The Billionaires’ Death Oracle

CHAPTER TWO — SIX DAYS:

The Cole Industries tower rose fifty stories over Manhattan, a slab of glass that caught the morning sun and threw it back in a blade of white light so sharp Sophia had to shield her eyes just to look up at it. She had been standing across the street for eleven minutes, her transcriptionist badge still clipped uselessly to her coat from the shift she'd walked out of an hour ago, telling herself this was insane, telling herself to turn around and go home, and not moving an inch.

Six days had become one, terribly.

She had called the switchboard four times, her voice growing steadier and more desperate with each attempt. She had emailed an assistant whose name she'd found on a press release, then another, then a general contact address that bounced back an automated reply within seconds. She had even, in a moment of pure desperation on day three, tried to explain herself to a security guard at the tower's lobby desk, who had looked at her the way people look at something small and broken on the sidewalk, and asked her, not unkindly, if she had somewhere else to be.

Today, she didn't try the lobby. Today, she stood across the street with her coat collar up against the wind and watched the revolving doors, because somewhere above her, in a boardroom with cold morning light and floor-to-ceiling glass, a man in a grey suit was already moving into position, and no one inside that building believed her enough to stop him.

She could feel the vision under her skin like a second heartbeat. The angle of the light. The color of the blood. The particular, terrible slowness with which Adrian Cole's body had folded backward over the table, as though some part of him already understood before the bullet did. She had not slept in three nights, not really, every time she closed her eyes the boardroom assembled itself behind her lids, patient and exact, waiting for her to look away so it could happen again. She started keeping the lights on. She started leaving her gloves on even alone in her apartment, as though her own hands might turn traitor and touch something that would show her one more thing she couldn't stop.

At 9:14, a black car pulled to the curb and Adrian Cole stepped out of it, phone to his ear, coat open despite the cold, moving with the brisk unbothered stride of a man who had never once in his life had to run from anything.

Sophia crossed against the light.

"Mr. Cole." She caught him at the base of the steps, breathless, chest heaving, and this time she didn't reach for his wrist, she had learned that lesson already, the hard way. "Please. I know how this looks. I know what I sound like. But you have a meeting this morning in your boardroom, and there's a man coming who isn't supposed to be there, and if you don't…."

"You again." He didn't stop walking. If anything, his pace quickened, and the two men flanking him closed the gap between her and his back like a door swinging shut. "I had you removed from a private event. I could have you arrested." He said

"Then have me arrested after." Her voice cracked hard on the last word, humiliatingly, and she hated how young it made her sound, how much like the frightened seven-year-old who'd first learned what her hands could do in her grandmother's kitchen. "Just… cancel the meeting. One meeting. If I'm wrong, you've lost twenty minutes. If I'm right…."

"You won't be." He finally turned, and for one unguarded second she saw something underneath the irritation, not fear yet, but the flicker of a man recalculating, the way people do when a stranger says something too specific to be pure madness. Six days. A boardroom. A grey suit. He hadn't told her any of it. She watched him remember that.

"Sir." One of the security men touched his elbow, glancing warily at Sophia. "We need to move."

Adrian looked at her a moment longer, unblinking. Up close, in daylight, he was younger than he seemed in photographs, and tired in a way expensive suits couldn't quite disguise the tiredness of a man who had spent a decade making sure nothing was ever left to chance, and hated, more than anything, being told that something had slipped past him anyway.

"Security review," he said finally, not quite to her, more to himself, as though testing the shape and weight of the sentence. "I'll have security do a sweep before the board meeting. That's all. Not because I believe you. Because it costs me nothing."

It was the barest possible c***k in the door, and Sophia took it with both hands, gratitude flooding through her so fast it nearly buckled her knees. "Thank you. Thank you, that's…. that's enough, that might be enough"

But he was already walking away, already lifting the phone back to his ear, folding her back into the category of things that didn't require his full attention. She stood on the sidewalk and watched the revolving door swallow him, and told herself the sweep would be enough, that some overworked security guard checking bags and IDs would catch a man carrying a gun before he ever reached the fiftieth floor.

She didn't know, standing there in the cold with her heart still hammering, that the man in the grey suit had walked past that same lobby desk two hours earlier, badged in as part of a vendor delivery, his face pleasant and unmemorable, the kind of face security cameras forget as soon as they've recorded it, and was already sitting quietly in a stairwell four floors below the boardroom, waiting for a door to open.

She only knew that she had done everything she could, that her legs felt hollow and her mouth tasted of copper, and that somewhere above her, in less than an hour, she would find out if it had been enough or if she was about to watch, from the sidewalk, the exact vision she had been carrying in her chest for six days come true in real time, with no way left to stop it.