DEMOLITION
POV: Elena Rostova
The emotional hangover was worse than the alcohol.
We had returned from the construction site at 2:00 AM, smelling of river water and old dust. The ride back in the elevator had been heavy with unspoken things. He had held my hand—his fingers interlaced with mine, skin against skin, anchoring me.
But when we stepped into the Penthouse, the air had changed.
Silas had dropped my hand. He hadn't kissed me goodnight. He had simply walked toward his office, his back stiff, his coat flaring behind him like the wings of a dark angel returning to hell.
"Go to sleep," he had said. "I have work."
That was yesterday.
It had been thirty-six hours since I last saw his face.
I sat at the dining table, staring at a plate of untouched fruit Marcus had delivered. The Spire felt larger today. Colder. The HVAC system hummed a low, threatening note that vibrated in the floorboards.
"Where is he, Marcus?" I asked for the third time.
Marcus was organizing papers at the sidebar. He didn't look at me. He looked thinner, greyer, more stressed than usual.
"Mr. Vane is in meetings. He is not to be disturbed."
"For two days?"
"A crisis has developed. The legal fallout from the Gala incident with Dr. Thorne has escalated. The shareholders are... anxious."
"I want to see him."
"Mr. Vane has blocked his calendar, Ms. Rostova."
"I have the master key," I said, sliding the black card onto the walnut table. It made a sharp click.
Marcus finally looked up. His expression wasn't one of deference. It was pity.
"Keys open doors, Elena. They do not open people. If Mr. Vane has entered the Vault, it is because he has chosen to be unreachable. I would advise you not to knock."
"I don't care about his Vault. We are supposed to be working."
"Work is suspended," Marcus said softly. "Indefinitely."
I felt the blood drain from my face. "What?"
"He has put the biography project on hold. Until the media storm settles. He views it as a distraction."
A distraction.
Two nights ago, on the floor of his bedroom, he had told me I was a structural load. He had told me I was the fire. Now, because some lawyers were shouting, I was a distraction?
"No," I said, standing up. "He doesn't get to do that. He doesn't get to pull me close and then ghost me in his own house."
I grabbed the key card.
I marched toward the North Wing.
The glass bridge over the atrium felt slippery under my feet. I looked down. The living room rug—the replacement white one—looked pristine. No wine. No mess. Just perfect, sterile silence.
I reached the office door. The red light of the panel stared at me like a cyclops eye.
I didn't hesitate. I slapped the card against the sensor.
Beep. Green.
The door slid open.
I stepped in.
The office was freezing. The blackout shades were drawn, plunging the room into artificial twilight. The only light came from the wall of monitors—twelve of them, displaying cascading code, market tickers, and architectural renderings.
Silas sat in the center of it all.
He was wearing his noise-canceling headphones. He didn't look up. He was typing.
But the worst part wasn't the darkness.
It was his hands.
The gloves were back on. Black leather, tight, sealing him off from the world.
"Silas," I said.
He didn't react.
I walked closer. I walked right up to the desk. I slammed my hand down on the obsidian surface, right next to his keyboard.
He stopped typing.
Slowly, deliberately, he peeled one headphone cup away from his ear.
He didn't look at my face. He looked at my hand on his desk.
"You are smudging the polish," he said.
His voice was dead. Flat. No inflection. No "dark rumble." Just audio output.
"We need to talk," I said.
"I am billing six thousand dollars an hour right now," he replied, putting his hand back on the mouse. "You are costing me equity. Leave."
"You put the book on hold."
"It is a non-essential asset. I am pruning."
"Pruning? You're acting like we didn't just spend the last week—"
"Creating a liability," he finished, cutting me off.
He swiveled his chair to face me. The movement was smooth, mechanical.
His eyes were terrifying. There was no heat in them. The silver was dull, tarnished. He looked through me as if I were a smudge on a windowpane that he had missed during cleaning.
"I made a calculation error, Elena. I allowed biology to interfere with architecture. The incident at the construction site... the intimacy... it caused a deviation in my focus."
He held up a gloved hand.
"Look at the ticker." He pointed to a screen where a red line was plummeting. "Vane Holdings is down 4% because the Board thinks I am mentally unstable. Because I assaulted a competitor over a girl with a debt problem."
"A girl you pursued," I snapped. "A girl you bought."
"Yes," he agreed coolly. "A purchase. Not a partner. I forgot the distinction for a moment. I have corrected the error."
I felt like he had slapped me. It would have hurt less if he had actually hit me.
"So that's it?" I whispered. "You just... reboot?"
"System restore," he corrected. "I am re-establishing the perimeter. You have the Master Key. You wanted access? Fine. You have the run of the house. You can swim in the pool, drink the wine, read the books. But you do not come in here."
He gestured to the invisible line between us.
"And you do not touch me."
He picked up a sanitizing wipe from a canister on his desk.
He wiped the spot where my hand had touched the obsidian.
He cleaned me away.
"Get out."
POV: Silas Vane
She left.
She didn't slam the door. She didn't scream. She just turned around, her spine stiff, her movements jerky and broken, and walked out.
As soon as the door sealed, I ripped the headphones off. I threw them across the room. They hit the far wall with a satisfying crunch of plastic.
I swiveled back to the screens.
My hands were shaking inside the gloves.
System restore.
It was a lie. There was no restoring the system. The virus was already in the code.
I looked at the security feed. Elena was walking back across the glass bridge. She stopped in the middle. She looked down at the drop.
For a second—a heart-stopping, sickening second—I thought she might jump.
I gripped the arms of my chair so hard the leather groaned. Don't do it. Don't you dare.
She didn't jump. She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering, and walked to her room.
I closed my eyes.
It had to be this way.
The meeting this morning had been brutal. Thorne's lawyers had photos. Not just of the assault, but of Elena's father's debt records. They were threatening to leak that Vane Holdings was laundering money for the Bratva through her "book deal."
It was a fabrication, but it was dangerous.
If I kept her close—if I let myself be seen with her, holding her, wanting her—they would tear her apart to get to me. Thorne wouldn't just sue; he would destroy her reputation. He would paint her as a whore paid off to write a vanity piece.
I had to distance myself. I had to make it look like a business transaction gone cold.
I had to break her heart to save her life.
And the sickening truth was... I was good at it.
Demolition was my specialty. I knew exactly where to place the charges to bring the building down in its own footprint.
"You are a purchase. Not a partner."
I replayed the words in my head. They tasted like ash.
I looked at the hand I had wiped the desk with. I hated it.
I pulled the glove off.
My skin looked pale. Human.
I opened the drawer and took out the bottle of scotch. It was 10:00 AM. I didn't care.
I poured a glass. I drank it in one swallow.
I turned back to the work. I had to destroy Thorne. I had to buy his firm, crush his equity, and burn his legacy to the ground.
Only then could I afford to be human again.
POV: Elena Rostova
He thought he could starve me out.
He thought that by retreating into his tower and treating me like furniture, I would wither. That I would accept the "System Restore" and go back to being the quiet mouse in the guest room.
He forgot what I was.
I was a cockroach. I was a survivor. I had lived through poverty, eviction, and the Volkovs. I didn't wither when the heat turned off; I just put on another coat.
For three days, the Penthouse became a Cold War zone.
We lived in separate orbits. Silas would leave before I woke up. He would return late, bypassing the common areas, retreating straight to his bunker.
But he left traces.
Red-lined edits appeared on my desk, anonymous and brutal. Notes on the kitchen counter: "The coffee beans are low. Order more."
He was treating me like a ghost he was trying to exorcise.
But I had the key.
And I had the anger.
On the fourth day, I stopped moping.
If he wasn't going to talk to me, I was going to find out why he was terrified. He said it was the shareholders. He said it was business.
I didn't believe him. Silas Vane didn't bow to shareholders. He ate them for breakfast.
Something else was happening.
I waited until he left for the office at 6:30 AM.
I showered, dressed in black jeans and a hoodie, and pulled my hair back.
I picked up the master key.
I went to the library. Not to write. To dig.
I knew he kept the digital archives in the cloud, encrypted behind layers of biometric firewalls I couldn't breach. But Silas was tactile. He loved paper. He loved blueprints.
I went to the shelving unit labeled HISTORY.
Most of it was architectural history. Vitruvius. Bauhaus.
But on the bottom shelf, tucked behind a massive folio on Gothic Cathedrals, was a simple black binder. No label.
I pulled it out.
I sat on the floor and opened it.
It wasn't business. It was medical.
PATIENT: VANE, SILAS.
DIAGNOSIS:
Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD)Touch Aversion (Haphephobia)Complex PTSD
I scanned the therapy notes. They were old. Dated from his twenties.
Patient exhibits an extreme need for control as a coping mechanism for childhood instability.Patient views relationships as transaction costs.Triggers: Chaos, Loud Noise, Intimacy.
I turned the page.
INCIDENT REPORT: 2018.
Patient hospitalized following the collapse of the Cobalt Project site. Buried for six hours. Severe crush injuries.
The note below was handwritten, likely by a therapist:
"Silas believes he survived because he didn't panic. He believes emotions are inefficient oxygen consumers. He has pathologized feeling. To feel is to suffocate."
I closed the binder.
He wasn't punishing me. He was suffocating.
I was the chaos. I was the loud noise. The week we spent together, the intimacy, the sex—it had overloaded his system. He was burying himself in work because it was the only air he knew how to breathe.
He wasn't a villain plotting my demise. He was a trauma victim trying to rebuild his walls.
I felt a pang of sympathy, but I crushed it. Sympathy wouldn't fix this. He respected force. He respected leverage.
I put the binder back.
I walked out of the library.
I went to the kitchen. I looked at the pristine, empty counters.
"Okay, Architect," I whispered. "You want a clean house? Watch this."
I didn't make a mess. Messes annoyed him.
I made a void.
I took every single decorative item in the common area—the expensive vases, the architectural sculptures, the perfectly aligned coffee table books.
I hid them. I put them in the guest closet.
Then I took the chairs. The Barcelona chairs. The bar stools. I dragged them all into the East Wing and locked the door.
I stripped the main room bare. Just the floor and the windows.
If he wanted emptiness, I would give him absolute, terrifying emptiness.
I sat in the middle of the bare floor, legs crossed, waiting.
POV: Silas Vane
I came home at 8:00 PM, exhausted. The battle with Thorne was turning into a war of attrition. We were bleeding capital.
I stepped out of the elevator.
I stopped.
My brain misfired.
The atrium was... wrong.
It wasn't dirty. It wasn't messy.
It was erased.
The furniture was gone. The art was gone. The plants were gone. The space, usually a carefully curated balance of positive and negative space, was now a cavernous, echoing nothingness.
And in the center of the nothing, sat Elena.
She was just sitting there on the white rug, reading a paperback book.
"Where is my house?" I asked. My voice sounded too loud in the empty acoustic space.
She looked up. She didn't smile.
"I pruned it," she said calmly.
I walked toward her. "Where is the furniture?"
"It was a distraction. I removed the variables. Isn't that what we're doing now? Removing non-essential assets?"
My eye twitched.
"This is childish."
"No. This is design. Minimalist. Brutalist." She stood up. She walked toward me.
She stopped at the perimeter of my personal space. She smelled of soap and defiance.
"You're hiding, Silas. You're hiding in your office, you're hiding behind your gloves, and you're hiding behind your 'system restore' bullshit."
"I am protecting this company," I snarled. "And protecting you."
"I read your file," she dropped the bomb casually.
I went still. "What file?"
"The therapy binder. In the library. The one about the crush injury."
Ice water flooded my veins. "You invaded my medical history?"
"You invaded my financial history. We're even."
She took a step closer, breaking the invisible barrier.
"You aren't pulling away because of the shareholders. You're pulling away because for five minutes, under the bridge, you felt like a human being, and it terrified you more than being buried alive."
"Stop," I warned. "You are diagnosing things you do not understand."
"I understand that you think feelings burn oxygen," she quoted. "But guess what, Silas? You're above ground now. There's plenty of air. You don't have to hold your breath anymore."
She reached out.
I should have stepped back. I should have slapped her hand away.
But I froze.
She grabbed my left hand. She began to peel the glove off.
"Don't," I whispered.
"Let me in," she said.
She pulled the glove off. She dropped it on the floor.
She intertwined her fingers with mine. Her hand was warm, small, soft.
"It's just a hand, Silas. It's not a structural failure."
I looked at our hands.
The anger drained out of me, leaving me exhausted.
"You are relentless," I murmured.
"I'm Russian," she said with a faint smile. "We don't do subtle."
"Thorne is going after you," I said, finally speaking the truth. "He is threatening to expose the debt. To paint you as a whore."
"Let him," Elena said fiercely. "I've been called worse by better men. Words are just noise. I don't care about the world down there."
She stepped closer, pressing her body against mine.
"I care about the world up here."
I looked down at her.
"It is unsafe up here."
"I know," she said. "I have the blueprint. I know where the cracks are."
She kissed my chin.
"Kiss me, you idiot. Before I put the furniture back wrong on purpose."
A laugh—a genuine, rusty laugh—broke in my chest.
I wrapped my arms around her.
I kissed her.
And the empty room didn't feel hollow anymore. It felt like space waiting to be filled.