once more.
Perfect.
Silence returned.
I was alone.
But for the first time in years, the silence felt… heavy. Waiting.
I touched the folder.
The game had begun.