Chapter 76 The Vote That Didn’t Save Us
Sloane’s POV
The board chair cleared his throat like he was about to read my sentence out loud.
I stood at the edge of the long table, palms pressed lightly to the back of a chair that wasn’t mine, and watched the room pretend it wasn’t shaking. Faces strained. Eyes avoiding mine, or locking onto me too hard like I might lunge across the polished wood and bite someone.
Mariah’s chair sat empty.
Sentinel Gate’s polished salesman was gone.
The silence had teeth.
“Ms Mercer,” the chair said, voice careful, “thank you for your patience.”
Patience. As if I had been waiting for a table at a restaurant, not for a room full of people to decide whether I still got to exist as myself.
Eli stood a step behind and to my right, close enough that I felt heat through the air but not close enough to be labeled a liability in anyone’s notes. His presence steadied me more than I wanted it to, which meant I kept my chin high and my expression neutral.
The chair glanced down at his papers, then back up. “By a narrow margin, the board has voted to retain you as Chief Executive Officer.”
Relief hit so fast and so hard it almost made me dizzy. Not happiness. Not victory. Just a momentary drop in pressure, like my lungs remembered how to expand.
I didn’t let it show.
Across the table, one director exhaled sharply as if I’d just been granted mercy instead of continuing to do the job I was already doing.
“However,” the chair continued, because of course there was a however, “the board is instituting immediate governance conditions designed to stabilize risk and reassure external stakeholders.”
He said stabilize risk the way other people said protect a child.
My fingers tightened on the chair back. I kept them there. Better a hidden grip than a visible tremor.
“First,” he said, “we are creating an independent Security and Ethics Oversight Committee. This committee will have sign off authority on major security arrangements, vendor engagements, and any restructuring of protective leadership.”
A committee. A new set of hands on my throat, wrapped in polite language.
“Second,” he added, eyes flicking briefly to Eli and then away like even looking at him too long might create scandal, “given the public attention on certain personal matters, the committee will monitor corporate risk arising from leadership relationships.”
Monitor. As if love was a malware process running in the background.
I felt Eli’s attention shift, not moving, just sharpening. Anger restrained so tightly it became a kind of stillness. I wanted to reach back and touch his hand, just once, but I didn’t. Not in this room.
“Third,” the chair said, “Mercer will undergo a mandated external audit of systems and compliance. We will select a vetted third party. Not Sentinel Gate at this time.”
At this time. A door left cracked on purpose.
The government liaison who had been watching from the far side of the table finally spoke. His tone was soft, almost kind, which is how people deliver threats when they want you to swallow them without choking.
“Ms Mercer, your contract review is now as much about governance optics as it is about technical merit,” he said. “Any further public drama could tip the scales.”
Public drama. Like the attempted abduction was a tabloid trend I started to boost engagement.
I nodded once. “Understood.”
I didn’t say what I wanted to say, which was that the drama would stop the moment the Council stopped trying to run my life like a spreadsheet.
The chair shifted to the next item. “Regarding Ms Chan.”
No one said her first name. No one said Mariah like she was a person. They said Chan like she was a file.
“Ms Chan has been placed on leave pending investigation,” the chair said. “Her firm will cooperate with document retention orders.”
A couple of directors exchanged glances. A few looked relieved, like they’d removed a stain.
I knew better. Leave pending investigation was what you said when you wanted the public to think you were acting while you quietly let the guilty party slip out a side door.
I lifted my chin. “Where is she,” I asked.
The chair’s mouth tightened. “She resigned for personal reasons during the recess,” he said. “She is currently unreachable.”
Unreachable. Funny word for someone who had been in my building every day for years.
Eli’s breath changed behind me, a tiny shift. I could feel the violence he was swallowing.
The meeting wrapped fast after that. Not because they were done, but because they had said what they wanted said and didn’t want any more truth bleeding onto the table.
When we walked out, the hallway air felt cold and clean compared to the boardroom’s recycled panic. I finally let my shoulders drop a fraction.
“I kept my chair,” I murmured to Eli as we reached the elevator. “For now. But they built a glass box around it.”
He stepped in behind me. The doors slid shut, muting the world.
“We’ll figure out how to fight from inside the box,” he said. “Or we’ll break it.”
The elevator moved. A gentle hum, a soft sway. For a second I couldn’t hold the mask anymore. Exhaustion collapsed me inward, and I leaned back into him like my body had decided first.
His arms came around me in a quiet hug that wasn’t about heat or optics. It was about holding up what the board kept trying to bend.
I closed my eyes. Breathed. Let myself be just Sloane for three floors.
Back in my office, the city looked the same, but the glass felt sharper. The moment I sat down, Mila slipped in like she’d been waiting for permission she didn’t need.
Her eyes were bright and ugly with focus. She didn’t offer congratulations.
“Before you exhale too hard,” she said, laptop already open, “we’ve got a problem.”
She turned the screen toward me.
A graph. Tiny spikes, irregular, spaced like someone trying to hide a heartbeat inside static. Outbound data bursts, small enough to look like noise, persistent enough to be a message.
“From Mercer,” she said, tapping one line. “And from Ward.”
My stomach dropped. “What is it.”
“Over the past year,” Mila said, voice tight, “there have been highly irregular outbound pulls from trusted internal monitoring modules. Not enough to trigger standard alerts. Just enough to feed someone patterns.”
I stared at the spikes until my vision narrowed.
Mila’s mouth twisted into something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“Either there’s a ghost in both machines,” she said, “or someone you trust built them that way.”