Chapter Thirty
Vane
The sixty-first floor is a tomb of glass and silence.
I step off the elevator, the signed resignation of Arthur Sterling heavy in my breast pocket, expecting the familiar glow of Sloane's monitor. I'm ready for the war. I'm ready for her to scream at me, to call me a monster, to throw her tablet at my head—anything but this goddamn silence. I have my logic lined up like a firing squad to crush her resentment.
But the lights in the executive suite are dimmed to their security minimum. Her desk is a sterile, mahogany wasteland. Her tablet is gone. Her coat is gone. Even the scent of her—that crisp forest-in-winter smell—is being swallowed by the recycled, metallic air of the building.
"Sloane?"
The name feels like a jagged piece of glass in my throat. I haven't used her name in an empty room since the Hamptons. There is no answer. Only the low, electric hum of the servers.
I walk to my office door. It's locked. I thumb the biometric override, the heavy oak swinging open to reveal a space that feels colder than a morgue. I don't sit. I don't breathe. I just punch the security logs into my terminal.
17:42:01 — Proxy Vance departed via Freight Elevator B.
Freight Elevator B. That clever, beautiful bitch. She avoided the lobby circus. She avoided the cameras. She avoided the armored car and the driver I had stationed at the main entrance to "protect" her. She didn't go out to face the world I've forced her into; she crawled out through the veins of the building to escape me.
"Find her," I growl into my phone. My voice is vibrating with a frequency that makes my own chest ache. It's a raw, primitive sound I don't recognize. "I want a GPS lock on her phone, her car, and her Apple Watch. Right fucking now."
"Sir," the head of my security detail crackles back, his voice thick with hesitation. "The GPS on her company devices has been deactivated, sir. Remote wiped. Her car is still in the garage. She... she took a yellow cab, Mr. Sterling. No digital footprint. We're pulling the medallion number from the street-level feed now, but—"
"But what?" I roar, slamming my fist onto the mahogany desk. The sound echoes through the empty suite like a gunshot.
"But she's off the grid, sir."
I feel a cold, sharp spike of adrenaline—not the calculated thrill of a merger, but the raw, frantic terror of a predator who realized he just accidentally killed the only thing he ever wanted to keep. She didn't sign that contract to stay with me; she signed it to buy herself enough time to vanish.
I don't wait for the elevator. I don't wait for my car. I run for the stairs, my lungs burning, my mind a chaotic mess of every worst-case scenario.
I've spent my life building a cage so perfect no one could ever leave. I forgot that I'd spent the last three years teaching her exactly how the lock works.