Chapter Twenty
Sloane
The drive back to Manhattan feels different than the drive out.
The silence is no longer suffocating; it is heavy with the weight of things unsaid. Vane is back on his laptop, his fingers flying across the keys with a renewed, almost manic ferocity. He is recouping the forty million dollars he burned for me, brick by digital brick. I sit beside him, dressed in a fresh suit—a sharp, navy pinstripe that feels like a coat of mail—but the armor feels thin.
Underneath the wool, my body still remembers the heat of the heating pad and the terrifying softness in Vane's voice when he told me Thorne was "dead" to him.
As the skyline of New York City rises up to meet us like a jagged crown of thorns, my phone vibrates in my lap. It's a news alert from the Financial Times.
"STERLING-VANCE WALKS AWAY FROM THORNE TEXTILES: A CALCULATED MOVE OR A COSTLY ERROR?"
I steal a glance at Vane. He doesn't even blink as the alert pops up on his own screen. He just closes the window and opens a spreadsheet for a lithium mine in Perth.
"The blood is in the water, Sloane," he says, his voice devoid of emotion. "The street thinks I've lost my edge. They think I got distracted. By the time we reach the office, the vultures will be circling the lobby".
"I can handle the press, Mr. Sterling," I say, my voice steady despite the flutter in my chest.
"I don't want you to handle the press. I want you to handle the board." He finally looks at me, and the ice in his eyes is back, but there's a flicker of something else—a shared secret. "They're going to ask why the most disciplined man in finance missed a closing. They're going to look for a scapegoat. They're going to look at you".
"Let them look," I whisper.
We pull up to the Sterling-Vance tower. The paparazzi aren't here—Vane is too powerful for that—but the lobby is filled with "observers." Men in expensive suits who pretend to be looking at their watches but are actually gauging the speed of Vane's stride.
He doesn't slow down. He moves through the lobby like a kinetic force, and I follow exactly one pace behind—the loyal asset, the ghost in the machine. But as we step into the private elevator and the doors hiss shut, Vane reaches out.
He doesn't touch me. He just stands so close that I can feel the heat radiating off him.
"Section 7, Sloane," he murmurs as the floor indicator climbs toward sixty-one. "The Confidentiality Clause. It's the only thing that protects you from what happens next".
"I know the contract, Vane."
The elevator dings. The doors open to a sea of angry executives and a board of directors that look like a firing squad.