Chapter 5

Thorne Capital occupied the top twelve floors of the most imposing glass-and-steel monolith in the financial district. There were no ping-pong tables here. There was no kombucha on tap, no neon signs quoting disruptive tech mantras, and absolutely none of the forced, toxic positivity that

Chapter 6

The penthouse Julian and I shared was a monument to his ego. It was a sprawling, multi-level glass box in the sky, decorated in stark whites, cold marbles, and metallic accents that screamed of new money and desperate validation. There was not a single personal touch of mine in the entire

Chapter 7

At 9:55 AM, I stood outside the frosted glass walls of Victoria Croft’s corner office, feeling the cold, hard weight of a silver USB drive in my blazer pocket.

My resting heart rate was a steady sixty-two beats per minute. I had spent the entire morning calibrating my appearance to proj