We give each other the minimum daylight requires and the maximum we will accept at night.
We sleep in the same bed, tangled and careful. He wakes me by mapping my spine like a ledger. He is gentler than the bond makes him sound. That gentleness feels like a concession I can accept without drowning.
Before sunrise steals the city's anonymity, I leave to handle the day—investor calls, counsel meetings, a planned press release that frames the consortium as governance innovation. I move through the building like a woman in modern armor. The C-suite runs like clockwork; Miles, my COO, is two steps ahead as always—breezy, competent, the kind of man who smiles at risk and treats it like a spreadsheet.
At the secure garage his car waits: armored SUV, vetted driver, temporary escort. The garage has biometric gates and human guard rotations; we've run emergency drills since the blackout. I watch Miles slip into the back. He waves. The cameras track his shadow out the door.
Hours later the message arrives.
It blows open everything we thought we had shored up.
My phone buzzes during a video call—one red-dot notification that should be nothing. I glance down and my stomach drops into the same hollow the mate-bond leaves when curiosity curdles into alarm.
A single-frame clip. Fifty seconds. Miles bound in the seat of an SUV. The interior filmed from the passenger side; the edges blurred, his face lit by strobing light as if someone walks past a storefront at night. Outside the window an overhead sign reads the garage name. The driver—our vetted driver—is not visible.
Text overlay: We have him. You have until dawn. Sign the transfer and he walks. Sign as instructed. No police. No tricks.
My thumbs move before my brain does. I call the garage dispatch. Static. I call security—voicemail. I call Miles. Straight to voicemail.
I end the call with a tidy excuse. I don't notice how my hands tremble.
I run. The city feels like a map with a hole punched through it. The gate at the garage opens for me—automatically, on my badge. The security desk looks ordinary; the guard's eyes are hollow. The CCTV wall is a mosaic of familiar angles until a long black bar of dead feed crawls across the monitor where the SUV route should be.
Someone has timed a blackout. Someone has looped feed. Someone knows which cameras to kill.
My mind flips to annexes, to runes, to the wax seal in my binder. The rival's fingerprints are everywhere: ritual sophistication braided to corporate reach. The ransom message's font is clean, surgical. The pronouns—they use my first name as if we've been negotiating. As if they know how I make decisions.
I watch the video again. Miles's jaw works. He swallows. He looks at the camera, and then, as if to give me something to hold onto, he manages a crooked half-smile.
"V," he says. "Sign. Get it done."
I am sitting on the cold lobby floor when the security chief bursts in, breathless, eyes wide and guilty.
"Miss Park—" he starts.
"How?" I demand, voice thin. "How was he taken from a secure car park?"
He stammers a technical answer about cloned transponders, an unauthorized valet badge, a truck that entered the loadingbay with forged manifests. He mentions a five-minute window and a smoke diversion.
My mouth tastes of iron.
The ransom pings again. A file attached: a photo of the driver's ID, wire instructions to a shell account flagged for laundering. The last line is pure cold leverage: Sign and we release him. Do not involve law enforcement.
My thumb hovers over the screen as if it will ink a new fate.
I think of Lucien, of the wolf and crown pressed into an annex I have but did not publicize. I think of the clause I refused.
Dawn is still hours away. The clock becomes a cruel metronome.
I have to choose.
6
VIVIAN PARK
They brought the first vote to a knife’s edge at ten-fifty-nine. I could see it in the faces—three milliseconds of hesitation, a thumb half curled over a screen. I smelled it before I heard it: stale coffee and a faint chemical tang from someone’s cologne, that exact cocktail of nervousness that precedes a swing.
“Now,” I said.
