Chapter 1061
The words had barely left Skye’s lips in the silence of her office when the elevator alarms began to scream. They did come. Dominic Thorne’s mercenaries breached the perimeter less than twenty minutes later, expecting a corporate boardroom full of soft executives. Instead, they walked into a meat grinder. The battle was short, brutal, and fought in the corridors of power with suppressed gunfire and the shattering of tempered glass. A violent storm that raged through the night—but now, as dawn threatened to break, the thunder had passed.
The air in the conference room on the top floor of Oracle Holdings still smelled of ozone, cordite, and iron—a metallic tang that coated the back of Skye Sterling’s throat. The floor-to-ceiling windows offered a panoramic view of Sea City, a sprawling grid of lights that looked deceptively peaceful from this height. Inside, however, the room was a wreckage of shattered glass and overturned furniture.
Skye sat at the head of the long mahogany table. She wasn’t trembling. She had buried that version of herself in the ashes of the old Vance Estate. Her hands were folded on the cool wood, her fingers resting lightly on a heavy Montblanc pen. She focused on the weight of the resin barrel against her thumb—the smooth, cold surface grounding her. Her heart beat a slow, steady rhythm against her ribs, the pulse of a woman who had looked into the abyss and refused to blink.
Dominic Thorne sat in a chair in the center of the plush Persian rug. The man who had once terrified her—the Architect who had manipulated stock markets with a snap of his fingers—looked diminished, but not broken. He had been dragged from the elevator lobby three hours ago, his tactical team neutralized in the hallway. Now his wrists were bound behind his back with heavy-duty zip-ties, but his posture remained defiantly upright. A trickle of fresh blood ran from the corner of his mouth, dripping onto his pristine white collar—the only sign of the struggle that had preceded this negotiation.
Alistair Thorne stood by the window, leaning against the glass with the casual ease of a man waiting for a taxi rather than deciding his brother’s fate. He held a folding knife in his right hand. Flip. Click. The blade extended, catching the recessed overhead lighting. Flip. Click. It retracted. The sound was rhythmic, hypnotic, and promising of violence.
Victoria Hayes, Skye’s newly appointed Chief Strategy Officer, stood near the wet bar, tapping on a tablet. She looked unbothered by the blood—a testament to her own ruthless climb to the top.
“Finish it, Alistair,” Victoria said, her voice crisp. “He is a liability. The board will not tolerate a loose cannon who knows where the bodies are buried. Literally.”
Dominic lifted his head. His left eye was bruising, but the right one burned with a toxic mix of hatred and intelligence. “Do it, little brother,” he rasped, the words wet with blood. “Prove you are nothing but a butcher. Or are you waiting for permission from your handler?” He jerked his chin toward Skye.
Alistair pushed himself off the window ledge. The movement was fluid, predatory. He walked toward Dominic, his footsteps silent on the thick carpet. The air in the room seemed to vanish, sucked into the vacuum of his presence.