Gavin
The ice in my whiskey has melted. I stare into the amber liquid, but I don’t see the bottom of the glass. I see her eyes. Sylvie Crane.
I came to that party to watch lambs celebrate their own slaughter. The Crane-Croft merger is a mess of ego and bad contracts, a fat, slow-moving target I’ve been waiting to bleed. I expected Marcus Crane to be a peacock, which he was. I expected Marin Croft to be a snake, which she is. I expected Sylvie Crane to be the decorative centerpiece. The pretty, polished link holding the whole fragile thing together.
She was not a centerpiece. She was a blade.
The door to my penthouse office clicks open. Anya stands there, her tablet glowing in the dim light. She is the most ruthlessly efficient person I know.
“The quarterly reports are collated,” she says, her voice crisp. “Hong Kong is on the line about the shipping lane dispute.”
“Tell Hong Kong to wait,” I say, not looking up from my glass. “I have a new priority.”
She waits. That’s Anya’s gift. Silence that demands to be filled.
“I want a dossier,” I say. “A complete workup. Everything you can find.”
“On whom? Another competitor?”
“On Sylvie Crane.”
Anya’s composure is a fortress, but I see the flicker. A slight hesitation before she taps on her screen.
“Sir, we have extensive files on Crane Industries and the Croft family. Her public profile is attached to those. Trust fund beneficiary, art history degree, standard socialite engagements…”
“I’m not interested in the standard,” I interrupt, finally looking at her. “I want what’s not in the file. I want to know what happened to her.”
“Happened to her? I’m not aware of any incident.”
“That’s the point.” I lean forward, placing the glass on my desk. The condensation leaves a perfect, wet circle on the polished black wood. “The woman I spoke to tonight was not a standard socialite. There was a profound… resolve. A sadness so deep it looked like armor. People aren’t born with eyes like that. They’re forged.”
Anya raises an eyebrow. It’s her version of a gasp.
“This sounds personal, Gavin.”
She only uses my first name when she thinks I’m about to make a very expensive mistake.
“It’s strategic,” I counter. “She knew about the tax loophole in the EU trade agreement. Not just knew about it, she understood its exact implications for the renewables market. Our analytics department took three weeks to model that scenario. She laid it out in ninety seconds.”
“Perhaps she was coached,” Anya suggests. “A line fed to her by her father to impress you.”
I shake my head. “No. This wasn’t a script. It was instinct. She looked me in the eye and told me the foundation of her own engagement had cracks. On the night of the party.”
The silence returns. This time, Anya is the one processing.
“What exactly do you want me to look for?” she asks, her tone shifting back to pure business.
“Everything. Start from a month ago and work forward. Any unusual activity. Hospital visits, even minor ones. Cancelled appointments. Strange financial transactions. Did she fire a driver? Hire new staff? Change her perfume?”
“Her perfume?”
“A change in habit, no matter how small, can signal a change in mindset. I want to know what triggered her transformation.”
“Transformation,” Anya repeats, the word clinical and skeptical on her tongue.
“She was supposed to be a lamb,” I say, more to myself than to her. “But I looked into her eyes and saw a wolf who was tired of wearing fleece.”
I stand and walk to the floor-to-ceiling window. The city is a galaxy of lights spread out below me, a kingdom of glass and steel. My kingdom.
“I attended that party tonight expecting to size up the weak link in the Crane empire,” I say, watching the endless stream of headlights on the freeway. “Instead, I found a queen in hiding.”
“A queen without an army is just a target,” Anya points out, her pragmatism a cold splash of water.
“Maybe.” I turn back to face her. “Or maybe she’s looking for one.”
Her fingers fly across her tablet. I know she’s already setting the wheels in motion, dispatching the quiet, ferociously competent people on my payroll who can find anything, for a price.
“There is one flag from last night,” she says, her eyes scanning the screen. “A social media whisper. Apparently, she had a rather public confrontation with Marcus Crane and Marin Croft.”
“Define ‘confrontation’.”
“Sources are vague. Only that she was ‘cold’ and that she made Marin Croft cry.”
Making Marin Croft cry is an achievement. The woman is forged from ambition and Botox. It would be like getting a statue to weep.
“Interesting,” I murmur. “The first move in a game no one else knows she’s playing.”
“What is the end goal here, sir? Do you want leverage for a hostile takeover? Are we disrupting the merger?”
I think about her question. It’s the logical one. The one my board of directors would ask. But the truth is something else, something I can’t quite articulate, even to myself.
It’s the feeling I had when she walked away from me on that terrace. A sense that I had just met a force of nature. It’s the inexplicable urge to see what she does next.
“The goal,” I say slowly, “is to understand. I want to know what war she is preparing to fight.”
“And then?” Anya presses.
I meet her gaze, my own reflection a faint ghost in the window beside me.
“And then I’m going to decide which side I want to be on when it begins.”
She nods, a silent acknowledgment of an order that is far outside the normal bounds of corporate espionage. She turns to leave.
“Anya,” I say, stopping her at the door.
She turns back.
“Put our acquisition bid for the Kenner-Lyons portfolio on hold.”
Now she looks truly shocked. “Sir? We’re set to close in forty-eight hours. It’s a guaranteed twenty percent return.”
“Sylvie Crane’s fiancé is about to walk his company off a cliff to acquire it,” I say, repeating the insight she had given me, now filtered through my own certainty. “Crane Industries is making a play for it.”
“All the more reason for us to secure it first.”
“No. Let him have it.”
I see the calculations running behind her eyes. Letting a rival acquire a valuable asset makes no sense. Unless the asset isn’t valuable at all. Unless it’s a trap.
“You believe her analysis of the market is that accurate,” she states. It’s not a question.
“I believe,” I say, turning back to the city, “that she knows something no one else does. Pull the file. I want to see everything you have by morning.”
The door clicks shut, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the silent, glittering city.
I can’t get the image of her out of my head. Standing there in that severe black dress, a storm hiding in plain sight. She is on the precipice of something. A rebellion. A revolution. A war.
And for reasons I don’t yet understand, I want her to win.
