Chapter 8 Over the Edge
Sloane’s POV
Wind hit my face and the city rushed up at me in a thousand tiny lights. For one dizzy second it felt like leaning over the code of an unstable system, just to see where it might break. I was not thinking about jumping. I was thinking about what it would feel like if I did not have to hold everything up.
Then Eli shouted my name and my foot slipped.
Cold stone was slick under my bare sole. Gravity grabbed me by the spine. The rail slammed into my thigh. There was a flash of air in my lungs that tasted like panic.
An arm clamped around my waist and yanked me backward so hard I lost my breath. We hit the glass wall together, my back first, his chest a solid impact against my shoulder blades. The windows shivered, but the view held. City, sky, my reflection, his shadow wrapped around me.
For a moment neither of us moved. His arm stayed locked around me, tight, my heartbeat slamming into his forearm, his heart pounding fast enough that I could feel it through his shirt at my back.
“I was not going to jump,” I snapped when I could get air again. It came out more raw than I wanted.
“I have watched enough people fall,” he muttered near my ear. “I am not leaving it to chance.”
There was something in his voice that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with a courtyard in a country he did not talk about. For half a heartbeat I almost asked who he had not caught. Then I remembered who I was supposed to be.
“Let go,” I said.
He did, slowly, like I might bolt toward the edge again if he moved too fast. I stepped away, rubbed at the line his arm had left on my ribs. My legs felt unsteady. I hated it.
“Why were you out here?” he asked.
“Thinking.” I looked back down at the grid of streets. “Trying to remember what this looks like when I am the one looking down and not someone else looking at me.”
“That someone now has more data,” he said. “The Berlin hotel confirmed their CCTV was pulled twenty four hours after you left. Same intrusion route that has been hitting Mercer. The photo was not a one off trick. It is part of a longer pattern.”
Berlin again. Always Berlin.
“So my one lapse is the morning star of a campaign,” I said. “That is what you are telling me.”
“Yes.” No comfort in it. Just fact. “Someone tied that night to everything that has come since. They either found you there or they followed you there.”
Something in my chest hollowed out. “Then we show them they did not pick someone who hides on her couch.”
He frowned. “You are not going to the office today.”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
“Forty eight hours, we agreed.”
“I agreed to forty eight hours when Berlin was just a photo and a dead camera.” I turned toward him fully. “Now we know that my personal life is already threaded into my company’s threat surface. If I do not show my face at Mercer, the story writes itself. Kidnapping attempt. CEO in hiding. Investors panic. Competitors whisper. We lose leverage and the contract.”
“You walking through a lobby does not fix a hacked hotel,” he said.
“It fixes narrative. Narrative controls money. Money pays for you and your team and all of this.” I waved at the glass and the city. “I will not cower. That is not who I am.”
We stared each other down. He hated it. I could see it in the tight set of his mouth, the muscle jumping in his cheek. But he also knew the game I was talking about. Optics. Psychology.
“Then we do it my way,” he said finally. “Decoy car. Different exit. Multiple route options. NYPD in the loop. You do not improvise so much as a bathroom break without telling me.”
“Agreed,” I said. The word tasted somewhere between surrender and truce.
At Mercer, the lobby eyes were knives on my skin. I felt Eli at my back, a wall in a dark suit, and pretended it did not help. Whisper trails followed us to the elevators. On the executive floor, the air had that particular density it got whenever people sensed blood in it.
The board meeting was short and vicious. Half the room spoke the language of genuine concern, wanting to know about the investigation, what steps we were taking. The other half asked careful questions about continuity and succession.
One woman, kindly voice and sharp smile, floated the idea of temporary co leadership. For stability, of course. Just until things settled.
“I understand the impulse to grab extra hands when the boat rocks,” I said, looking her straight in the eye. “But Mercer is not sinking. We hit a wave. I am still steering.”
The topic died. For now.
In the hallway afterward, Eli caught my arm and pulled me into a quieter corridor.
“Half of that room would sell you for parts if it raised the stock two points,” he said.
I ripped my arm free. “Board politics are not your arena.”
“Internal threats are still threats,” he shot back. “If someone in that room is talking to whoever came after you, I need to know.”
“You are here to stop bullets, not choose my allies.”
“I am here to keep you alive,” he said. “Sometimes that means telling you the people at your table are not on your side.”
His eyes were hard. Mine probably were too. There was too much truth in what he said. I did not like it.
Later, at home, I tried to burn off the leftover adrenaline by letting him drag the rug back off the floor. Self defense again. Holds and breaks, how to twist out of a grip.
“Step there,” he said, guiding my foot. His hands were warm on my hips, his chest close to my back. “If they pull, you go with it and turn.”
We moved, bodies a breath apart. A misstep, a stumble, and suddenly I was on my back on the floor with him braced above me, one hand by my head, the other still caught around my wrist.
We froze. My lungs forgot how to work. Berlin rushed back, his weight pinning me in a way that had nothing to do with holds and everything to do with how it had felt to let him in. His face was inches from mine, eyes darker than they had any right to be.
For one heartbeat I thought about closing the distance. About seeing if his mouth would taste the same without a fake name between us.
I turned my head instead, shoved at his chest. “Business and pleasure stay separate,” I muttered, getting to my feet.
He pushed himself up slower, watching me. “What happened in Berlin did not hurt you,” he said quietly. “What is hurting you is pretending it never happened.”
There was no good answer to that, so I did what I was best at. I pivoted away, picked up my water, buried myself in my inbox.
That night I lay in the guest room, unable to look at the remnants of my old bed. Sleep came in broken pieces. Sometime after midnight my private phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Unknown number. One image.
My own face, thrown into stark relief by a camera that had no right to be in that room. Eyes closed, mouth open, hair stuck to my cheek with sweat. It was mid pleasure, mid surrender, everything I had given to that night caught from an angle I had not known existed. Under it, in neat text, words that made my stomach twist. He cannot always catch you.
The room spun. There had been a camera inside the Berlin suite. Not just in the hall. Someone had watched the most private thing I had ever done and saved it for later.
My thumb hit delete before my brain had fully processed. The picture vanished, but the feeling did not.
A knock at the door made me flinch.
“You good?” Eli’s voice, muffled. “Heard your phone.”
Spam, Say it is spam. Keep one thing that is still only yours.
“Just a spam notification,” I called. I was amazed my tone barely shook.
There was a pause. I could feel his doubt through the wood.
“Get some sleep,” he said finally. Footsteps moved away.
I lay back down, heart still racing, the ghost of that image burned into the dark behind my eyes.
I had lied with the ease of long practice.
The tiny crack that ran through what we were building did not look like much in that moment.
But I could not shake the feeling that it was going to matter.