Chapter 2 - The Fire in the Tower
I stayed until Gabriel fell asleep in the white wicker bassinet beside Carolina's bed.
I wanted to stay the night. Every primal instinct screaming inside my chest demanded that I barricade the apartment door, sleep on the floorboards, and guard them with my life. But Carolina was a ghost of herself—pale, shaking with exhaustion, her breasts leaking milk through her faded shirt, her eyes swollen.
"Go," she had told me, her hand resting on the bassinet rim like an iron lock. "If you stay here tonight, Lucian, I will lose what little mind I have left. Go deal with the monsters in your house. Don't bring them to mine."
I left my personal platinum card on the kitchen counter. When she saw it, she picked it up and dropped it into the kitchen trash can without blinking.
"I don't want your blood money," she said quietly. "If you want to help your son, Lucian, figure out what kind of man you are. Because right now, you're just Eleanor's errand boy with a CEO title."
That sting stayed with me during the drive across the Brooklyn Bridge.
By five o'clock in the morning, the rain had turned into a thick, suffocating fog that swallowed the tops of the Manhattan skyscrapers. Hayes Tower rose out of the mist like an obsidian blade, seventy stories of black glass and polished steel that I had spent eighty hours a week constructing, managing, and worshiping.
I walked through the lobby at five-fifteen. The night security team scrambled to their feet, startled to see the founder arriving before dawn without an entourage, wearing yesterday’s rain-wrinkled suit and no tie.
"Mr. Hayes! Good morning, sir," the lead guard stammered. "We didn't expect you until—"
"Unlock the private elevator," I said. My voice was level, dead, terrifying in its stillness. "And call IT. I want the security logs for the executive mailroom for the entire month of March pulled and loaded onto my desk in twenty minutes."
"Yes, sir. Right away."
The elevator ride to the sixty-fourth floor took forty-two seconds. Forty-two seconds of watching my reflection in the polished bronze mirror. I looked like a stranger: dark circles under bloodshot eyes, stubble on my jaw, a smudge of dried baby formula on the cuff of my bespoke shirt.
When the elevator doors dinged open, the floor was silent. The smell of expensive leather, floor wax, and filtered air greeted me. This was the empire I had chosen over Sunday breakfasts with Carolina. This was the cathedral of productivity where I had told my wife that starting a family was "premature."
I went directly to Evelyn's desk outside my office. Evelyn was fifty-two years old, had been my administrative gatekeeper for eight years, and was paid a quarter of a million dollars annually to be infallible.
I sat behind my massive mahogany desk, placed the red-stamped envelope directly in the center of the leather blotter, and waited.
At six-thirty, the floor began to wake up. At six-forty-five, I heard the familiar, rhythmic clicking of Evelyn's sensible heels approaching down the hallway.
She walked into my office holding a fresh cup of black roast coffee and an iPad. "Good morning, Lucian, you're in exceptionally early—"
She stopped dead.
Her eyes flicked to my unkempt clothes, then down to the desk. When her gaze landed on the envelope with the red return-to-sender stamp, the color drained from her face so completely that her skin matched her pearl necklace.
"Lucian..." she whispered, dropping her hands to her sides.
"Sit down, Evelyn," I said.
She didn't move. "I... I can explain."
"Sit. Down."
She sank into one of the Italian leather armchairs across from me, her knuckles white around her tablet.
"Eight months ago, my ex-wife brought this envelope to the lobby," I said, leaning forward. Every word was measured, precise, like scalpel cuts. "She begged security to send it to my office. It contained an ultrasound of my firstborn son. My name is on the front. Your handwriting is on the back."
Evelyn swallowed hard. A bead of sweat formed at her hairline. "Lucian, you have to understand the pressure we were under. The merger with Vance Holdings was on the razor's edge. Marcus Vance was threatening to walk if there was any personal scandal or litigation that could alter the equity split. Your mother—"
"Did my mother tell you to reject mail addressed to the Chief Executive Officer?"
"She told me that Carolina was attempting to derail the settlement!" Evelyn's voice cracked, rising into a panic. "She told me that Carolina was faking a pregnancy to extract another twenty million dollars out of you! Eleanor said that if you saw that letter, you would get sentimental, you would stall the merger, you would ruin five years of planning!"
"So you took an envelope addressed to me, marked it rejected, and sent it back to a pregnant woman who had no one else in this city?"
"I was following orders from the Executive Vice President!"
"I am the Chief Executive Officer!" I slammed my open palm against the desk. The sound cracked through the office like a gunshot. Evelyn flinched violently, tears springing to her eyes. "I own sixty-two percent of voting shares in this firm! My mother works at my discretion! You work at my discretion!"
The glass door to my office swung open with a smooth, heavy click.
"That's enough, Lucian."
The voice was cool, cultured, and devoid of any human warmth.
Eleanor Hayes stood in the doorway. She was sixty-one, impeccably styled in a charcoal Chanel suit, her silver-streaked hair pulled into an immaculate chignon, not a single hair out of place. She held a black leather portfolio beneath her arm.
She looked at Evelyn without an ounce of pity. "Evelyn, leave us. Wait in the conference room."
Evelyn practically sprinted out of the room, closing the door behind her with trembling hands.
Eleanor walked in, unbuttoning her jacket, and took the seat Evelyn had just vacated. She crossed her long legs, glanced at the envelope on the desk, and then met my gaze with cold, unflinching disdain.
"You're making a scene in front of the support staff," Eleanor said smoothly. "That is unbecoming of a Hayes. Pull yourself together."
"You knew," I whispered.
May you like
"Of course I knew," Eleanor replied, not batting an eyelash. "I intercepted the letter. I dictated the response. And if given the chance, I would do it again ten times over."
***
