Across the lobby.

Jenny had found the sofa.

It was a good sofa — the kind placed in corporate lobbies to signal that the company valued the comfort of visitors while ensuring those visitors waited long enough to feel the importance of whoever they were waiting to see.

Jenny sat in it.

Her bag on her lap.

She breathed.

Her eyes moved around the lobby. The people passing through. The security barriers. The camera position above the reception desk — one blind spot to the right, which she filed. The lift bank to the left. The stairwell door beside it, which was alarmed from the outside but, from the placement of the sensor, only on the outward-opening side.

She breathed again.

Sat there for ten minutes.

The lobby manager — a precise, middle-aged man with the build of someone who had once been athletic and had let it calcify into authority — noticed her after the eighth minute and walked over with the polite urgency of a man doing his job.

"Can I help you, miss?"

Jenny looked up at him.

She let two seconds pass.

Then her mouth twitched.

"I’m Thalia’s sister."

The confusion that moved through his face was brief and sincere — the logical conflict of a man who had been briefed on the new Director’s family and didn’t have a sister listed anywhere.

Jenny opened her bag.

Pulled out an ID.

He looked at it.

Then at her.

The ID listed her name. Under the family connection field, it listed Thalia’s name.

It was a very good forgery.

Or it was real.

He chose not to determine which on company time.

"Of course." His posture adjusted to vertical. "Please, this way, ma’am."

Jenny stood from the sofa.

Adjusted her hemline with one hand.

Followed him to the lifts.

The lift doors closed.

The lobby manager stood beside her, slightly forward, the professional posture of an escort.

Jenny looked at the floor indicator above the doors.

Counted.

She had delayed eleven minutes on the sofa.

Her mother had gone up eight minutes ago.

She breathed out through her nose.

"I hope you’re creating chaos, Mother."

She said it quietly enough that the lobby manager interpreted it as something personal and did not respond.

The lift moved upward.

## The Director’s Office — Blac Corporation

The office was large.

The kind of large that made statements — floor-to-ceiling glass on the city side, the desk positioned to put the occupant between the visitor and the view, a chair that was not technically a throne but had been designed by someone who had thought carefully about the psychological difference between a chair and a throne and then split it evenly.

Thalia sat in it.

She was tapping one finger on the desk in a slow, regular rhythm that did not match any urgency but conveyed the specific quality of a person who had been born to this room even though she had arrived in it recently.

Across from her, on the visitor’s side, Vivienne sat.

On her knees.

Not the floor. The chair — perched on the front edge of it with the posture of a woman whose spine had been introduced to a new hierarchy overnight and had adopted it without being asked.

Her hands in her lap.

Her eyes slightly down.

The coffee stain on her dress from the lobby, where someone had bumped her at the entrance, spread across her left side in a dark brown map.

The mark on her neck visible above her collar.

The rings visible through her blouse when she breathed.

Thalia looked at her.

The tapping continued.

One finger. Steady.

"So."

She tilted her head.

"Cruxius sent you here to create enough chaos that I’d get distracted." She said it the way people read known information off a page — not as a question. "And while I’m dealing with you, your daughter is somewhere in this building collecting the Blac key."

A pause.

"Am I correct, Miss Vivienne?"

The silence that arrived had a specific texture.

The kind that sits in a room when someone has said the true thing out loud and the person it was said to has run out of available directions.

A single bead of sweat moved from Vivienne’s hairline to her jaw.

Her eyes, which had been slightly down, didn’t move.

Her hands in her lap pressed together.

The composure that had survived this morning, the lobby, the receptionist, the walk through the office — all of it sat very still now.

Then it exhaled.

Vivienne’s head, which had been slightly inclined, dropped the remaining few degrees.

Chin toward chest.

The full weight of the night behind it — the shower, the bite, the car, the parking lot, the slow overwriting of every previous version of herself — settling into the gesture.

"Yes."

Thalia looked at the top of Vivienne’s bowed head for a long moment.

Then she sighed.

The particular sigh of a person who has confirmed something they already knew and finds the confirmation more exhausting than surprising.

"That pervert."

She leaned back in her chair.

Her finger resumed its tapping on the desk — one slow, rhythmic press after another — while her eyes moved off Vivienne and toward the glass wall and the city beyond it.

"He really thought I’d care." She said it to the window. "About the people he left behind to distract me."

A pause.

"About ’me’ being distracted."

The office was quiet around her.

Vivienne stayed exactly where she was — perched forward, hands in her lap, the marks on her neck above her collar visible from across the desk.

Thalia didn’t look at them directly.

But she had catalogued them in the first thirty seconds.

The mark shape. The position. The specific way Vivienne’s blouse pulled slightly at the chest where the rings sat beneath the fabric.

She had seen that posture before.

Not on this woman. On the shape of the dynamic.

She knew what had happened. She knew exactly what he did. She had known since childhood what he was capable of, in the clinical sense, and had spent the first fifteen years of her life trying not to think about it, and the years after that learning to weaponise the knowledge instead.

Her stepmother had tormented her with the information as though it were a verdict.

Meeting him had done something different to it.

The trauma hadn’t disappeared. But it had receded to a middle distance, the way something painful does when you find a context that makes the pain legible rather than just loud.

She rubbed her forehead.

’He fucked her.’

Not a question.

She had seen Vivienne’s type before too — the high-society composure, the absolute certainty of her own position, the kind of woman who walks into a room like she already owns the air in it.

And now here she sat, perched on the front of a chair with her chin down and her nipples outlined through her bra, both rings catching the light through the fabric on every breath.

Thalia rubbed her forehead harder.

That woman would not have left without draining him twice minimum.

She turned.

Sugar stood near the office door.

Tactical jacket. Steady eyes. The posture of a woman who had been summ to this room under circumstances she still hadn’t fully categorised and had decided the most useful response was to remain vertical and professional until further notice.

"Take her," Thalia said. "And her daughter. Back to their home."

A pause.

"Both of them. Now."

Sugar’s expression didn’t change.

"Understood."