The Sinner's Invitation

Chapter 6:Risk

Elias missed the decimal point.

It was the kind of mistake he hadn’t made since year two at the firm, back when he still double-checked everything twice and slept with case law under his pillow. The Q3 slide threw it up on the screen in 40-point font: 4.7% instead of 4.17%.

The room went still.

“Mr. Elias,” Diane from Legal said. Her pen stopped mid-tap against her notepad. “Is that the revised figure, or are we working off last week’s draft?”

Elias stared at the screen. The red underline under the number pulsed. It looked like a cut.

“Last week’s,” he said. The words left his mouth before he could dress them up. “My apologies. I’ll recirculate.”

He didn’t look up. He couldn’t risk seeing Diane’s eyebrow lift the way it did when she smelled blood. He felt the shift anyway. Fingers paused over keyboards. Chairs stopped creaking. The conference room AC, usually just white noise, suddenly filled his ears like a jet engine.

He clicked to the next slide. His hand shook on the mouse.

After the meeting, Diane caught him by the elevator. Her heels didn’t make a sound on the carpet. That was the thing about Diane. She moved like a cat.

“Everything alright?” she asked. Not the way she asked about the weather. This was the voice she used in depositions.

Elias forced the corners of his mouth up. The muscle memory was there, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Long week.”

“Right.” She wedged her palm against the elevator door. The metal was cool under her hand, and it didn’t budge. “You’ve been out early the last three nights. Leaving before six. Not like you.”

The doors tried to close. Her hand held them. The motor whined in protest.

“I’m just saying,” she said, quieter now, dropping her voice so the intern at the copy machine couldn’t hear, “if there’s something going on, you should tell me before the board hears it from someone else. We’re exposed right now. The merger talks—”

“There’s nothing,” Elias said. The denial came out too fast, too sharp. It hung between them.

Diane’s eyes narrowed. Just a fraction. Just enough to say _I heard that_.

The elevator dinged. A junior analyst stepped out, earbuds in, oblivious. Diane let the door go. It shut with a soft sigh.

“Okay,” she said. She didn’t believe him. “But you’re not yourself, Elias. And people notice.”

She walked away. He didn’t answer because his throat had closed up.

Back at his desk, the second screen glowed. An email from the club. No subject line. Just four numbers in the preview pane: _23:14. Back door._

His hands hovered over the keyboard. The cursor blinked in the reply box of the board packet. Taunting him. He needed to fix the number. Needed to call the analysts, grovel, get ahead of it. Needed to be the Elias who ran Monte Carlo simulations on his own life before he lived a second of it.

Instead, his eyes kept sliding to the other screen. To _23:14_.

The office had thinned out. The air smelled like cold coffee and Diane’s perfume. Citrus and something expensive. It clung to the space where she’d stood by the elevator, sharp enough to cut.

His phone buzzed. Face-down on the desk, it rattled against wood. He flipped it.

Amp, from two nights ago: _You didn’t come._

His thumb hovered. He typed. _I can’t._ Deleted it. Typed again. _Work._ Deleted that too. The words felt flimsy. Lies, or worse, truths he wasn’t ready to name.

His chest pulled tight. Like he’d been shoved underwater and every direction looked the same shade of dark. The club was a hook behind his ribs, tugging. The firm was a stone in his mouth. And he was standing in the middle of the river, getting pulled apart.

He closed the board packet without saving. The unsent correction would sit in drafts, another mistake waiting to happen.

He left at 6:03.

The click of his office door felt louder than it should have.

Diane was still at her desk. She didn’t turn when he passed. She didn’t have to. He felt her gaze on his back anyway, cataloging the time, the slump in his shoulders, the way his suit jacket hung looser than it did on Monday.

The elevator doors opened. He stepped in alone.

For three floors, he watched the numbers tick down. For three floors, he didn’t breathe.

When the doors opened to the lobby, the city exhaled hot air into his face. It smelled like rain and exhaust and something he couldn’t name yet.

His phone was still in his hand.

_23:14_, the screen said.

He didn’t put it away.