Chapter-four
Vane
I am lying on my back, watching the shadows of the clouds crawl across the ceiling like ink stains on a map. Sloane is beside me, her skin cooling against mine, her breathing shallow and jagged. For the first time in my life, I don't feel the urge to check the ticker. I don't feel the need to audit the seconds to see how much money I've made while I lay here.
Instead, I feel the ghost. The one I've been outrunning since I was twelve years old.
"You asked me why," I say. My voice is a low, hollow rumble in the dark, vibrating through the floorboards of my empire.
Sloane shifts, her head resting on my chest. She doesn't speak, but I feel the sudden, heavy weight of her attention. It is the only thing in the world I cannot buy, and yet, in this moment, she is giving it to me for free. No contract. No clause.
"You think the clinic is about power," I continue, staring into the dark. "You think I hold your mother over your head because I like the leverage. And maybe, in the beginning, that was the lie I told myself. Leverage is the only language I was ever taught to speak fluently."
I take a breath, the cold, pressurized air of the sixty-first floor stinging my lungs.
"When I was twelve, my mother didn't have a Vane Sterling to sign her checks. She had a bed in a public ward that smelled of industrial bleach and neglected death. My father had already liquidated our lives—sold every piece of furniture, every memory—and vanished to Singapore with a mistress and whatever was left of the family trust. I was a child, and I was irrelevant."
I feel Sloane's hand move over my heart, her fingers light and hesitant, as if she's touching an old scar.
"I sat by her bed for three weeks," I whisper. "The machines she was on... they were old. They rattled. Every time the floorboards creaked or the power flickered, I thought her heart would just give up. I went to the administrator's office. I begged them for a private room, for better equipment, for a doctor who didn't look at her like she was a broken chair. I told them I would work. I told them I would be a slave to that hospital for the rest of my life if they would just give her a chance."
I let out a short, jagged laugh that sounds like breaking glass.
"They laughed at me, Sloane. They told me 'assets' like my mother didn't get upgrades. They told me that in the real world, you get exactly what you can afford. And she could afford to die in a hallway."
I turn my head to look at her. Her eyes are wide, shimmering with the reflected lights of the city.
"She died during a brownout. The ventilator stopped for forty-five seconds. That's all it took. Forty-five seconds of 'inefficiency' took the only person who ever looked at me and didn't see a dollar sign. I counted every one of those seconds. I stood there and watched her turn blue while the system decided she wasn't worth the backup power."
I reach out, my thumb tracing the line of her jaw. My hand is shaking, a human tremor I haven't allowed in a decade.
"When I saw your mother's files... I didn't see a way to control you, Sloane. I saw a way to win a war I lost when I was twelve. I built that clinic. I hand-picked the staff. I bought the most expensive, redundant machines in the world so that nobody in my orbit would ever have to count forty-five seconds again."
I pull her closer, my grip almost painful.
"I didn't trap you to be cruel. I trapped you because I'm a man who will burn the whole world down before I let the power flicker on you."