The fifty-first floor of the Hawthorne Tower was a cathedral of glass, steel, and hushed voices. It was a sterile, architectural marvel where silence operated as a high-value currency, and every heavy footstep on the polished Italian marble echoed like a gavel hitting a block. Normally, Elias moved through these soaring, sunlit halls with the natural, unthinking ease of a man who owned the very air he breathed.
Today, he felt like a ghost haunting his own life.
The emergency adjournment of the Newark signing sequence had left the boardroom in a state of absolute, chaotic whiplash, but Elias had retreated.
He sat rigid behind his mahogany desk—a massive, imposing slab of rare wood that Victor Hawthorne had gifted him upon his ruthless promotion to Chief Operating Officer. It had been en
