The building felt eerily quiet. It was past midnight on a Tuesday, so the basement staff was minimal, but the silence still felt wrong. The air was heavy, thick with an unspoken tension.
We reached the staff locker room. It was empty.
I walked down the narrow rows of gray metal doors until I found locker number 402. Thomas’s locker.
I reached up and felt along the top rim of the metal frame. My fingers brushed against a cold, small piece of brass. A spare padlock key.
I unlocked the heavy padlock and pulled the metal door open.
My stomach plummeted.
The locker was completely empty, save for a single piece of crisp white paper taped to the back wall.
It was an official corporate termination notice. Thomas’s name was printed at the top. The document stated he had been relieved of his duties effective immediately due to "gross misconduct and breach of executive privacy."
The signature at the bottom was written in thick, aggressive blue ink. Marcus.
Beneath the signature was a secondary authorization stamp. It was signed by Elena Sterling.
My sister.
I stared at her signature, feeling the breath leave my lungs.
Elena was the vice president of public relations. We had never been incredibly close, but she was my blood. When I woke up in the hospital after the crash, Elena had cried by my bedside. She had told me to listen to Marcus, to go to the recovery center, to take my time healing.
Why was her signature on a high-level security termination notice?
“Mommy, where is Mr. Thomas?” Leo whispered, tugging on my sweatpants.
“I don’t know, baby,” I choked out, fighting the sudden wave of nausea.
I reached into the empty locker to grab the termination paper. As I pulled it off the tape, I noticed something written on the back in hasty, frantic pencil lead.
It was Thomas’s handwriting.
"Presidential Suite. The old floor safe. He's selling the entire company tomorrow at the board meeting. I'm sorry, Dani. They found me."
I crushed the paper in my hand.
Marcus wasn't just siphoning money. He was going to sell Sterling Hospitality to the highest bidder. My father’s life work, Leo’s entire inheritance, sold off in a closed-door boardroom deal while I was supposedly rotting away in a padded room.
And my sister was helping him do it.
I looked down at Leo. He was shivering slightly in his damp clothes.
I couldn't just run back to the car. If Marcus finalized the sale tomorrow, he would have unlimited resources. He would hunt me down. He would take Leo from me legally, claiming I had kidnapped him in a state of clinical insanity.
The only way to stop this was to get into the Presidential Suite on the 50th floor and retrieve the files Thomas had managed to hide in my father’s old mechanical floor safe.
There was only one problem. The Presidential Suite was locked down with a biometric security system. The only way up that private elevator was with an active, coded master keycard.
My old cards were undoubtedly deactivated. Thomas was gone.
The only place I could get a master keycard was from the main reception desk in the grand lobby.
I took a deep breath, trying to steady my shaking hands. I had to walk into the brightest, most public part of the hotel. I had to hope that whoever was working the night shift was a new hire who wouldn't recognize the deceased founder's daughter looking like a drowned, exhausted ghost.
“Come on, Leo,” I whispered, lifting him into my arms again. “We have to go upstairs.”
We walked out of the locker room and toward the grand marble staircase that led up to the main lobby.
The moment I pushed the heavy velvet service doors open, the brilliant, warm light of the grand lobby washed over us. The massive crystal chandeliers sparkled above the imported Italian marble floors. The soft sound of a jazz pianist playing in the adjacent lounge drifted through the air.
It was beautiful. It was mine. And it felt completely foreign to me.
I stayed near the edges of the room, keeping to the shadows of the massive marble pillars. I kept my hood pulled low.
I was about twenty feet away from the expansive front desk when the main brass revolving doors began to spin.
A group of men in expensive tailored suits walked into the lobby. They were laughing loudly, shaking off the rain from their umbrellas.
At the center of the group was Marcus.
He looked immaculate. His dark hair was perfectly styled, his jaw sharp and relaxed. He was wearing the custom charcoal suit I had bought for him on our last anniversary.
He was smiling broadly, patting the shoulder of an older, gray-haired man I recognized instantly. It was Richard Vance, the CEO of Vance Global, our biggest corporate rival.