Stan and Zack had just ended the conversation when Stan’s phone buzzed against the console.
An incoming report from the police investigative team, forwarded through the hotel’s legal liaison, who had apparently decided that passing information directly to Stan Harrison qualified as a reasonable use of priority handling.
He read it once. Then he read it again.
The information extracted from Damien and his guards during interrogation assembled into a picture uglier than Stan had expected, and he had already expected sothing reasonably ugly.
Damien’s obsession had a specific origin point: a female strear nad Sophie Youngs.
Months before the two-hundred-million-dollar gifting incident, Damien had beco fixated on her. He had used his wealth and influence to manufacture proximity through mutual connections, event appearances, private invitations, and the kind of sustained, escalating attention that lived sowhere between admiration and obsession.
Sophie had rejected him. She had simply treated him with the sa calm indifference she showed anyone who approached her the wrong way.
For Damien, that had apparently been worse.
Anger could be negotiated with. Indifference couldn’t. It left no opening, no illusion of possibility.
Over ti, the rejection had curdled into sothing uglier. What began as frustration hardened into a generalized hostility directed not only at Sophie, but at female strears as a whole, as though the category itself had beco a substitute for the specific wound she had left behind.
He had started identifying smaller strears, won with growing audiences and limited protection around them, as accessible targets for the power and control Sophie’s rejection had denied him.
Zoey had been first on the list.
She would not have been the last if he had been allowed to continue.
Stan lowered the phone onto the console.
He threatened Sophie’s na specifically, he rembered when Damien’s voice thundered through the door.
’You strears think you can do whatever you want. I’ll make you pay, and then I’ll make Sophie pay too.’
Stan’s expression remained still. His eyes level.
He called the detective handling the case.
"The charges as they stand, is there room to add anything related to the preditated nature of the targeting? And the threat made against a third party before the door was forced?"
"We’re already building that case," the detective replied. "What happened tonight wasn’t spontaneous. The paynt to the accomplice, the room booking, the guards outside the suite, all of it points to planning. The DA’s aware. They’re looking at significant ti."
"Good," Stan said.
Then, after a brief pause:
"Make sure everything connected to Sophie Youngs is fully docunted in the motivational record. She needs to be inford this existed, and she needs protection from any future contact attempts."
"Understood."
Stan ended the call.
He sat alone in the idling car for a while, the city quiet around him, and thought about a woman in a maroon dress who had no idea that her na sat at the center of tonight’s events like a buried root beneath poisoned soil.
Sophie, He would tell her.
Not tonight. Not over the phone. Not through a ssage that would reach her alone in her apartnt at midnight.
He would tell her in person, where he could see her expression, answer the questions she would inevitably have, and stay for whatever ca after.
Before leaving, he made sure Zoey’s testimony was taken properly and that the hotel’s security footage was formally requisitioned and transferred to the police departnt.
Only then did he finally walk out of the Wanhai Grand lobby.
It was close to midnight.
The night air was cool and clean, carrying the distant hum of traffic through the city. His Lamborghini Huracán sat exactly where he’d left it, a parking ticket tucked beneath the windshield wiper from an attendant who had apparently missed the mo about whose car it was.
Stan peeled the ticket free, glanced at it for a second, then slipped it into his jacket pocket.
After that, he got into the car, started the engine, and drove ho through the empty, amber-lit streets, the city’s indifferent silence blending with the Huracán’s low, steady growl.
Behind him, hidden inside one of the most expensive hotels in the city, the aftermath of sothing ugly was still settling into place, while the rest of the world carried on without the slightest idea it had happened at all.
Stan was halfway ho when his phone screen lit up with a notification that had been quietly piling up while the evening’s events unfolded.
Missed calls. Six of them, all from the sa number: Vivian Reeves.
He looked at the screen for a mont as the mory resurfaced: the brief, clipped exchange after the Wanhai Grand eting, the words ’co make yourself useful,’ the specific day he’d given her.
He had completely forgotten.
Between the court hearing, Zoey, and Damien, the matter with Vivian had been buried so thoroughly beneath the rest of the evening that it felt like sothing from an entirely different week.
Sighing, he scrolled down to the SMS thread.
Vivian didn’t have his Snapchat, he had never given it to her, so she’d continued using the number attached to the shareholder eting arrangents.
The ssages were restrained. Professional. Carefully phrased in the precise way people wrote when they were trying very hard not to sound anxious while being, in fact, extrely anxious.
Vivian:[Sir Stan, I haven’t received any feedback from you since you ntioned I should et up and make myself useful. I wanted to confirm whether the arrangent still stands.]
Stan read the ssage once before replying.
Stan:[My schedule encountered complications. You’ll have another opportunity.
In the anti, here’s your assignnt: research how to make yourself genuinely useful to Star Entertainnt and to a major shareholder. Not surface-level observations. I want substantive proposals.
Co to the address below tomorrow at noon and demonstrate what you’ve prepared. The quality of your performance will directly influence my assessnt of whether your position at the company is worth preserving.]
He attached the address to his Wanhai Grand HYTV Hotel, specifically the private eting suite on the top floor, and sent it.
The reply arrived less than a minute later.
Vivian:[Understood, Sir. I’ve noted the address. What ti should I arrive?]
Stan: [Noon.]
Vivian: [Understood. I’ll be there. I can only bla myself for how I behaved toward you earlier. I allowed my temper and assumptions to guide when I should have been more asured. I won’t disappoint you tomorrow.]
Stan set the phone down on the passenger seat.
’She’s nervous,’ he thought, reading between the careful formality of the ssages.
’Good. She should be. Maybe nervous Vivian would prove more interesting than arrogant Vivian.’
The corner of his mouth shifted slightly, almost becoming a smile, before he continued driving ho through the sleeping city.
Morning arrived with the particular crispness of a day that had consciously decided to be pleasant: clear skies, cool air, and sunlight sharp enough to make the world look slightly more deliberate than usual.
Stan hit the gym early.
...
A/N:
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