They brought Cassandra to the boardroom like a prize or a provocation; Elena still couldn't tell which.
The tower smelled of antiseptic and adrenaline. Security moved in precise formations, doors sealed, staff kept in waiting rooms. Word had crawled through the building like a fever. Someone had tried to kill her on Adrian's floor. Someone had used Vega-level clearance to get in. That meant a mole. That meant betrayal from inside a place she'd been taught to respect.
She had expected Adrian to handle it, to be that cold force who chewed up problems and spat out answers. What she hadn't expected was how empty the answers sometimes were. The investigation moved like clockwork: interviews, surveillance pulls, code audits. Elena watched with a hollow curiosity, feeling at once relieved and hollow. Relief because he didn't leave; hollow because she was still the target.
They escorted her into the conference room where the board usually debated numbers and mergers. Today, it was a theater. Adrian sat at the head, shoulders tense under his shirt. He didn't bother to pretend calm. He didn't have to. The men and women around the table, lawyers, heads of security, compliance, looked like a tribunal.
Cassandra sat on the opposite side, unruffled. Her hair, her posture, her expression, everything was deliberately impeccable. She was introduced as a returning consultant, her presence framed as coincidence at first, then necessity. Elena watched her, face a marble mask, the way predators sometimes rested without showing the teeth.
When the breach was traced to access codes used by "Dana Lee," the trail initially went cold, Swiss trusts, dead-end shells. But Adrian's team had found a sliver they hadn't expected: a transfer sequence that bounced through three accounts and then to a company registered under a business consulting name associated with Cassandra Lim. Small, legal-sounding. Clean on paper. Dirty underneath.
Elena felt her stomach drop as Adrian slid the evidence across the table. The printouts were clinical: timestamps, the machines used to log the accesses, phone IMEI numbers. One printout had a photo from the service corridor camera, a blurry figure with his face angled away. Another had the ID badge used to access the executive pantry that morning. Vega-level clearance. An ID that matched temporary passes issued recently to a contractor hired through Cassandra's team.
Her hands tightened into fists she didn't realize she'd made. The room hummed with low voices. Cassandra's chin tilted in that infuriating way she'd seen in magazines, a perfect headline of disdain. Alone, sitting there, Elena felt very small.
Adrian cleared his throat. "Ms. Lim," he said, voice low. "Your firm's contractor list shows a recent hire, Dana Lee. She had access to internal systems. She is the same account used to clear access codes on the forty-third floor this morning." His stare did not leave Cassandra.
Cassandra's smile did not falter. "That's… convenient," she said. "You're painting a tidy picture, Mr. Vega." Her voice was honeyed. "But convenience and truth are not the same thing."
"Convenience?" Adrian's eyes were iron. "Convenient for who? For someone who wanted Mrs. Vega removed."
The words landed like stones. The room went quiet in that brittle way where everyone is waiting to see which splinter of glass will cut first.
Cassandra laughed softly, but it was not amused. "You're dramatic as ever," she said. "You think I would sully my reputation to pull… what? A cheap hit?" She leaned forward, eyes glittering. "Who benefits most from Mrs. Vega being gone?"
The question was rhetorical. Everyone in the room knew the easy answer; still, the question was a blade aimed at Adrian, and he knew it.
Elena swallowed. Her pulse hammered. "Why would you," she began, but the words tasted like wine, too acidic to swallow.
Cassandra's gaze slid to her with a slow, smug assessment, as if she were reading a menu. "Because love is a theatre," she said. "Because people like to watch when the greatest stage collapses. Adrian loved spectacle even before you, Elena. Don't be naive."
"I'm not naive," Elena snapped. "I'm not some… some pawn you move to hurt someone else."
"You're a woman who chose to walk back into a man's life that still had ghosts," Cassandra said mildly. "If I wanted you harmed because I desired Adrian back, well, that's dramatic and messy. But there is a cleaner rationale: destabilize the CEO. Make him chase ghosts, watch the empire tilt, and someone else slips in."
"So you admit it," Adrian said, the ice in his voice sharp enough to cut. "You hired a contractor, you brought in someone with access."
Cassandra's smile thinned. "If I had wanted Mrs. Vega gone, do you think I'd be so clumsy as to leave a paper trail?"
Adrian's jaw tightened. "No. But you're the common denominator. Your man was seen leaving the tower an hour before the breach. Your account shows large disbursements to an offshore trust linked to the contractor. Your assistant's email forwarded internal schedules to an anonymous address."
Cassandra's left hand stretched up to touch her throat, the movement languid, practiced. "Mr. Vega, you're making allegations that require evidence beyond circumstantial suggestions." She glanced at Elena with an expression Elena could not parse, was it pity? scorn? boredom? "You think this proves something?"
Minutes stretched into a pressure so thick Elena felt it in her teeth. Then a voice spoke from the corner, quieter than the rest. "We pulled the service elevator logs for the timeline." Dmitri, head of security, had a folder open. His finger pointed to a line. "The temporary pass used on the morning of the breach was issued from a mobile terminal logged to a device that pinged Cassandra Lim's office IP. The RFID matched equipment signed out this morning by Cassandra's firm for archival work."
Cassandra's expression faltered, an almost invisible twitch. Someone else at the table raised their hand to ask about the offshore transfers, the name of the trust, the channels. The list unfurled: names, shell companies, a chain of transactions. It led to a corporate services firm in a jurisdiction whose employee file listed Cassandra Lim as the beneficial owner through nominees.
Adrian didn't argue. He let the paper speak. The air shifted. The room got smaller.
Cassandra's smile, when it returned, was slower, colder. "You can massage facts to fit any narrative," she said. "But narrative is not conviction."
Adrian's answer was not for the room. He spoke so close to Cassandra that only she could hear. Elena strained. The rest of the board watched like vultures.
"You used me once," he said. "You thought walking away would let you keep your conscience clean. But you never walked away from what you wanted."
Cassandra tilted her head. "You loved me, Adrian. For the vanity of it, not for the woman. You left because I refused to be a trophy. You left because you feared anyone who might ask you to be smaller than the empire." Her words were precise, calculated to press a bruise only Adrian knew existed.
Elena's skin prickled. There was history here, a history she'd felt in ambiguous fragments: a piano, a vanished warmth, the way Adrian sometimes looked at city lights as if measuring past mistakes. Cassandra was poking at old stitches.
"You think destroying Elena will make me come back?" Adrian said, voice low and raw. "That I will kneel? You're mistaken."
Cassandra spread her hands placidly. "Oh, it's never about kneeling. It's about attention. About seeing him try to fix something beyond him. Humans are always most interesting when they're salvaging what they've broken."
Elena's chest tightened so hard it hurt. She wanted to stand, rip Cassandra's perfect face off like a mask, but the security detail was already moving. This was not a street fight; it was a chessboard.
Dmitri tapped a tablet. "We'll continue forensics. Tonight we'll have a sweep. But the financial trails are worrying. We need to go deeper into corporate services firms."
"So the hits come from my perimeter?" Cassandra asked, almost amused. "How quaint."
"Enough," Adrian snapped. His hands curled into fists on the table. "You have access. You had motive. We have transactions and timestamps. We have a contractor cleared through your firm. We have a man with a gun on my floor. This isn't quaint, Cassandra. This is attempted murder."
Her expression hardened. Then, with a slow, deliberate tilt of her chin, she offered a toast to the room with the smallest of smiles. "If your word is law, Adrian, then you'll have me proven guilty in due course. If your power is performative, you'll have already lost."
Elena's stomach dropped. There was a tenor to Cassandra's cruelty that didn't rely on guilt or innocence. Cassandra liked the theater of accusation; she would be content if the world bled scandal and Adrian tripped.
When the meeting adjourned, they didn't escort Cassandra out in handcuffs. That would be too neat. Instead, legal wanted more, PR wanted to control the message, and Adrian wanted answers. Cassandra left under her own umbrella, flanked by a carefully chosen aide who radiated loyalty. She passed Elena in the hallway and, for a breath, their eyes locked.
"No one will ever love you the way he needs to be loved," Cassandra whispered so softly Elena barely heard it. It wasn't a threat; it was a verdict.
Elena felt it like a cold hand: not the hand that wanted her gone, but the hand that wanted Adrian to feel the hollowness of his choices. Cassandra wasn't shooting to kill Elena as much as to make Adrian watch some private destruction and see how he handled it.
Outside, paparazzi lenses were a swarm. Cameras followed Cassandra's car. Cameras followed Adrian's. Cameras watched Elena as she moved down the corridor, protected but visible. The public would relish the frame: the ex-fiancée, the CEO, and the young bride caught in the middle.
Adrian met her at the glass doors, the city reflected behind him like a thousand watchers. He looked exhausted and razor-sharp at the same time. He didn't reach for her. He knew better than to confuse gestures with solutions.
"We'll find everything," he said, quieter than she'd heard him all morning. "I'll make sure no one touches you."
Elena searched his face for softness. For an apology. For admission. He gave none, just the promise of action, which was, in its own way, his kind of tenderness.
She wanted to tell him she didn't want his protection if it meant war, but Cassandra's whisper still crawled beneath her ribs. She would rather have wondered about motives than find herself assigned as the battleground he defended at all costs.
That night, the city slept uneasily. Elena lay awake, the suite around her full of light and security cameras. She felt small and very much watched. In the bathroom mirror she caught her own face: tired, sharpened by fear. She thought of her mother, in some small ward, too fragile to be dragged further into headlines.
A message blinked on her phone then, anonymous, as always. "You should be careful of the hands that hold you."
She put the phone down, palms flat on the sheet, and closed her eyes. Cassandra had called it a "theatre." Maybe she was right. But theatre could hide real fire.
Outside the window, somewhere Cassandra's engine purred like a challenger. Elena imagined the woman looking back up at Vega Tower and smiling.
A strategist. A broken heart wrapped in silk. A woman who did not flinch from watching a man dismantle himself if it served her art.
Elena's throat tightened. She would not be reduced to a prop in anyone's revenge. But she also knew: winning meant surviving the thing that loved her least, Adrian's war.
As she drifted toward a restless sleep, her phone buzzed again, a photo this time. Not of her balcony, not of the hospital. This one was of Adrian's study: the photo showed an envelope on his desk, its contents spread like proof, and in big, even lettering across the image: "OPEN IT. HE KEEPS MORE THAN SECRETS."