Bound by His Shadow: The Billionaire's Secret Weapon

Chapter 2: The Last Sterling

The entrance to the Gray Door was behind a laundromat.

Seraphina pushed open an unmarked iron door and slipped through a corridor so narrow she had to turn sideways. Steam from the laundry presses seeped through the walls, carrying the cloying sweetness of cheap fabric softener. A tarnished brass bell hung at the end of the corridor. She didn't ring it. Just pushed through.

The bar at three in the afternoon was empty. Dim light. No bartender behind the counter. The old jukebox in the corner had been broken for years, its display frozen on the same track. Sylvia sat in the farthest booth, a laptop with a cracked screen open in front of her, her never-lit vape pen dangling from her lips. She was wearing a faded sweatshirt with a peeling band logo on the pocket. She looked like a sleep-deprived grad student.

"You're late." Sylvia didn't look up.

"You say that every time."

"Because you're late every time." Sylvia pulled the vape pen from her mouth and glanced up. "That." She pointed at her own cheekbone. "From the rooftop?"

Seraphina pulled out the chair across from her and sat. "Your intel's fast."

"If it weren't, I'd be dead." Sylvia closed the laptop and slid it toward her. The screen displayed a compiled intelligence file, Lucian Vance's photo on the first page, dense timelines and linked names annotated in the margins. "CEO of Vance Group. Current head and heir of House Vance. Six months ago, right around when everything happened to you, he survived three assassination attempts in a row. All internal. The second one nearly killed him. They used reverse gravity suppression against him. Same Gift type. Think about what that means."

"His own family wants him dead."

"Correct. And the one trying to kill him shares his bloodline, which means it's a close blood relative." Sylvia leaned back into the booth. "His half-brother, Marcus Vance, has been aggressively courting the board. One spark away from a succession war." She flipped to the next page. "He's also got Mind Recoil. Hereditary, from his father's line. Gets worse the more he uses his Gift. Rumors say it went from once a week to every other day in the last six months. He hasn't let anyone treat it."

"He has no one he can trust."

"Exactly. His security chief, Damian Cross, is the only person with access to his private life, but Damian's a normal human. Can't do anything about Recoil." Sylvia tilted her head, watching Seraphina. "You, on the other hand, you can cure anything. And kill anything. You two would make quite the pair."

Seraphina didn't take that. She flipped the file to the last page and stopped. A record from when Lucian was ten years old. Mother died in an internal family conflict. Poisoned. Killer never found. She stared at those words for a moment. Then closed the file.

"What's he waiting for?" she asked.

"What?"

"You said it's every other day now and he hasn't let anyone treat him. A man like that doesn't wait to die."

Sylvia was quiet for a beat. "Maybe what he's waiting for isn't medicine. Maybe it's someone he's willing to owe."

Seraphina stood. Sylvia pulled something from her pocket and pushed it across the table. A micro encrypted comms unit, no bigger than a fingernail. "Put this in your ear canal at the gala. It's invisible from the outside. If anything goes wrong, I can at least hear where you are."

"No."

"You sure?"

"If he knows I have backup outside, the negotiation changes. I have to be a card with no retreat. Otherwise he won't take the deal."

Sylvia looked at her for a moment, then pocketed the comms unit. "You know what you're walking into, right? Lucian Vance is the kind of man who makes people on the other side of the table wish they'd rather kill themselves than finish the negotiation."

"Sounds like he needs a reason to feel alive."

Sylvia raised an eyebrow. "You want to be his reason."

"No. I want to be his necessity." Seraphina picked up the untouched glass of water on the table, took a sip, and put it down. "Keep digging. My uncle Victor's whereabouts. Internal communications from the night of the m******e. Any Sterlings who might have surfaced on any channel."

"You still haven't given up on finding someone alive?"

Seraphina was already at the door. She didn't answer.

By the time she got back to the rental, it was dark. The neighbor had switched to a different dating show, the host's laughter punching through the thin wall. She shut the door, cutting off the noise, and stood in front of the mirror.

The person in the mirror was wearing a faded gray T-shirt. Hair cut to her shoulders, edges uneven, done herself with scissors. She hadn't looked in a mirror while she was cutting. When she finished, the right side was longer than the left, so she cut more, and kept cutting until there was almost nothing left. Before the m******e her hair had fallen to her waist. Every time she saw her mother, her mother would say, "When are you going to trim those ends," and every time she'd said, "Next time."

She dug out the cheap high heels. Thin stilettos, soles hard as wood. She pulled them on and stood up, the old band-aid still plastered over the unhealed sore on her heel, the back of the shoe pressing right into it. She took two steps in front of the mirror, the heels leaving round dents in the cheap vinyl flooring.

She thought of her mother.

Not the mother from the night of the m******e. The mother who was alive. She was sixteen that summer, sitting at the stone table under the old locust tree in the backyard. Her mother sat on the stone bench and slipped the white dove ring onto her finger. The ring was a little too big. Her mother pinched it gently to make it fit. "This isn't jewelry," her mother said. "This is home. Wear it, and no matter where you are, someone is waiting for you to come back."

Seraphina remembered thinking that was kind of cheesy. When you're sixteen, a lot of things seem cheesy. Your mother's concern. Family rules. Everyone having to be at the table before dinner could start. When she was twenty, her mother flew to her university on a business trip detour and knocked on her dorm room door at two in the morning, holding a cup of hot chocolate. Seraphina had been cramming for finals, barely sleeping for two days. She opened the door and found her mother standing in the hallway in a camel coat she'd seen a hundred times without ever thinking it looked good, clutching hot chocolate in a thermos wrapped in two layers of plastic bags.

"Don't you have a meeting tomorrow," Seraphina had said.

"That's why I caught the red-eye."

That was the last time she saw her mother before graduation.

She also remembered Christmas, one year ago. The Sterlings had a rule: Christmas, no matter where you were, you came home. That night the banquet hall held thirty-seven people. Her father stood at the head of the long table and started telling his joke, the same one he told every year: "Why can't a Pyrokinetic ever become a chef?" He cracked himself up before he even got to the punchline. He always did. Her mother rolled her eyes across the table. "You tell this every year." He claimed this year's was a new version, then repeated the same joke unchanged. Seraphina's oldest cousin was wiping tears of laughter off her face with a napkin. Her second uncle's daughter had brought her new boyfriend, and the guy sat there rigid with terror, clearly having never witnessed an entire room of people laughing that hard at a joke that wasn't funny. Seraphina remembered thinking, at that moment: I hope every year is like this.

She hadn't known it was the last Christmas.

The neon outside the window flickered. Seraphina looked at herself in the mirror. Her right hand held her left wrist. The ring was on her finger. Still a little too big.

Her phone screen lit up. An anonymous number. A message: The gala tomorrow. Don't go. If you go, don't expect to come back.

She looked at it. Deleted it. Stood up and put the black heels back on. This time she didn't notice the pain in her heel. She looked in the mirror and tucked the longer side of her hair behind her ear. Then she took the ring from the metal box and put it on. Still too big. It had been that way since she was sixteen. Her mother had pinched it to make it fit. Now it was still too big, but her mother wasn't there anymore to pinch it for her.

She turned off the light. The door clicked shut behind her.

One of the streetlights downstairs was out. The one still working bled an orange line across the wet asphalt, still damp from the rain. A black sedan was parked across the street, engine running. Tinted windows. No way to tell if anyone was inside. Not here to pick her up. But it would follow her all the way to the gallery. She knew.

She didn't look back.