Chapter 42 Daughter of Closed Doors
Sloane’s POV
“Sixteen,” I repeat, buying half a second.
Quiet. Curious. Obsessed with computers. That is the answer I give the camera, the one that will play well in sound bites.
“I was pretty quiet,” I say aloud, lips shaping the line we rehearsed. “Curious. I spent more time with computers than people. I liked having problems I could actually solve.”
The interviewer nods, encouraging. “And your parents supported that?”
“Supported,” I echo, keeping my face neutral. “They encouraged me to lean into what I was good at.”
Inside, the real reel starts playing.
My childhood house smells like lemon polish and cold coffee. Glass and chrome, big windows that never open. My father, Graham Mercer, in his favorite chair with the financial pages spread out, tie loosened a careful inch. Eyes on numbers, not on me.
Everything is an asset, including you, he said once when I brought home a top score. I had thought he was joking. The way he looked over the rim of his glass told me he was not.
At twelve I cracked the parental controls on the home desktop because the limits annoyed me. The password prompt was a puzzle, and puzzles beg to be solved. Three attempts, a little script, a restart later, I was past the cartoon lock and into the guts.
Behind the kid safe wallpaper were spreadsheets of deals and offshore accounts and NDA templates. Names of companies I did not recognize back then. Columns of numbers higher than anything I had seen on a calculator. It was the first time I understood that the real power in my house did not sit in his voice. It lived in hidden cells on a screen.
At sixteen, I got bored one weekend. That was all it was. Boredom.
Dad’s firm ran old software. I had noticed it watching over his shoulder once, bored at dinner. So I pointed my machine at it and started probing. Ports, services, a few weak password patterns. The door opened so easily it almost offended me.
I did not break anything. I did not steal. I slipped in, looked around, and left a single text file on his desktop.
Your perimeter is a joke.
It made me laugh so hard I had to bite my pillow.
I did not know, then, that it was the moment everything changed.
On camera, I smooth that into something else.
“I poked around in places I probably should not have,” I say. “Mostly our own systems at first. I was a teenager with a lot of curiosity and not much fear.”
“And your father?” the interviewer asks lightly. “How did he react to that curiosity?”
“Let us say he was… interested,” I answer. It is as close to honest as I can get without opening an entire graveyard.
In my head, I am back in his office the Monday after my little prank. He calls me in with that voice he uses for partners, not children.
He does not yell. He does not hug me.
He plays the text file. Your perimeter is a joke. Then he looks at me in a new way, like I have turned into something else overnight.
“Did you write this?” he asks.
“Yes.” My voice shakes. He notices. His mouth quirks.
He is not proud. He is not angry.
He is calculating.
Two weeks later he has a friend over. Dark suit, British vowels, consulting firm logo on his briefcase. I am made to sit at the dining table with a laptop while they stand behind me and talk about me like I am a demo model.
“Show him what you did,” my father says.
They discuss my abilities, my attitude, my marketability. Not once do they ask if I am scared or what I want. They toss around phrases like innovative defense tech prospects and emerging talent. I am the only one at the table without a drink in my hand and the only one whose future is being traded.
They toast to a new strategic partnership in the living room later. I catch one name through the crack in the door. Avalon Ridge.
Back then, it is just words. Now, sitting in this studio years later, I can see its logo on some of the shell company charts around Noah’s firm and Sentinel Gate. The same fund that bought pieces of my father now sitting quietly behind my enemies.
“Did you have anyone you trusted completely as a teenager?” the interviewer asks.
The question yanks me back to the present. Lights. Camera. Her steady eyes.
I hesitate. That will look good on camera. Vulnerable. Real.
“I trusted the machines,” I say. “They did exactly what I told them to. People came with patches and backdoors.”
The crew is silent for a second. The interviewer writes something down.
“Cut,” the producer says gently. “We will take five.”
I exhale, shoulders unclenching. When I step off the little set, my legs feel strange, like I have been walking underwater.
Eli is waiting in the side room they gave him. He leans against the wall, arms folded, wearing the kind of neutral face that fools most people. I know him well enough now to see the tightness in his jaw.
“How bad is it?” he asks.
“Depends,” I say, rubbing at the mic mark on my collar. “On camera, I was quiet, curious, obsessed with computers. Off camera, I hacked my father’s company and he brought an audience.”
He searches my face, all tactics and care. “You okay?”
“I thought,” I admit, surprising myself, “that if I got smart enough, he would see me as more than a balance sheet entry.”
The words hang there, too raw.
Eli’s eyes soften. “You got smart enough to not need him at all,” he says. “That might be what he never forgave.”
I huff out a breath that might be a laugh. Or a sob. “You are very bad at letting me cling to my self loathing.”
“Occupational hazard,” he says. “I am supposed to drag people out of bad positions.”
A tech peeks in. “Two minutes.”
Back under the lights, the chair feels harder. The interviewer asks about university. I talk about scholarships and top schools, about taking freelance gigs pen testing systems for companies who did not realize the kid on the other end of the line did not have a driver’s license yet.
I do not mention the dinner where Avalon Ridge’s rep shook my father’s hand in our living room while I poured drinks I was not old enough to buy.
The hour wears on. My voice starts to scratch. The questions dig more gently now, but they dig.
When we finally wrap the first block of filming, the producer calls lunch. I step off set and the world expands again.
Eli falls into step beside me in the hallway, not touching, close enough that his presence is a warmth at my side.
“You were a kid,” he says quietly, no cameras now, no crew, just fluorescent lights and a vending machine humming. “And they put you on the auction block.”
The phrase slams into me harder than I expect. I suck in a breath.
Auction block.
I have thought a lot of things about my childhood. Asset. Tool. Investment. But never that word.
Now that he has said it, I cannot unhear it.