Chapter 2: The Consultant of Ruins
The air in the boardroom had turned into a vacuum. The locket lay on the polished mahogany, its silver surface scorched and pitted by a heat I could still feel in my nightmares. My hand hovered over it, trembling. This was the locket my father had fastened around my neck on my eighteenth birthday—just four hours before the world turned to orange and black.
"You're lying," I whispered, the white silk of my blazer feeling like a straitjacket. "I felt the chain snap when I crawled through the nursery window. It fell into the rose bushes. The fire took it."
Arthur straightened, his silhouette blocking out the flickering news report behind him. "The rose bushes were the first thing to catch, Sloane. The accelerant was poured there specifically. If this had fallen into the dirt, it would have melted into a puddle of slag. I caught it. Before the first match was struck."
I looked up at him, my vision blurring with a cocktail of rage and sudden, piercing vertigo. "You caught it? Because you were the one who started it."
"If I had started it," Arthur said, his voice dropping to a dangerous, silky register, "I wouldn't be standing in your boardroom ten years later handing you the only piece of physical evidence that places me at the scene before the 911 call."
He stepped around the table, his movements fluid and predatory. The board members were gone, the room now a private arena for a decade of festering hatred. He picked up the locket, the charred metal looking fragile in his large, calloused hand.
"You acquired my debt to ruin me," he continued. "You wanted to watch me bleed out in the streets. But now the police are digging up your father's garden, Sloane. They aren't just looking for bones. They're looking for a motive. And you just bought the company that holds every single secret my father and yours ever shared."
I snatched the locket from his palm, the cold metal biting into my skin. "I didn't buy this company to keep your secrets, Arthur. I bought it to expose them. You think this locket buys you a reprieve? It buys you a prison cell. I'll hand this to the lead investigator myself."
"Do it," he dared, his grey eyes sparking with a challenge that made my blood boil. "But once you hand that over, the Vane Global assets will be frozen. Your 'liquidation' will be tied up in probate and criminal court for the next twenty years. You'll be bankrupt before you can even take down the sign on the front door."
I froze. He was right. In my haste to gut him, I had tethered my finances to his sinking ship. If the company became the center of a double homicide investigation, the bank would pull my credit lines instantly.
"What do you want?" I spat.
"A seat," he said, gesturing to the chair he had occupied for years. "I stay on as a 'special consultant.' You need someone who knows which files to shred and which ones to feed to the press to keep the stock price from bottoming out while we find out whose bones are in that dirt."
"I'd rather hire a snake as a necktie," I hissed.
"The snake knows where the venom is hidden, Sloane. You don't."
I stared at him, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I hated the way he looked at me—not with the fear I had spent millions to cultivate, but with a dark, twisted familiarity.
"Fine," I said, my voice trembling with the effort to remain cold. "You're a consultant. You have no power. No office. You'll sit in the glass-walled bullpen with the junior analysts where I can watch every breath you take. You will be my shadow, Arthur. And shadows don't speak unless they're stepped on."
He smiled then, a slow, devastating expression that didn't reach his eyes. "Be careful, Sloane. Shadows are the only things that stay with you when the lights go out."
I turned my back on him, walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, and looked down at the street. The police cars were already pulling up to the curb of the Vane Tower. My phone buzzed in my pocket—a text from an encrypted line.
I pulled it out, expecting a message from my legal team. Instead, it was an audio file. I pressed play, and the sound that filled my ear made my knees give way.
It was my father's voice. Recorded yesterday.
"Sloane, if you're hearing this, it means you've finally come home. Don't trust the man in the room with you. He didn't save you from the fire—he's the reason I had to start it."