Chapter 6 — The Glass Tower
Gravity changed.
It was the first physical sensation marking the transition from the underground world—where Maya’s life had been dismantled and sold—to the upper world, where she would now exist as a commodity.
There was no mechanical jolt of an ordinary elevator, that nauseating lurch signaling the start of an ascent.
Ethan Vance’s private elevator—accessed through a hidden biometric panel behind a tapestry in the back hallway—moved with the smoothness of a sigh in an empty room.
The only indication of movement was the sudden pressure in Maya’s ears, a dull, muffled pop that seemed to push her eardrums inward toward her skull.
They were ascending. And they were ascending fast.
Maya leaned against the back wall of the cabin.
The walls weren’t industrial brushed metal or varnished wood.
They were mirrors. Smoky, dark mirrors reflecting a grayed, ghostly version of the occupants.
She saw her own reflection: a trembling red smear, hair escaping from the bun in strands of desperation, makeup smudged beneath her eyes creating artificial dark circles that competed with real exhaustion.
The cheap dress, which hours earlier had seemed like seductive armor, now hung on her body like withered skin, wrinkled and wrong.
And then, there was his reflection.
Ethan Vance stood in the center of the cabin, his back to her, facing the closed doors.
In the mirror, he was a column of darkness and precision.
He didn’t lean against the walls. He showed no signs of fatigue, no hint of the emotional weight of what had just happened.
He had just acquired a human being, destroyed another person’s life, and threatened a family of elderly people in Ohio, yet his posture was relaxed.
He took his phone from the inner pocket of his jacket.
The bluish glow of the screen illuminated the profile of his face reflected in the dark glass. His thumb slid across the screen. A mundane gesture. Banal. Was he checking emails? Checking Tokyo stock quotes? Responding to a text from some other billionaire?
The normalcy of the gesture was what almost made Maya scream. How could he be checking his phone while she was having a silent nervous breakdown three feet behind him?
“My ears…” Maya whispered, her voice coming out hoarse. She swallowed hard, trying to equalize the pressure, but the ascent was relentless.
Ethan didn’t turn around. He kept typing something on the screen.
“We’re ascending fifty floors in less than forty seconds,” he said, his tone informative, devoid of empathy, like a bored tour guide. “The cabin pressurization tries to compensate, but physics has its limits. Open your mouth slightly. It helps.”
Maya didn’t open her mouth. She pressed her lips together, refusing to follow even that simple instruction, that small biological mercy. It was a tiny rebellion, invisible and useless, but it was the only one she had at that moment.
Silence filled the mirrored box again. There was no elevator music here.
Only the almost imperceptible hum of cutting-edge technology defying gravity and the sound of Maya’s shallow breathing.
The adrenaline that had sustained her during the negotiation in the office—that hot fury that had made her want to attack Kyle—was draining rapidly, leaving behind a toxic residue of exhaustion.
Her knees trembled, no longer from fear, but from sheer muscle fatigue.
She looked at the digital numbers above the door. They didn’t show floors. They showed altitude in feet. The numbers climbed in an illegible blur.
100 feet.
200 feet.
300 feet.
She was being taken to the sky, but it felt like she was descending into hell.
“What happens now?” The question escaped before she could contain it.
Ethan locked the phone screen and put it away. He watched her reflection in the polished metal of the doors in front of him.
“Now, we ascend,” he said. “And then, we enter. And then, your new life begins.”
“This isn’t a life,” Maya retorted, meeting his eyes in the reflection. “It’s a sentence.”
Ethan turned his head slightly, just enough for his profile to come into sharp focus.
“Most people live sentences, Maya. Sentences of mortgages, of unhappy marriages, of jobs they hate, of bodies that fail. The difference is that your sentence has a defined expiration date and a level of comfort that 99% of the population would kill for.”
“You talk as if you’re doing me a favor.”
“I am,” he said simply. “You’re just too traumatized to see the math yet. But you will. I’m patient.”
The elevator began to decelerate. The sensation of weight returned to Maya’s body, her internal organs settling back into place. The hum changed pitch, becoming deeper.
Ping.
A soft, discreet sound. The polished steel doors slid apart.
Maya expected a hallway. She expected another security anteroom, more guards, more locked doors.
She didn’t expect the sky.
The elevator opened directly into the penthouse. There was no entrance hall. One step out of the cabin and you were inside Ethan Vance’s personal sanctuary.
Maya took a hesitant step forward, her heels meeting not carpet but the cold resistance of a black stone floor, polished until it looked like still water at night.
She raised her eyes and her breath caught in her throat.
The space was colossal. The ceiling must have been twenty feet high, disappearing into shadow, but the walls... the walls didn't exist. They were glass. Floor-to-ceiling glass, uninterrupted, with no visible seams, wrapping around the entire gigantic room.
And outside, Las Vegas burned.
It was a view no tourist on the sidewalk would ever have.
A god's-eye view. The neon glow of the Strip lay far below, reduced to luminous toys.
The Bellagio fountains were nothing but a garden hose spray.
The relentless traffic flowed like red and white blood cells through an asphalt artery.
The city that had seemed so big, so loud and overwhelming when Maya was at street level now looked like a glowing circuit board, silent and distant.
The silence of the penthouse was absolute. The glass blocked every sound from the city. No sirens, no music, no shouts from drunks. Only the hum of the climate control system, a whisper of purified air that kept the space at a cool sixty-four degrees.
“Welcome to Olympus,” Ethan said, walking past her toward the center of the room.
Maya hugged herself. The cold here was different from the office downstairs. There, it was morgue cold. Here, it was the cold of outer space. Empty. Vast. Lonely.
She looked around, trying to process the sheer scale of wealth.
The living room was bigger than her parents’ entire house.
The furniture was sparse, minimalist, angular.
Low white Italian leather sofas that looked like they’d never been sat on.
Glass and chrome coffee tables that looked like blades.
There was no clutter. No magazines, no picture frames, no throw blankets, no life.
And there was the art.
Scattered throughout the space, illuminated by precise spotlights that dropped from the dark ceiling, were the “beautiful things” Ethan collected.
A white marble statue of an armless woman, the stone so smooth it looked soft.
A massive abstract painting dominating an interior wall, violent slashes of red and black that looked like a wound in the architecture.
A twisted glass sculpture that caught the city’s light and scattered it into broken rainbows across the dark floor.
It was a museum. A beautiful, terrible mausoleum.
“Take off your shoes.” Ethan’s voice came from somewhere ahead, near a glass wall.
Maya blinked, snapping out of her trance.
“What?”
Ethan turned. He’d already removed his jacket and tossed it over the back of a white sofa. He was unfastening his cufflinks.
“The shoes,” he repeated, pointing at her feet. “The floor is imported stone. Your heels have worn metal tips. I heard the sound downstairs. You’ll scratch the floor.”
The triviality of his concern hit her like a slap. He’d just destroyed her life, and he was worried about scratches on the floor.
“You’re kidding,” she said, incredulous.
“I never joke about my home.” His tone hardened slightly. “Take them off.”
Maya looked at him, feeling the anger burn again, now tangled with the throbbing pain in her toes. She hated those shoes. She’d wanted to take them off for hours. But doing it on command turned relief into humiliation.
She bent down, wobbling slightly, and yanked off the left shoe.
Then the right. She let them drop to the stone floor with a clumsy thud.
The physical relief was immediate, her feet throbbing with gratitude as they touched the cold stone, but the sense of vulnerability only grew.
Now she was barefoot. Smaller. More exposed.
“Better,” Ethan said. He walked to a bar built into the wall, an onyx structure backlit from within. “Water?”
“I want to leave,” she said, her voice small in the vastness of the room.
“Water, then.” He grabbed a glass bottle of a brand Maya had never seen and poured. He walked over to her and held out the glass.
Maya didn’t take it. She stared at the crystal-clear water.
“I don’t want anything from you.”
Ethan sighed and set the glass on a side table, next to a sculpture that looked like a skull made of diamonds.
“Dehydration causes headaches and bad moods, Maya. And you already have enough reasons for both. Drink when you want.”
He swept his hand across the space.
“Let’s establish the ground rules. The space is large, but the boundaries are rigid.”
He started walking, and Maya, feeling like a lost dog with no choice but to follow the only human in sight, went after him. Her bare feet made no sound on the stone, turning her into a ghost in her own tragedy.