Chapter Thirty-One
Vane
I beat the security team to her apartment by ten minutes. I drive the Maybach with a violence that defies every traffic law in Manhattan, my knuckles white and bloodless on the leather steering wheel. My heart is a frantic, jagged rhythm in my throat, screaming one name over and over.
Sloane.
Her building is in the Upper West Side—a pre-war brownstone that is far too modest, too small for the salary I pay her. I've never been inside. I've always viewed her home as a theoretical space, a boring little square on a map where the Asset went to recharge before returning to me.
I don't knock. I don't ring the bell. I kick the door.
The wood splinters around the deadbolt with a sickening crack that echoes through the quiet hallway like a gunshot. I burst into the room, my chest heaving, my eyes raking the space for any sign of her.
The apartment is small, impeccable, and utterly, hauntingly empty.
It smells like her—lavender, old books, and that faint, sharp scent of cold rain. There is a single coffee mug in the sink, a half-read novel on the nightstand, and a framed photograph of her mother on the mantel. I walk to the bedroom, throwing open the closet doors so hard they nearly jump the tracks.
Her suits are there. The navy pinstripe. The charcoal grey. The "armors" I bought for her. But the black dress from the Hamptons is gone. The small, battered duffel bag she keeps under the bed is gone.
She didn't just leave the office. She evacuated her goddamn life.
I sink onto the edge of her bed—the bed she sleeps in when she's not on the floor of my office. The sheets are cool to the touch, mocking me. There is a lingering warmth to the room, a sense that she was right here, breathing this air, only minutes ago. She's a ghost I just missed, and the realization makes me want to burn the entire building to the ground.
She thinks she can hide. She thinks that because she wiped her phone and took a cab, she's free. She doesn't understand. I don't need a GPS to find her. I know her pulse. I know what makes her heart bleed.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. It's a silent notification from the clinic's security feed—the one I've been paying for in secret for two years.
Motion detected at the North Entrance.
I freeze. The clinic. The only place on earth where she is vulnerable. The only place she would go when I've made the rest of the world too loud for her to hear herself think.
"I'm coming for you, Sloane," I whisper to the empty room, my voice a dark, jagged promise. "And God help anyone who stands between us. Because I'm done playing by the rules of a contract."
I stand up, taking the photograph of her mother from the mantel and tucking it into my coat. If she wants to play the game of disappearing, she's forgotten one thing.
I own the map.