Chapter 53 Sacrificial Bloodline
Eli’s POV
I knew it was bad news from the way Harper knocked.
No quick double tap, no breezy entrance. One slow, heavy rap on Sloane’s office door, late in the afternoon when most sane people had already gone home.
I was standing by the window, watching London flight alerts scroll across my phone, when Harper stepped in. Her face was wrong. Careful.
“Sloane,” she said, closing the door behind her. “You need to sit down.”
“I hate when people say that,” Sloane replied. She did not sit. “Just tell me.”
Harper hesitated, then said it anyway.
“Your father is dead,” she said. “They found him at his condo this morning.”
For a second, time froze. The only sound was the faint hum of the air vent.
Then Sloane set her pen down very neatly. “How,” she asked.
“Fall from his balcony,” Harper said. “They are calling it an accident or possible suicide. That is all I have, for now.”
Sloane went very still. Her face did not crumble. It smoothed out. That was worse. “Of course,” she said after a heartbeat. “Tie up loose ends.”
Harper’s eyes flicked to me. I felt my spine lock.
This smelled like a message. We know you visited him. We can reach anyone tied to your past. You are not the only one who pays.
“We need details,” I said. “Now.”
Harper nodded. “I will get what I can from the local investigator. It will not be the full truth, but it will be something.”
When she left, the room felt bigger and colder.
Sloane stared out at the skyline, hands flat on her desk. “If I had not gone,” she said quietly, “would he still be alive.”
“He signed contracts with people who kill when it is convenient,” I said. “You did not put him on that balcony.”
“He sold my life’s work,” she said. “And they still killed him. They eat their own.”
“That is what we are up against,” I said. “No loyalty. Just leverage.”
Later, when the first thin reports came through, I read them in a conference room with the lights too bright.
Building said he fell sometime after midnight. No witnesses. Balcony rail “possibly compromised.” CCTV for that night at his floor and the stairwell was “corrupted.”
I did not even have to ask Mila. She ran the file headers anyway.
“Same signature as your penthouse tampering,” she said over comms. “Same as the fire alarm hack. Someone walked in, rewrote the record and walked back out.”
They had taken him out. Not because he deserved justice. Because he was a link. Because killing him twisted the knife in Sloane, and probably bought them a bit of cleanup on the side.
I ordered a full protective sweep on everyone else who had once been inside her circle.
“Old professors,” I told Diaz. “Former colleagues. Any family friends who still answer her calls. Quietly. No panic, but I want eyes.”
He nodded. “On it.”
Sloane fought guilt like it was a physical thing. I saw it in the way her shoulders stayed too square, in the way she refused to look at any photo that had her father’s face in it.
“He betrayed me,” she said in her office that night, voice low. “But he was still my father.”
“You get to be angry and not sad,” I said. “You get to be both. Or neither. There is no right script for this.”
Harper came back with a new kind of advice.
“You should attend the funeral,” she said. “For optics. For closure. To control the narrative. If you are not there, speculation fills the gap. About you. About him. About who did what.”
“I do not owe him grief,” Sloane snapped.
“No,” Harper said. “You owe yourself the chance to say goodbye. Not to him. To what he did to you.”
She looked at me then. Quiet question. You going to back me up.
I picked a careful path.
“You might not owe him anything,” I said to Sloane. “But you might owe it to yourself not to let them write this chapter without you in the room.”
She pressed her lips together. “I have spent my whole life in rooms where men decided things about me without me present,” she said. “I am not starting now.”
Which was, grudgingly, a yes.
That night, in her office, she finally cracked a little.
The city outside was a smear of orange. Her suit jacket was off, hair loose, eyes too bright.
“He sold my life’s work,” she said, fingers digging into the edge of her desk. “And they still killed him. They did not even keep their end of the devil’s bargain. They used him and tossed him too.”
“That is the only way this machine knows how to work,” I said. “It chews up everyone. The obedient and the disobedient. You. Him. Me. Amira. No one is safe once they are a line item.”
She let out a sound then. Not a scream. Not a sob. Something low, punched out of her like air from a lung.
I stepped in, gently. Put my arms around her. She came in stiff, then sagged a little, forehead pressing into my chest. My shirt went damp under her cheek.
I held her. Quietly. I did not tell her to calm down. I did not tell her it would be okay. I just stood there and took her weight.
She did not collapse. She did not fall apart in some cinematic way. She let out one long, controlled sob, then pulled herself together enough to breathe again.
“I am fighting my own blood’s contracts,” she whispered.
“Then we make those contracts worthless,” I said. “One by one. Until the paper means nothing and the people behind them have nowhere left to hide.”
Silence, full and heavy.
“Fine,” she said after a long time. “I will go. To the funeral. Not because he deserves it. Because I am not letting them turn my whole story into a blank page and call it an accident.”
Her jaw set.
“You are coming as my date,” she added, looking up at me with something fierce in her eyes. “Not as my invisible detail. Let us see what vultures show up when they think the asset brought her soldier to say goodbye.”
I nodded once. “Yes, maam,” I said softly, and for once it did not sound like a job.
It sounded like a declaration.
Somewhere out there, the same people who had pushed her father off a balcony were watching. They wanted us rattled. They wanted us alone.
Instead, we were about to walk into a room full of ghosts, hand in hand.
Let them see.