Chapter Thirty-Eight
Vane
I watch them take her.
I watch the way the cold steel bites into the soft skin of her wrists. I watch the way her hair—the hair I had my fingers tangled in just hours ago—falls across her face in a curtain of shame. Every primal instinct I possess, the raw, territorial ones I discovered on the cliffs of the Hamptons, screams at me to vault over the desk and tear those men apart with my bare hands.
But I am Vane Sterling. And in this glass tomb, I have to be a god of logic, or we both die.
If I intervene now, if I claim the audio is a fake without the data to back it up, the board moves for an immediate freeze of my personal assets. They'll seize the trust. They'll pull the plug on the clinic just to spite me for a lost quarter. I have to let her go to save her mother.
"Sir," my head of legal, Miller, whispers at my elbow, his voice trembling. "The stock is in freefall. Twelve percent in ten minutes. If you don't distance yourself from her now, the SEC will come for you next. You have to denounce her."
"Distance myself?" I turn on him, my voice a jagged, lethal edge that makes him flinch. "She is my proxy. She is the air in this goddamn building. There is no distance."
"There is if she's the one who approached Arthur," Miller counters, his face a sickly shade of gray. "The audio Arthur leaked is convincing, Vane. It's a masterpiece. It sounds like she was playing both sides from the start. It sounds like she was the architect of the whole 'Scorched Earth' play and you were just her pawn."
I don't answer him. I walk back into my office and slam the door, the sound echoing like a coffin lid closing. I don't look at the screens. I don't look at the tickers. I go to the floor, to the spot on the rug where she slept, where the scent of her still lingers like a ghost. I reach down and pick up a single pearl earring she dropped in the chaos. It's small, cold, and devastatingly real.
Arthur hasn't just attacked my firm. He has attacked my reality. He knows that by framing Sloane, he is forcing me to choose between the empire I spent my life building and the only person who makes that empire worth having.
I look at the "indefinite" contract on my desk. In the eyes of the law, it's not a romantic gesture. It's a confession. It looks like I bought her silence.
"Miller!" I roar, throwing the door open with such force the handle dents the drywall.
He jumps, nearly dropping his tablet. "Sir?"
"Get the best criminal defense team in the country on the phone. Not for the firm. Not for me. For her. I want a legal wall around Sloane Vance that the DOJ can't even see through. And tell the board that if a single one of them leaks so much as a whisper to the press, I will personally burn this company to the ground with them locked inside the vault."
I grip the pearl earring in my fist until the post draws blood from my palm. Arthur thinks he's trapped me in a corner. He thinks he's shown me my weakness.
He's wrong. He's just shown me that I have nothing left to lose.