Rhys
The whiskey is wasted on me. The twenty five year old single malt tastes like ash in my mouth. I stare at the bank of monitors on my office wall. Each screen shows a different angle of the same stretch of road. Grainy security footage from a traffic camera. A digital reconstruction of the crash. A satellite overlay.
Data. It’s all just data until you give it meaning.
My head of security, Sterling, stands silently by the door. He’s been my shadow for fifteen years. He has the patience of a glacier and the morals of a cobra. Perfect for the job.
“The driver’s name is Frank Miller,” Sterling says, his voice a gravelly monotone. “Clean record. Until six months ago. A series of large, untraceable cash deposits into an offshore account. Totalling two hundred fifty thousand dollars.”
“Enough to make a man’s brakes fail on command,” I say, not looking away from the screens. I take a sip of the whiskey. It still tastes like nothing.
“The truck was reported stolen an hour before the crash,” Sterling continues. “We found it abandoned two miles from the site. Wiped clean.”
“Amateurs,” I mutter.
“No. Professionals who want to look like amateurs. The police report is exactly what you’d expect. Freak accident. Case closed.”
Of course it is. Money makes everything neat. Everything clean. I watch the footage again. The digital rendering of her black sedan. The truck. The impact. A clean, geometric violence. The only thing missing is the sound. The shriek of metal, the explosion of glass. I remember the sound.
I was there.
The memory is branded into my mind, sharp and cold. The rain had been a fine mist, slicking the roads, blurring the city lights into a watercolor smear. I was two cars behind her. I recognized the lines of her custom Salient V12. Of course she drove a Salient. Understated. Brutally powerful. Just like her.
I was thinking about our last board meeting. The way she’d dismantled my pitch for the telecom merger. She did it with a surgeon’s precision and a polite smile that was more unnerving than any threat. I felt a familiar sting of irritation. And a deeper, more satisfying thrum of respect. She was the only one who could do it. The only one who made the game worth playing.
Then I saw the truck. It was moving too fast for the conditions. Its approach was all wrong. It wasn’t drifting or skidding. Its movements were deliberate. Predatory.
It swerved. A single, clean, murderous motion.
Time seemed to stretch. I saw the impact before I heard it. Her car crumpled like a paper cup. The sound was a physical blow, a sickening crunch that echoed in the cavern of the street. Everything stopped.
My training took over. Assess the threat. Analyze the variables. But my hands just gripped the steering wheel, my knuckles white. For a single, frozen moment, I was not a CEO. I was not a rival. I was just a man watching the unthinkable happen.
Then I saw the second detail. The one that turned a tragedy into a conspiracy. The truck driver didn’t look forward. He didn’t look back at the devastation he’d caused. His head turned to the side, toward a dark sedan that had been pacing Ivy’s car for the last three blocks. A silver Audi.
The driver of the Audi was a silhouette, but I didn't need to see his face. I knew that car. I’d seen it parked in Ivy’s private garage. I’d seen Julian Croft step out of it at a dozen different charity galas, his arm possessively around her waist.
The two drivers exchanged a look. It was brief. A nod. A confirmation. A payment delivered and a job completed.
Then the Audi accelerated, peeling away into the night before the first sirens began to wail.
A cold, clean rage settled over me. It was so pure it felt like a state of grace. It wasn’t the rage of a competitor whose rival had been removed from the board. It was the rage of a mathematician who sees a beautiful equation defaced with filth.
Ivy Vance is a force of nature. She builds things. She creates. Julian Croft is a parasite. A decorative, smiling leech who attaches himself to brilliance because he has none of his own. I’ve watched him for years. The way he speaks for her at parties. The way he touches her, a constant assertion of ownership. The way he patronizes her genius, calling her ‘my brilliant girl’ with a smile that never reached his dead eyes.
I am her rival. I want to defeat her. I want to stand on the wreckage of her latest project, look her in the eye, and see her get back up to fight me again. Because she is my only equal.
Julian Croft wants to own her. And what he can’t own, he breaks.
“Sir?” Sterling’s voice pulls me back to the present. Back to my silent office, fifty floors above the city.
“The car,” I say. “The silver Audi. I want to know where it is now.”
“In the garage of Ms. Vance’s penthouse. Croft drove it there this morning.”
“Of course he did.” The audacity is breathtaking. The murder weapon is parked in the victim’s own home.
I remember walking into that hospital room. The reek of antiseptic and despair. Julian was there, playing the part of the devoted lover. He was good. I’ll give him that. His performance was flawless.
Then I saw her. Small. Pale against the white sheets. A furious, brilliant mind temporarily caged in a broken body. The sight of her like that… it was wrong. A violation.
I told her about the truck. The maintenance records. I had to give her something. A loose thread. I know how her mind works. Give her a thread, and she’ll unravel the whole damn tapestry. I needed to see if the fighter was still there, behind the pain and the confusion.
I saw it. A flicker in her eyes. The old fire. Julian postured and puffed out his chest like a frightened bird, but she was listening. I knew she was. He called me a conspiracy theorist. He had no idea I was an unwanted witness.
I turn away from the monitors. The digital crash plays on a loop, a silent, repeating nightmare.
“What are your orders, sir?” Sterling asks. He knows this isn’t just business. Not anymore.
I pick up the glass of whiskey and drain it in one swallow. The burn is welcome. It’s real.
“We’re done watching,” I say, my voice low and hard. “I want full surveillance on Julian Croft. Physical and electronic. I want a team inside Vance Industries. People loyal to her, not to him. Find them.”
“That will be difficult without Ms. Vance’s knowledge.”
“Then be discreet,” I snap. “His plan, whatever it is, is already in motion. He thinks she’s weak. He thinks he’s won. We know better.”
I walk to the window and look out at the city. Her building is a shard of light in the distance. The queen is wounded, and the jackal is circling her throne.
He’s counting on her being broken. He’s counting on me being her enemy.
He’s made a fatal miscalculation on both fronts.
“One more thing, Sterling,” I say, my eyes fixed on the distant penthouse.
“Sir?”
“Put a protective detail on her. Subtle. Invisible. I don’t want her to know they’re there. But if anyone, and I mean anyone, gets close to her again… make sure they don’t get a second chance.”
He nods once. “Consider it done.”
Sterling slips out of the room, leaving me alone with the silent, looping crash and the cold, clean certainty of what I have to do. The game has changed. This isn't about market share anymore. This is about justice. My own version of it.
And I will not let that parasite win.
