Sienna's POV
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I typed three different replies to his message and deleted all of them.
The first was: Who gave you this number.
The second was: Don't contact me privately.
The third was: What time.
I deleted the third one fastest.
Then I put my phone face down on the nightstand, turned off the lamp, and lay in the dark next to Leo telling myself I was going to sleep.
I did not sleep.
-
Leo's breathing was soft and even beside me. He had one arm thrown over his face the way he always slept, completely trusting that the world would still be in order when he woke up. I watched the ceiling and I listened to him breathe and I thought about the fact that three years ago I had made one decision in a very dark moment that I had spent every day since then either being grateful for or being terrified of.
Tonight I was terrified.
-
I had found Cole and Mira on a Tuesday.
I wasn't supposed to be home. I had a dinner that got cancelled last minute and I came back early and I walked into an apartment I shared with Cole and found my stepsister sitting at my kitchen table wearing Cole's shirt and laughing at something on his phone like they had been doing it for years.
Maybe they had.
Cole saw me first. That horrible blank second before his face figured out what expression to make. Then Mira looked up. And the worst part — the part that still made something cold move through me when I thought about it — was that she didn't even look ashamed. She looked almost relieved. Like a secret she had been keeping had finally been allowed to breathe.
I didn't scream. Didn't cry. Didn't throw anything.
I just left.
I walked out of that apartment and kept walking and I ended up in the financial district at eleven at night with nowhere to go and no one to call because every person in my life was tangled up in the same world Cole and Mira lived in. My father was sick. My friends were their friends. My life and theirs were so interwoven that pulling myself out of it felt like trying to pull a single thread from a sweater without unraveling the whole thing.
I needed to disappear.
Just for one night.
Just long enough to breathe.
Someone at a company event months before had mentioned The Glass Jungle like a secret you weren't supposed to know. Underground bar in the financial district. The city's elite went there to vanish for a few hours. No names. No titles. Just masks at the door — white ones on a table, choose your own.
I picked white.
I sat at the bar and ordered something I didn't taste and I thought about absolutely nothing because nothing was all I could manage.
He sat beside me twenty minutes later.
Black mask. Dark jacket. He didn't speak immediately — just ordered his drink and sat with the particular stillness of someone who was also there to disappear. Not to perform. Not to network. Just to stop being whoever he was outside that door for a few hours.
I understood that without him saying it.
Eventually he said, "You look like someone who just made a decision."
I said, "I look like someone who just had one made for them."
He considered that. "Is there a difference?"
"There is," I said. "But maybe not tonight."
We talked for hours. About nothing with names attached. About what it felt like to be born into something you didn't choose. About the particular exhaustion of being expected to want things you were never actually asked about. He talked like someone who had spent a long time being very careful with words and was allowing himself, just for tonight, to stop being careful.
I talked like someone who had forgotten what it felt like to say true things out loud.
At some point the talking stopped.
At some point I stopped thinking about Cole and Mira and my father's failing health and the company and the life I had been carefully building inside a structure that had just collapsed.
I just felt something real for the first time in a long time.
I left before morning.
I didn't take my mask.
I didn't look back.
Two weeks later, on a plane to a city far enough away that I could breathe differently, I found out I wasn't alone anymore.
-
I stared at the ceiling now and told myself what I had been telling myself for three years.
The tilt meant nothing.
Leo tilted his head because children tilted their heads. Because it was a coincidence. Because my brain was exhausted and desperate and connecting dots that were not actually connected because the alternative — the thing the dots actually spelled out if I let myself look at them directly — was so enormous and so irreversible that I couldn't afford to let it be real.
I told myself this.
I told myself this several more times.
I did not believe it even once.
-
My phone lit up at 2am.
Not a message. An alert from the monitoring app my forensic accountant had set up on Vale's financial records — the one that flagged unusual activity in real time.
I sat up. Opened it.
Someone had accessed the Vale accounting system in the last ten minutes. Not from a company device. From an external login using an internal access code — the kind only senior staff possessed.
The account that had been accessed was the same subsidiary one I had flagged with a question mark tonight.
Someone knew I had been looking at it.
Someone was covering tracks.
My hands moved fast. I screenshotted everything the app showed me, forwarded it to my forensic accountant with a message marked urgent, and then sat in the dark with my heart going very loud and very fast.
Seventeen red marks. And whoever made those marks necessary had just found out I was looking.
Leo shifted beside me. Sighed in his sleep. Completely safe. Completely unaware.
I looked at Damien's message still sitting on my phone.
"Meet me tomorrow. Alone. Tell no one."
I had spent two hours telling myself not to go.
I picked up my phone.
Typed one word.
"Where."
Sent it before I could delete it a fourth time.
His reply came in eleven seconds.
Eleven seconds — which meant he had been awake too, phone in hand, waiting.
That fact alone told me more about Damien Mercer than two hours in a boardroom had.
I read the address he sent.
Then I read the second line beneath it.
And my blood went completely cold.
Because the address he had chosen for our private meeting —
was The Glass Jungle.