CHAPTER 4 - Sylas
The city of London looked clean from seventeen floors up, but it was an illusion. Underneath the glass and the architectural lighting, it was just a massive, tangled circuit of debt and desperate people.
I stood by the window of the penthouse, a glass of neat scotch sitting untouched on the low ledge beside me.
The room was entirely dark, lit only by the ambient orange glow of the city reflecting off the low clouds.
I had stripped off my tie hours ago, the top two buttons of my shirt undone, but the heavy, suffocating pressure of the tower hadn't left my chest.
"The restructuring files for the offshore registries are ready for your signature, Mr. Vane," Vance’s voice cut through the silence. He didn't knock; he didn't need to. He was the only man in this building who held a physical master key.
I didn't turn around. "Leave them on the desk."
Vance stepped into the room, his heavy shoes silent against the white rug. "The Board was... vocal after you left the meeting this afternoon. Lord Sterling is questioning the liquidity freeze you initiated on the secondary maritime accounts."
A cold, faint smile touched my lips, though my eyes remained fixed on the dark ribbon of the river below.
"Sterling is an idiot who thinks a balance sheet is a suggestion.
Tell him if he touches those accounts before the autumn audit, I will leak his personal shell companies to the Inland Revenue myself. "
Vance paused. I could hear the stiff rustle of his tailored coat as he shifted his weight. "He’s a powerful ally to lose, Sylas."
"I don't have allies, Vance. I have assets," I said, my voice dropping into that quiet, absolute register that left no room for negotiation. "And right now, the assets are showing a structural instability I don't like."
I finally turned around, picking up the scotch but not drinking it.
My gaze locked onto Vance, tracking the slight, defensive tightening of his jaw.
I knew exactly what Vance was doing in the lower lobbies.
I knew about the "secondary operations" his security contractors were running under the Olympus umbrella—the silent extortion, the leverage on local shelters, the dirty variables he thought were too small to reach the seventeenth floor.
I tolerated it only because a beast like Vance needed to be fed to stay on a leash.
"There was an anomaly in the network traffic from the secondary servers this afternoon," I murmured, watching him closely.
Vance’s expression didn't change, but his posture went subtly rigid. "A routine maintenance loop, sir. Nothing to concern yourself with."
"I don't like routine loops that drop the firewall efficiency," I said, setting the glass down with a soft, deliberate clink against the marble desk. "I want the diagnostic reports for the entire week on my desk by eight o'clock tomorrow morning. Every sector. No exceptions."
"Of course," Vance muttered, his tone darkening as he took a step back toward the glass doors. "Goodnight, Mr. Vane."
When the doors slid shut, the clinical, sterile silence rushed back to fill the room.
I sat down behind the massive marble desk, the screen casting a pale, bluish light over my face.
I didn't open the financial ledgers. Instead, my mind did something unusual—it looped back to a completely insignificant detail from earlier that afternoon.
A low-level IT girl on the ninth floor, a legacy hire with a messy coat and an old name, who had disrupted a senior analyst's entire day because of a three-millisecond delay.
Three milliseconds.
In my world, a hitch that small was usually a ghost. A sign that someone, somewhere, was pulling at a loose thread in the fabric of my empire.
I leaned back in the leather chair, my long fingers tapping a slow, rhythmic pulse against the armrest as I stared into the dark. The pyramid was perfectly stable. But for the first time in five years, I felt a sudden, distinct urge to look at the foundations.