Chapter 2 - The Taste of Champagne and Blood
The rain swept across Lake Shore Drive in silver sheets, drumming against the reinforced glass of Julian Seo’s Maybach. Inside the leather-lined cabin, the sound was reduced to a soft, rhythmic patter, insulated from the sirens and the grit of the midnight city.
Nia sat with her head resting back against the headrest, her eyes closed. The adrenaline that had carried her through the ballroom doors was beginning to recede, leaving behind an ache she had carried in her bones for thirty-six months.
A warm hand slid over hers, fingers interlacing with hers. Nia didn’t pull away.
“Are you alright?” Julian asked. The lethal edge from the Halston ballroom was gone. In the dim amber glow of the car’s interior, his features looked softer, younger, though the scar running along his left jawline—a remnant of an ambush in Incheon when he was twenty-two—remained a permanent reminder of who he was.
“I’m better than alright,” Nia murmured, opening her eyes. She looked out at the lights of Navy Pier blurring through the downpour. “I spent three years imagining that moment. I thought I would scream. I thought I would throw something at him. But when I saw him standing there, Julian… he looked small. He looked like an empty glass.”
Julian smiled faintly, his thumb tracing the curve of her knuckle. “That’s because he is an empty glass, Nia. Men like Ethan Cole don't generate light; they reflect it from the people they consume. He consumed you until your reserves were gone, and then he found another woman with a more prestigious family crest to reflect off of next.”
Nia let out a soft, dry laugh. “Claire Whitmore looked like she wanted to evaporate.”
“Claire Whitmore’s family has been old-money royalty in Illinois since the Civil War,” Julian said, his voice turning analytical. “Her father, Senator Thomas Whitmore, didn't back Ethan’s cyber defense bill out of charity. He backed it because Ethan promised him twenty million in options before the Series E round. Now that the underlying intellectual property is under federal scrutiny, the Senator will cut Ethan loose before sunrise. Old money does not tolerate public embarrassment.”
Nia looked at their joined hands. “You played a very dangerous card back there, Julian. Mentioning Mercy Hospital. The assignment waiver.”
Julian’s expression tightened, the playful warmth receding behind a wall of granite. “I don't play cards, Nia. I collect assets, and I eliminate liabilities. What he did to you in that hospital wasn't business. It wasn't even a standard betrayal. It was predatory.”
Nia looked away, the memory lunging at her from the dark corners of her mind.
*Three years ago.*
The sterile smell of floor wax and antiseptic. The steady, terrifying beep of the heart monitor. She had been twenty-nine, her body torn apart by an emergency D&C after a pregnancy that had failed at fourteen weeks. Her mother had passed away only six weeks before that from breast cancer. Nia had been drowning in grief, her mind shattered by high doses of post-operative narcotics.
Ethan had walked into her room with a leather briefcase and three cups of lukewarm coffee.
*“Baby, we need to sign these transfer forms for the Series A funding,”* he had said, brushing a curl from her forehead with a hand that felt dry and nervous. *“The venture partners at Greylock won't release the ten million unless the organizational structure is streamlined. It’s just an administrative formality. A corporate shielding maneuver so you don't carry personal liability if the deployment fails.”*
She had trusted him. She had loved him so deeply that she had given him the code she’d spent seven years developing at MIT, the algorithms she’d written by hand in spiral notebooks while sitting in cheap laundromats. She had signed where his finger pointed.
Three weeks later, she came home to their Lincoln Park townhouse to find the locks changed, two private security guards standing on the porch, and a courier holding an envelope containing divorce papers and a non-disclosure agreement with a liquidated damages clause of five million dollars.
*“You’re unstable, Nia,”* Ethan had told her through the half-opened window of his BMW outside the courthouse. *“Everyone knows you had a breakdown after your mother died. Take the three-hundred-thousand-dollar settlement and start over in Atlanta. Don’t ruin your life trying to claim something you don't have the resources to defend.”*
She hadn't gone to Atlanta.
She had moved into a small garden apartment in Hyde Park. She had eaten instant ramen and worked three consulting jobs under an assumed LLC name. And then, fourteen months ago, an encrypted message had appeared on her terminal, bypassing her seven-layer firewall with effortless elegance.
*‘Your Black Dahlia algorithm has a mathematical elegance I haven't seen since my days at Stanford,’* the message had read. *‘Ethan Cole is using it to secure maritime communications for my shipping lines. He’s charging me thirty million a year for work he doesn't understand. Come have dinner with me at the Peninsula. Let’s talk about restitution.’*
That had been her introduction to Julian Seo.
“Nia?” Julian’s voice brought her back to the present.
She blinked, turning her face toward him. “I’m here.”
“He’s going to strike back tonight,” Julian said calmly. “Ethan is reckless when he's terrified. He knows that if the DHS contract collapses, Cole Cyber’s debt-to-equity ratio will trigger immediate margin calls from his lenders. He won't just call his lawyers. He has friends in private security—former contractors who handle messy corporate exits.”
Nia raised an eyebrow. “You think he’ll try to intimidate me?”
Julian let out a cold, humorless chuckle. The car slowed, turning through the iron gates of a private estate overlooking the lake in Kenwood—a secluded fortress of limestone, surrounded by twelve-foot walls and mature oaks that screened the grounds from the street.
“He might try,” Julian said, his eyes glinting in the dark. “Which is why you are not staying in Hyde Park tonight. You are staying with me.”
“Julian—”
“It’s not a request, Nia,” he said, his voice dropping into that quiet, unbreakable tone that brooked no argument. “Until the board meeting on Wednesday, you are the most valuable target in this city. Ethan’s life’s work is held hostage by your signature. I will not leave you in an apartment building with an exterior fire escape and an unarmed doorman.”
The Maybach came to a halt under a massive stone porte-cochère. Two men in black suits immediately opened the doors, holding large umbrellas to shield them from the storm.
Nia stepped out, her crimson gown rustling against the wet stone. She looked up at the towering mansion—a place whispered about in Chicago’s political circles as the private redoubt of the Seo family, where three generations of power had been brokered behind closed doors.
She looked at Julian, who stood beside her, waiting, offering his arm once again.
“Wednesday is going to be a bloodbath,” she said quietly.
Julian looked down at her, his eyes steady, unyielding, and filled with a fierce, intoxicating certainty.
May you like
“No, Nia,” he replied, leading her inside through the heavy oak doors. “A bloodbath implies both sides have a chance to fight. Wednesday is an execution.”
***
