Chapter 2 (Part 1)
1392 Words
Colby’s POV
Sydney at night looked like a map of power, every lit window a confession, every dark one a secret. From my office, the skyline stretched to the harbor where the ferry lights blinked like patient eyes. I should have gone home hours ago, but “home” was just an address with a better view. The center of gravity had shifted the moment Aurora Ainsley walked back into Hudson Tower and looked at me like I was a chapter she’d already finished.
“She’s hiding something,” I said to the glass, as if the city might answer.
Behind me, the door gave a soft knock. Jax Mercer stepped in with two coffees and a face that said he’d tried to go home and failed. Again.
“You’re still here,” he said.
“Spare me the irony.”
He set a cup on my desk. “I pulled the server log deltas you wanted. We’ve got three anomalous access events in the past ten days all from legitimate badges, routed through a mirrored IP.”
“Which badges?”
Jax hesitated. “Legal archive. Executive courier. And… your private floor.”
I looked up. “Mine.”
“Technically. The access shows from the penthouse service corridor. No footage on the 57th camera was down for ‘maintenance.’”
My jaw tightened. Maintenance was a word that covered a multitude of sins. I slid the tablet toward me. Three timestamps stared back, each perfectly spaced three days apart, like someone tapping a watch to make sure it still kept time.
“Where’s Eleanor?”
“At home.” Jax managed a dry smile. “Presumably sharpening knives.”
“She always preferred velvet.”
He didn’t say what both of us were thinking: Eleanor Hudson liked control the way other people liked oxygen. Anything that threatened it had a way of disappearing. Five years ago it had been a woman with too much promise and not enough armor. It had been Aurora.
Jax cleared his throat. “You sure you want her, Aurora leading this hunt?”
“Yes.” The answer came too quickly. I slowed it down. “She sees patterns the rest of us miss.”
“And you see patterns where she’s concerned?”
“Jax.”
He lifted both hands. “Fine. But if you’re wrong, she’ll be the one holding the knife.”
“If I’m wrong, I deserve the cut,” I said, surprising myself with the honesty. He studied me for a moment, nodded once, and left.
I turned the tablet back around, the anomalies a neat little constellation on-screen. They were too clean. Too careful. One mistake and the whole thing would unravel. Whoever was poking holes in my ship wasn’t trying to sink it, not yet. A controlled leak to weaken the hull. Enough to force me to sell to the right buyer. The thought rolled through me like ice water.
My phone buzzed. Eleanor.
I answered because I always did. Power compels habits the way gravity compels tides.
“Darling,” she purred, the kind of voice that made people lean in without realizing why. “I hear you’ve acquired an exterminator.”
“Crisis strategist,” I said. “And yes.”
“She’s competent,” Eleanor allowed. “But competence can be so… untidy.”
“I’ll risk a little mess.”
“And reputation?” She sounded almost bored. “Our investors delight in stories. They like them tidy. The return of a disgraced intern as our savior, how terribly modern.”
I could see her: feet up, glass of Barolo, a smile that never reached her eyes. “The board wants results. So do I.”
“And what do you want, Colby?” she asked softly. “From her.”
I could have said the obvious: answers, names, blood. I could have lied better. Instead, I said nothing, which apparently was answer enough.
Eleanor hummed. “Be careful. Old fires look like warmth until they burn down the house.”
She hung up before I could reply. She always did. Conversations with Eleanor were performances with only one star.
I stared at the city for another long minute, then shut the lights and headed to the private elevator. In the mirrored doors I caught the outline of a man I used to recognize and decided I didn’t like him very much.
Morning brought the smell of rain and the kind of humidity that made shirts cling and secrets bloom. I arrived early and found Aurora already in the war room, sleeves rolled to the elbow, hair pinned up with a black clip that made her look more dangerous than any weapon I’d ever seen. The whiteboard behind her was a battlefield, arrows, dates, tight handwriting that mapped out our bleeding.
She didn’t look up when I stepped in. “You’re blocking the light.”
“Good morning to you, too.”
She capped a marker, finally meeting my eyes. There was coffee in her dark, defiant, necessary. “I stayed late.”
“I noticed,” I said. “The cameras show you left at one.”
Something flickered across her face annoyance or amusement, hard to tell. “Keeping tabs already?”
“Keeping you alive,” I said, and surprised us both. I set a folder on the table. The Penthouse corridor camera was down for maintenance during two of the anomalous access windows. Legal archive courier gap. Both route through the same mirrored IP.”
Her gaze sharpened. “So not just internal, internal with legacy keys.”
“Someone who knew how this place worked five years ago.”
Her eyes flicked up to mine. She didn’t say it, but we both heard the echo between the lines. Someone who was here when you let me fall.
“Jax will pull staff rosters from that year,” I said. “You’ll get them by noon.”
“Good,” she said. “I want courier rosters, shadow vendors, any contractor who had temporary plates during those months.”
“You’ll have them.”
She jotted notes. When she wrote, my world narrowed to the small details, the precise way she formed her R’s, the way the vein in her wrist moved when she pressed down. Five years hadn’t dulled anything. It had sharpened everything I shouldn’t have noticed.
I forced my attention to the board. “Walk me through your suspicion tree.”
She did, brisk and clean. Moira wasn’t there, but if she had been, she would have tried to make the room smaller with her smile. Aurora made it bigger with data. She pinned three names to the top right corner, not as culprits but as fulcrums, people through which material passed.
“Jax?” I asked, and heard the defensiveness in it.
She shook her head. “Jax is careful to the point of pathology. If it’s him, he’s grown sloppier than his personality allows.”
“Eleanor,” she said next, and let the name hang.
“She’s… thorough.” The understatement almost made me smile. “But she likes proxies. If it’s Eleanor, it’ll be someone who owes her everything.”
“So a man made of favors,” Aurora said. “Or a woman made of debt.”
Her phone buzzed across the table. The name that flashed on the screen was saved as T with a lemon emoji. She silenced it, but not quickly enough for me to miss the preview: Pick-up cutoff 5:45. He insists on apple juice.
“Personal,” she said, sliding the phone aside like the word cost nothing. “Focus.”
“I’m focused,” I lied, and then, because I couldn’t help myself: “Who insists on apple juice?”
“My… responsibility.” She didn’t look away as she said it. The words were clean, self-contained, and guarded like valuables in a vault.
Something restless moved under my ribs. “I see.”
She capped the marker with more force than necessary. “Do you?”
“Not yet,” I said. “But I will.”
Her mouth tilted. “There it is. The threat.”
“Promise,” I corrected.
She turned back to the board and the conversation was over. For now.
- Writer
