She woke up to nothing. That was the point.
I didn’t want a reaction. I wanted an absence. A void so complete it would make her question whether she’d ever existed in this space at all.
No clothes. No laptop. No trace of her scent in the sheets.
Even the books she never read but always kept on the nightstand were gone. All that remained was the letter. My signature, exact. No flourish. Just surgical precision.
Effective immediately. Breach of contract. Violation of trust.
The words looked impersonal, yet they weren’t. I’d written them myself.
Because trust, in my world, wasn’t emotional. It was currency. And someone had burned mine to the ground.
I watched her from the surveillance feed as she stood there, stunned. She said something—mouthed it, maybe cursed me out. Probably deserved it. But I didn’t turn on the audio.
I already knew the soundtrack.
Shock. Betrayal. Rage. Grief.
She would check for bruises, even though I’d made damn sure there weren’t any.
I didn’t hurt her. I restrained her. There’s a difference. One I’d respected—until the moment I found out she was the only one who knew about the tapes.
She said she didn’t leak them. I didn’t believe her.
Not because the logic tracked. It didn’t. The breach was too targeted, too exact. But belief had nothing to do with evidence. It had to do with betrayal.
And when I looked at her last night—bound, eyes wide, lips parted like she couldn’t tell if she was more furious or turned on—I saw something I wasn’t ready to see:
Fear.
And that was the moment I snapped. Because if she was guilty, I had to end it. And if she wasn’t… Then I’d just destroyed the only thing in my world that felt real.
I walked down the corridor, past the executive suite, past Sia’s office. She didn’t look at me.
Good. I wasn’t in the mood to be pitied by the woman who’d spent fifteen years trying to be what Floris became in fifteen weeks.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Encrypted ping. Not from the internal network. That was my second mistake—checking it.
Video file. Anonymous sender.
I ran a trace, got nothing. Whoever sent this was good. Not better than me, but good enough to cover their tracks for now.
I opened it and the bottom dropped out of my fucking world.
Jake Middleton. The boy I’d paid to keep alive. Not for charity. Not for redemption. For her.
He was on the floor of his hospital room. Pale. Eyes fluttering. Three masked figures stood above him in surgical scrubs, but their posture was all wrong.
They weren’t there to help. They were there to send a message. “Your sister chose the wrong enemy.”
My blood went still.
This wasn’t Floris. This wasn’t a betrayal. This was war.
Jake coughed—blood. Barely conscious.
“Floris,” he rasped. “I don’t know what you did, but they say…” another cough, brutal, wet “…you have twenty-four hours to fix it or they’re taking me off all my meds.”
The screen went black and for the first time in years, I didn’t feel in control. I felt rage.
Not hot and irrational. Cold. Surgical. The kind that drives men to destroy entire empires just to dig out the single termite that started the collapse.
I leaned forward and tapped the screen again. Rewatched it. Paused on each frame.
Studied gait, height, angle of approach. Looked for clues in the hospital badge. Oxygen tank placement. Even the camera shake.
Someone had orchestrated this. Someone with access to my surveillance protocol, my treatment records, my internal chain-of-command. And they wanted me to think she was the breach.
They wanted me to gut her myself.
I stood, feeling how my hands didn’t tremble. They never did when I was ready to ruin someone. The real leak was still out there.
Someone who knew how close she’d gotten. Someone who’d been watching us burn from the inside—and poured gasoline when we got too close to the truth.
And I? I’d played right into their hands.
I opened my encrypted server, keyed in the kill switch for non-essentials, and pinged the one person still loyal enough to follow a command without question.
“Track every asset who’s touched the medical fund in the last six weeks. Cross-reference with Red Room access logs and top-tier decryption keys. I want them unmasked. I want them alive.”
I paused. Then added: “But if they touched the boy—bury them.”
I looked up at the surveillance feed.
Floris was back at her desk. Hair pulled tight, jaw clenched, typing with the kind of fury that looked an awful lot like mine.
Not broken. Focused. And I knew that look.
She wasn’t running. She was about to burn down whoever had come after her family.
Good.
We could build our revenge together. Just as soon as I earned the right to step back into the fire with her.
And I would. Because no one got to take Floris Middleton from me.