“You don’t have property in my building,” Chloe whispered, leaning close to my face. She reached out and cruelly pressed her thumb directly into the red slap mark still burning on my cheek. I winced. “Lock her in the basement storage closet. Keep her there until the press conference is over tomorrow. If she ruins my perfect day, I’ll ruin her life.”
Dave dragged me out of the server room by my arm. As I stumbled down the hallway, I felt the heavy weight of the encrypted Vance phone still perfectly hidden against my ankle in my boot.
The burner was gone, and the pictures with it. But I had the server files. I had everything I needed.
And tomorrow, I was going to bury her.
The basement storage closet was pitch black, freezing cold, and smelled intensely of industrial bleach. Dave had shoved me inside just after midnight, locking the heavy deadbolt from the outside without a word.
I spent the next fourteen hours sitting on a plastic bucket in the dark.
I wasn't terrified. I was calculating.
Through the thin drywall, I could hear the vibrations of the building waking up above me. The muffled thumps of heavy equipment being moved. The frantic shouting of event coordinators. As the morning turned into early afternoon, the noise shifted to the low, thrumming bass of pop music and the unmistakable hum of a massive crowd.
The press conference had begun. Hundreds of journalists, influencers, and industry titans were currently filing into the ground floor, taking their seats in the crystal chairs I was supposed to have set up. They were all there to witness Chloe Sterling secure the golden ticket: the exclusive Vance Retail partnership.
I reached down into my boot and pulled out my encrypted phone. The screen cast a faint blue glow in the suffocating darkness of the closet. The battery was at seventy percent.
I opened the secure messaging app and typed a rapid message to Marcus, my father’s head of security, who was waiting in a motorcade exactly three blocks away.
MIA: Situation escalated. Locked in basement storage. Room B-4. Do not breach the building yet. Wait for my signal.
MARCUS: Understood. Chairman Vance’s proxy convoy is arriving at the front loading zone now. They expect you on that stage in twenty minutes.
MIA: Have my suit ready in the east stairwell. I’ll meet you there.
I slipped the phone back into my boot and stood up. I ran my hands along the dark walls until I found the doorknob. I tested it. Solid steel, commercial grade. I wasn't breaking that.
I looked up. In the corner of the ceiling, the blue screen light had briefly illuminated a large, square ventilation grate. It was an older building, retrofitted for air conditioning. The ducts would be wide enough to crawl through, at least to the next room.
I dragged a heavy wooden shelving unit to the corner, wincing as the metal scraped against the concrete floor. I climbed to the top shelf, balancing precariously. Reaching up, I hooked my fingers through the metal slots of the vent. The screws were old and rusted. I planted my boots on the wall, grabbed the grate with both hands, and pulled with every ounce of strength I had.
With a loud screech of bending metal, the grate ripped free, showering me in decades of accumulated dust. I shoved the grate aside, pulled myself up, and squeezed into the cramped, metallic darkness of the air duct.
It was agonizingly tight. I dragged myself forward on my elbows, coughing as dust filled my lungs. I crawled for what felt like miles, though it was probably only fifty feet, following the faint slivers of light filtering up through the floor grates from the hallway below.
I reached a section of the duct that intersected with the east stairwell. Looking down through the grate, I saw Marcus.
He was a mountain of a man in a perfectly tailored dark suit, standing completely still with an earpiece in his right ear. In his left hand, he held a sleek black garment bag bearing the gold crest of Vance Retail.
I kicked the vent grate out. It clattered loudly down the concrete stairs. Marcus didn't even flinch. He simply looked up and extended a hand as I dropped from the ceiling, landing heavily on the stair landing.
I was covered in gray dust, my cheap sweater was torn at the elbow, and the red mark on my face had bruised into an ugly purple shadow.
“You look terrible, Ms. Vance,” Marcus noted in his flat, professional baritone.
“It’s been a long ninety days, Marcus,” I rasped, wiping the dirt from my eyes.
He unzipped the garment bag. Inside was my armor. A sharp, bespoke, slate-gray Armani power suit. A crisp white silk blouse. A pair of black Tom Ford stilettos.
“Your father sends his regards,” Marcus said, turning his back to give me privacy. “He said to remind you that Vance Retail does not negotiate with terrorists.”
“We’re about to do a lot more than not negotiate,” I replied, shedding the hideous gray sweater and stepping into the trousers of the suit. I buttoned the blouse and shrugged into the impeccably tailored jacket. The transformation was instantaneous. The psychological weight of Mia Harper evaporated, replaced by the crushing, absolute authority of Mia Vance.
I slipped on the stilettos, my posture straightening. I pulled my hair out of the messy elastic and used a brush from Marcus’s kit to smooth it back into a sharp, severe chignon.
“The drive?” I asked.
Marcus handed me a small silver USB thumb drive. “All the emails you downloaded are loaded. Furthermore, my cyber team accessed the Aura building’s internal security network ten minutes ago. We retrieved the dressing room footage from yesterday. It has been synced to the main event server. You have full control of their presentation screens.”