BOARDROOM ENEMIES BEDROOM LOVERS

Chapter 1 The Woman In Red

The man who killed my father was waiting for me on the 89th floor.

That was the official story anyway: suicides, no notes, no warning, no history of it, just a brilliant, stubborn sixty-one-year-old man who supposedly climbed onto the ledge of his own office building on a Tuesday afternoon and stepped off without telling a single person goodbye.

The police have closed the file in 6 weeks; I never closed anything, not the file, not the question that lived under my ribs for three years like a splinter working its way to the surface. My father wasn't a man who jumped; he was a man who fought. Someone had made that decision for him, or made it look like his own, and I intend to find out which. I told myself that on the drive over and over like a rosary made of rage instead of prayer beads.

By the time the car pulled up outside Castellan Tower, I almost believed I was calm, almost.

The building didn't just rise out in the city; it seemed to grow out of it, glass and steel stacked so high that the top floors disappeared into clouds on overcast days. Today the sky was clear, cruelly clear that the sun hit the tower's face like it was showing off. I sat in the car for eleven seconds longer than I needed to, staring up at it at the small gold letters over the entrance that spelled out a name I’d hated for years: CASTELLIAN.

My father used to say a building tells you everything about the man who built it; if that was true, then Roman Castellan was cold, expensive, and built to make ordinary people feel small standing at its feet. I got out of the car anyway; small has never stopped me before.

I showed up with a red dress on purpose, not because red was my color, though it was, but because red doesn't apologize. Red doesn't sit quietly in a corner and wait to be noticed; it walks in and makes the room rearrange itself. It was a war day; I wasn't going to do it in grey.

The lobby was the kind of beauty that made you feel like you owed somebody money just for breathing the air. Marble floors polished to a mirror shine; a waterfall was built into the reception desk, water sheeting down black stone in complete silence, like every gravity has signed an NDA.

Security guards in tailored navy, not the rumpled blue of a mall cop but something closer to Secret Service. One of them straightened when he saw me coming, his eyes flicking from my heels to my face and back like he was trying to place me; he placed me fast enough.

Miss Vance, his voice cracked slightly on the second syllable, Mr Castellan is expecting you, Eighty-ninth floor. Of course he was at the top where a man could stand at his window and watch the whole city spread out beneath him as though he owned it outright. I’d read enough profiles on Roman Castellan to know he liked being above things, above the board, above the wreckage he left behind when he wanted something and took it.

The elevator was glass on one side, so that as it climbed you could watch New York shrink into a model of itself, then into a smear of light and still, then into something that didn't look real at all. Eighty-nine floors, I counted them without meaning to, the way you count something when you are trying not to think about what's waiting at the end of it. And somewhere in the ninety seconds it took to reach the top, my heartbeat found the same rhythm as my heels against the marble, sharp, controlled and unwilling to admit it was afraid.

I was afraid; I refused to be afraid; fear was a luxury my father didn't get to have in his final year when Roman Castellan’s company gutted Meridiam Corp from the outside and left him standing in the wreckage of forty years of work. Fear was for people with something left to lose; I'd already lost it.

The doors opened onto a boardroom made entirely of glass: glass walls, glass table, even the light fixtures seemed to be made of something you could see straight through, as if the entire floor had been designed by a man who wanted everyone to know he had nothing to hide, even though everyone in the building suspected the opposite. Twenty men in identical dark suits sat around the table talking business that could ruin lives in three states away without anyone in the room ever having to watch it happen.

One of them didn't look away when I walked in. A silver-haired man seated close enough to Roman’s chair set his pen down slowly and watched me the way you’d watch a fire you started, waiting to see how far it would spread. I didn't know his name yet; I’d have plenty of reason to learn it later. For now I only noted the strange, cold attention, his eyes flicking to Roman and back to me, checking whether the two of us had recognized each other.

And at the far end, with his back to the room stood the reason I was there; he didn't turn, yet he didn't need to. Something about the position of his shoulder told me he already knew exactly who had walked in, the way a predator knows the shift in air pressure before it ever sees its prey.

Leave, he said. He didn't raise his voice; he didn't have to. Twenty chairs scraped back in a near-perfect unison; nobody argued, nobody looked at me on their way out, which told me more about Roman Castellan than any headline ever had.

The door clicked shut; it was just the two of us and about four hundred feet of open air on the other side of the glass. Then he turned around. Storm gray eyes, the kind of gray that changes with the light and never quite settles into a color you can name. A jaw sharp enough to cut a glass, dark hair pushed back like he’d run his hands through it in frustration an hour ago and never bothered to fix it, his tie slightly pulled down, his chest showing halfway, and his sleeves rolled to the forearm.

I hated that my body noticed before my brain caught up and reminded me it was who he was. His gaze moved over me slowly, deliberately, from my heels up to my dress to my mouth, and he did it without a shred of apology, as though he was cataloguing a weapon he intended to use.

Miss Vance, his voice was low, unhurried, the kind of voice that made you feel like the room had gotten smaller. I have had a great deal with you; I’m sure you have. I didn't let myself blink first, considering you had my father investigated for eight months before you took his company apart.

Something flickered behind his eyes, gone before I could name it: Harvard Law, top of your class, Ellias Vance’s daughter. He took a step closer, close enough that I caught the smell of him, cedar and something darker underneath, something like the inside of a locked drawer. The woman suing me for two billion dollars- someone has to.

Someone has to do what? To answer for the man who destroyed my father, my voice didn't shake; I’d practiced that in the mirror more times than I would ever admit. The temperature in the room seemed to drop, Roman’s jaw tightened, one small muscle ticking near his ear, and for half a second I saw something that looked almost like grief cross his face.

Ten million dollars, he said, drop the suit, walk away with your dignity and your bank account intact. I laughed; it surprised even me how genuine it sounded, how little it had to do with humor. My father’s life wasn't for sale, Mr Castellan. Neither was mine; he was directly in front of me now, close enough that I had to tilt my chin up to hold his eyes. You want a war, Miss Vance, you will get one. He walked away without another word.

It was only on my way out that I noticed the credenza behind his chair, a single white frame lying face down among a row of upright ones, the only photo in the room he hadn't wanted standing. I almost turned it over. I do not know what stopped me some instinct, maybe that whatever was underneath it wasn't mine to see yet.

My phone buzzed as I stepped back into the elevator, an unknown number;

‘’8 pm dinner, come alone. I know who killed your father; bring the lawsuit or bring your coffin.

I read it twice, then, on the third reading, my thumb hovered over the screen as I tried to make the words rearrange themselves into something less dangerous. I didn't delete it; I didn't call my lawyer either, though every instinct I’d spent three years building screamed at me too. Some small, reckless grief socked part of me had already decided I was going.