The sterile tang of glass cleaner hangs in the air, clashing with the faint trace of ice and rubber wafting up from below. I swivel back to my computer and start typing with sharp, deliberate keystrokes. My marketing brain shifts into crisis mode, calculating damage control scenarios while my fingers fly across the keyboard.
Subject: Mandatory – Media Synergy & Brand Strategy Session
Attendee: Garrett Sullivan
My cursor hovers over the send button. This meeting isn't just a PR exercise. It's a gamble. My job, my promotion, and my entire reputation are riding on this. The reputation I fought tooth and nail to build, to prove I was more than just Easton's little sister who got lucky. The cold from the rink six floors below seems to creep up the back of my chair, a silentwarning against the man who could topple it all without a second thought. I ignore it and click send.
The invite vanishes into the ether. Below me, the practice rink glows under the lights, a pristine, untouched sheet of ice. Up here, my office is a command post.
You have no idea what's coming, Sullivan.
2
Sloane
The fluorescent lights in the corporate wing buzz with their usual morning aggression, casting everything in stark, surgical angles. I pace the polished marble corridor with my second coffee of the day, reciting talking points for the Sullivan meeting like incantations. The sharp, chemical scent of floor polish hangs in the air, blending with the low hum of the HVAC system—a soundtrack composed by capitalism itself.
Then I pass Vivian's office.
Something stalls my stride.
She's not typing. Not talking. Not issuing rapid-fire orders or dissecting spreadsheets with surgical precision. She's just... sitting. Perfectly still behind her glass fortress, staring at her computer screen with an expression I've never seen on her before.
Unshielded. Hollow. Almost... broken.
My marketing brain automatically catalogs the incongruity. This is the woman who dissects quarterly reports like a surgeon, who never shows anything but silk-wrapped steel. But right now, her carefully constructed armor has cracked wide open.
From my angle, I can make out what has her so transfixed: a photograph on her monitor. It shows a much youngerVivian, barely out of her twenties, standing beside a man in a Columbus Blue Jackets jersey. My mind, a veritable Rolodex of hockey lore, flips to the right card: Jake Morrison, star defenseman, early retirement, off-ice scandal that swallowed his career whole. But it's not him I'm focused on—it's her.
Her arm is looped through his, but her body leans subtly away. No smile. Her expression is taut, brittle, eyes narrowed in a way that suggests possession rather than pride. It's not a snapshot of love; it's a study in control. Of someone holding too tightly, desperate not to lose whatever grip she has.
In the stillness of the present, Vivian's gaze on the image isn't wistful. It's razor-edged. Bitter. Like she's staring at a ruin she helped build and wondering whether the fire was worth it.
And beneath that bitterness: something colder. The flint-eyed calculation of a survivor who learned the hard way never to trust a falling tower—and who won't hesitate to burn someone else's village to keep her own safe.
It was the same look I'd seen on my mother's face in the months after my father left—the look of a woman who'd had her entire identity ripped away by a man and would burn down the world to never let it happen again. It wasn't just ambition; it was survival. And I suddenly, inexplicably, felt like a threat.
The moment holds until she senses me.
Her head snaps up. Eyes lock with mine through the glass. The photo vanishes with a single, sharp click.
Vivian rises and opens her office door, her voice cutting through the corporate quiet.
"Don't you have a multi-million-dollar asset to babysit, McKenzie? Or are you planning to stand there gawking all day?"
The venom in her tone is disproportionate, personal in a way that makes my skin crawl. I hurry toward my office, filing away this moment as another variable in the puzzle that is Vivian—one I don't yet understand, but that feels important.
Dangerous.
Human.
I check my laptop for the third time in five minutes. 2:27 p.m.
Garrett Sullivan is now twenty-seven minutes late to a mandatory meeting.
The sixth-floor conference room is a tomb—high-gloss mahogany table, gleaming glass walls, and one solitary chair facing mine like a challenge. My first slide waits frozen on the screen: "Media Synergy & Brand Strategy." An empty seat stares back at me, mocking.
My phone is silent. No texts. No calls. No lies about practice running long or last-minute emergencies. Just nothing.
