Chapter 270
She walked over to the puddle and picked up the soggy, ruined sandwich. The mud oozed between her fingers. She carried it to the trash can and dropped it in. Then she retrieved her empty lunchbox, sat back down on the bench, and opened her backpack. She pulled out a small spiral-bound notebook, took a deep breath — counting to four — and picked up her pencil.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…
She wrote the Fibonacci sequence. She focused on the numbers. Numbers didn’t lie. Numbers didn’t care who your father was. Numbers were safe.
Thirty minutes later, across the city, Isolde sat in a temporary office cubicle at Orbital Systems, staring at her phone.
A notification from the St. Jude’s parent portal appeared on the screen.
𝖩оi𝗇 о𝘂r с𝘰𝘮m𝘂𝗇𝘪𝗍у 𝗼𝗻 gа𝘭ո𝗼𝘃el𝘀.с𝗈𝗆
Incident Report: Lunchtime Spill. Status: Resolved.
Isolde frowned and immediately tapped the call button.
“St. Jude’s Academy, how may I direct your call?”
“This is Isolde Carson. I received a notification about Effie.”
“Oh, Mrs. Lancaster — sorry, Ms. Carson.” Ms. Gable’s voice came on the line a moment later, sugary sweet and coated in artificial concern. “It was nothing, really. Effie dropped her lunch in a puddle. She was a bit… emotional about it. But Kaiden was so sweet — he tried to help her clean it up.”
Isolde’s hand tightened around her phone until her knuckles turned white.
She knew Effie. Effie had the dexterity of a surgeon. She didn’t just drop things. And Kaiden helping? That was a statistical impossibility.
“Did anyone see her drop it?” Isolde asked, her voice low.
“Well, no,” Ms. Gable stammered. “But Kaiden said—”
“Kaiden said,” Isolde repeated. The venom in her tone made the line crackle. “Thank you, Ms. Gable. I understand perfectly.”
Isolde hung up.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t throw the phone. She stared at the blank monitor in front of her.
The school was protecting the bully because of his last name. They were gaslighting her five-year-old daughter because the Lancaster money paid their salaries.
Isolde picked up a pen and pressed its tip into the notepad on her desk until the metal point snapped.
“I can’t just be right,” she whispered to the empty room. “I have to be powerful. I have to be so powerful that they are terrified to lie to me.”
She looked at the clock. 2:00 PM.
One hour until her meeting with Sterling Stone.
She stood up and smoothed her blazer. She wasn’t going to that meeting to ask for a partnership anymore. She was going to demand an empire.
Isolde walked into Arland Roth’s executive office at SkyLine Technologies.
The room was glass and chrome, overlooking the Hudson River — the kind of office that screamed power, but today it felt like a cage.
Arland was on the phone, pacing. When he saw her, he hung up immediately.
“You’re early,” Arland said. “The meeting with Sterling isn’t for forty minutes.”
Isolde didn’t sit down. She walked to his desk and placed a thick blue folder on the polished surface.
“What is this?” Arland asked, eyeing the file.
“Restructuring,” Isolde said. “Carson Dynamics needs to decouple from SkyLine’s support infrastructure. I’ve initiated the process to transition our legal representation to a specialized firm focusing on intellectual property, independent of your general counsel. I need dedicated expertise for our unique challenges.”
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