Chapter Thirty-Two
Sloane
The air in the clinic is thick with the smell of antiseptic and the low, rhythmic thrum of life-support machines. It is the only place in the world where Vane Sterling's name doesn't mean "Power." Here, he is just a signature on a check—a name on a billing statement that keeps the lights on and the heart beating.
I am sitting by my mother's bed, my hand folded over hers. She is sleeping, her chest rising and falling in a mechanical, fragile cadence. She looks peaceful, oblivious to the fact that her daughter just sold the rest of her life to a man who treats human beings like line items on a balance sheet.
I'm wearing a faded hooded sweatshirt and jeans—clothes I haven't touched in three years. The "Sloane Vance" of the sixty-first floor has been discarded, left in a heap on my apartment floor. In this room, I am just a girl watching her mother fade away.
I keep the lights off. I want the shadows. I want to disappear into the dark until that "indefinite" contract feels like a bad dream.
Then, I hear them. The footsteps.
They aren't the soft, rubber-soled squeaks of a nurse or the heavy, tired trudge of a grieving relative. They are the sharp, authoritative clicks of bespoke leather shoes on linoleum. They are the footsteps of a man who thinks he owns the goddamn ground he walks on.
I don't move. I don't breathe. I just tighten my grip on my mother's hand.
The door swings open. Vane stands in the threshold, his silhouette framed by the harsh, flickering fluorescent light of the hallway. He looks like a fallen angel who just crawled out of a wreck—his hair is a mess, his suit is rumpled, and his eyes are burning with a dark, terrifying intensity.
He doesn't speak. He just stands there, his chest heaving, watching me in the dark like I'm the only light left in the world.
"You shouldn't be here, Vane," I whisper, my voice cracking and raw. "This is the one place you don't belong. There's nothing here for you to audit."
"I belong wherever you are, Sloane," he rasps, stepping into the room. He closes the door behind him, plunging us back into the dim, green-tinted shadows of the medical monitors. "You breached the protocol. You wiped your tech. You ran from me."
"I didn't run. I came to see what I fucking sold myself for." I look at my mother's pale, translucent face. "I came to see if she was worth the lie. If she was worth the golden cage you built for me."
Vane walks toward the bed, his presence filling the small room until the air feels like it's being sucked out. He stops inches from me. He smells like the city, expensive gin, and a cold, frantic desperation. He looks at my mother, then back at me.
"She is worth everything," he says, and for the first time in three years, the predator is gone. I hear a man staring at his own reflection in the wreckage. "But you didn't have to run, Sloane. I would have brought you here myself."
"No, you wouldn't," I spit, standing up to face him, the hoodie making me feel small but the rage making me feel tall. I jab my finger into his chest, feeling the hard, fast thud of his heart through the silk of his shirt. "You would have turned the car ride into a briefing. You would have used the time to analyze my 'emotional variables.' You would have made it about you."
I step closer, my voice dropping to a hiss. "You used me, Vane. You watched me on that camera. You watched me turn down my own life for you, and you didn't see it as a gift. You saw it as a tactical advantage. You leaked that audio to destroy me. You made me radioactive so I'd have nowhere to go but back to you. You didn't save me. You buried me."
Vane catches my hand, his grip not painful, but absolute. He pulls me toward him, his face so close I can feel the heat radiating off his skin.
"I did it because I was losing my goddamn mind!" he roars, the sound echoing off the sterile walls and making the monitors spike. "I watched you in that garage, and for a second, I thought you were going to say yes to Arthur. I thought you were going to walk away and leave me in that glass tower alone. And I realized... I realized I can't function without the friction you provide. I can't breathe in a world where you aren't there to hate me."
He lets go of my hand, his shoulders sagging as the adrenaline leaves him hollow.
"I'm not a good man, Sloane. We both know that. I'm a man who buys what he wants and breaks what he can't have. But I'm not letting you go. Not to Arthur. Not to the press. Not to anyone. If I have to be the villain to keep you in my orbit, then fine. I'll burn the city down."
"So I'm a prisoner," I say, a single tear finally escaping and tracking a path through the dust on my cheek.
"You're the only person I trust," he whispers, his voice breaking. "And in my world, that's the same thing."
He reaches out, his thumb catching the tear. His touch is light, almost reverent—a stark contrast to the violence of his words.
"The contract is 'indefinite' because I don't know how to end it," he admits, his forehead coming to rest against mine. "I don't know how to go back to the way it was before the Hamptons. I don't know how to look at a spreadsheet and not see your face in the numbers. You're the only real thing in my life, and I'm terrified of what I'll be if you leave."
I look at him—this monolith of power, this shark of the Dow—and I see the truth. He is as trapped as I am. He has built a golden cage, and he's locked himself inside it with me.
"I hate you, Vane," I whisper, leaning into him even as I say it.
"I know," he says, his breath hitching. "I'm counting on it. It's the only honest thing left in this building."