Chapter 7 Eleanor’s Pov
The ivory queen rested in the pocket of my apron, cool and unyielding—a silent declaration that I was no longer a pawn, but a player in a game I’d spent years watching from the shadows.
Two days passed in a state of quiet anticipation. I moved through the estate with the precision of someone expecting a summons, every step measured, every glance calibrated. But Alec gave me nothing—no summons, no reprimand, not even a look across the breakfast room. Only silence and in that silence, I heard the hum of a far more dangerous weapon: patience. He wasn’t hunting me. He was waiting for me to reveal myself.
Psychological warfare, Sterling-style.
Elegant, brutal and effective.
Ollie, bless his irrepressible soul, became my lifeline to something resembling normalcy.
True to his word, he gathered a small group—me, a wiry junior gardener named Liam, and one of the estate drivers—and spirited us away to the city the following weekend. The pub was exactly as he’d described: low ceilings, dark wood beams, the comforting reek of stale beer and frying onions. Music thumped just loud enough to drown out secrets.
For a few precious hours, wrapped in the familiar cadence of London vowels and the satisfying thwack of axes embedding into cottonwood targets, I almost forgot who I was. Almost remembered how to breathe.
Ollie held court like a man born for it—charming, loud, effortlessly magnetic. He bought rounds, told riotous stories about his teenage stints as a semi-pro football hooligan, and made sure my pint never ran dry. He laughed with his whole body, head thrown back, eyes crinkling at the corners.
“So,” he said, sliding into the booth beside me after winning yet another axe-throwing round, “the big house still giving you the willies?”
I took a slow sip of lager, the bitter tang grounding me. “It’s… quiet,” I admitted, managing a small, genuine smile. “Good to hear a bit of proper noise for a change.”
He grinned and nudged my shoulder. “Told you. You can’t live in a museum. You need a little life.”
Then his expression shifted—softer, more serious. “Listen,” he said, voice dropping, emerald eyes locking onto mine, “if it ever gets too much—if that place ever swallows you whole, you talk to me, yeah? Stick together, us Brits abroad.”
The offer was so simple, so devastatingly kind, it felt like a physical wound. In that moment, I saw a future: sunlight, laughter, no more ghosts. Just Ellie Shaw, a girl from Surrey who took a strange job and walked away before it ruined her. The urge to say yes, to take his hand and never look back, was so powerful I had to gulp down half my beer just to keep my hands from shaking.
“That’s… very kind of you, Ollie,” I managed, my voice softer than I’d intended.
He started to speak again—perhaps to say something that would unravel me completely—but a shout from the axe range called him away. I watched him go, a strange tide of guilt and gratitude swirling in my chest. He wanted to protect me. But I couldn’t let him get close. Not now. Not when I was so near the truth.
The next evening, the fragile illusion shattered.
I was clearing dinner dishes—Alec and Charlotte had shared a meal of icy silence, barely acknowledging each other—when the news crackled from the staff common room television:
“Breaking: a brazen, coordinated attack on a downtown Sterling Holdings venue. Early reports describe the violence as targeted and unusually precise—the apparent escalation in the ongoing territorial conflict with the Ivanov organization.”
The room fell still. Faces went pale. This wasn’t gossip or speculation. This was war, bleeding into our sterile sanctuary.
Later, I found myself in the library, “dusting” shelves I’d already cleaned twice—anything to linger near the estate’s nerve center. Through the study’s slightly ajar door, Alec’s voice cut through the hush.
“Wiped clean, Alec,” David said, strained. “It’s a new kind of crypto-tumbler—nothing in our databases. Our experts can’t trace the fund flows. The money’s just… gone.”
“Unacceptable,” Alec replied, low and lethal.
“The Ivanovs hired a new specialist,” David pressed. “This isn’t street-level encryption. It’s state-of-the-art.”
I froze, a feather duster clutched in my fingers.
The Ivanovs? Sophisticated crypto? They were enforcers, not engineers. But I knew that tumbler. That signature. It matched a Finnish programmer—Koskinen—whose nested encryption protocol left a nearly invisible watermark in the tertiary layer: a recursive checksum anomaly. Most dismissed it as noise, but I’d spent months studying it during my father’s final investigation.
To me, it was a beacon, and I knew how to exploit it.
This was my opening.
My chance to step onto the board not as a maid, but as a strategist—as the daughter of the man who first uncovered Sterling’s financial web.
The ivory queen burned in my apron pocket.
Not a warning. An invitation.
Time to play.