CHAPTER 20

Mark noticed the silence before he noticed anything else was wrong.

Barnaby always met him at the door — always, regardless of how long Mark had been gone or how little attention he'd paid the dog in the days before. It was the one constant Mark had never had to work for, the one relationship in his life that required nothing of him but his presence, and even that, apparently, he'd managed to squander.

"Barnaby?" His voice echoed off the penthouse's expensive, empty surfaces. No click of claws on marble. No enthusiastic scramble toward the door.

He found the food bowl gone from the kitchen first — not empty, gone, the exact spot where it usually sat wiped clean, as though it had never existed at all. Then the dog bed by the window, vanished. Then the leash that usually hung by the door, missing along with everything else that had ever suggested a dog lived here at all.

"What the hell," Mark muttered, pulling out his phone, dialing the housekeeper with hands that were, to his genuine surprise, shaking slightly.

She picked up on the second ring, her voice carrying the particular calm of someone who had spent the last hour rehearsing exactly what she would say if this call came. "Mr. Vance."

"Where's Barnaby? His things are gone. Did you take him somewhere?"

A pause, brief but deliberate. "I fed him at six, same as always. Everything was in its place when I left at seven."

"So someone took him. Someone got into my apartment and took my dog." Mark's voice rose, the particular outrage of a man discovering, for possibly the first time in his adult life, genuine consequences for a choice he'd made. "Did you see anyone? Anything unusual?"

"No, sir. I'm sorry. I noticed nothing out of the ordinary." Another pause, and something in her tone shifted, subtle but unmistakable — not quite satisfaction, but something adjacent to it. "Would you like me to call building security to review the footage?"

Mark hesitated. Building security meant Viktor. Viktor meant questions about why Mark had left a dog alone for two full days the week before, questions that would inevitably reach Alexander, questions Mark did not currently have satisfying answers for.

"No," he said finally, tightly. "I'll handle it myself."

He hung up before she could respond, standing alone in his too-quiet apartment, feeling — for reasons he refused to examine too closely — considerably more shaken than the disappearance of a dog should have made him.

---

It took him twenty minutes of pacing before the anger fully crystallized into something more useful: the certainty that this wasn't random. Nobody broke into a penthouse in this building and stole a dog and nothing else. This was a message. Somebody wanted him to know they could get to him, quietly, without leaving a trace — and there was really only one person in this company petty enough, and connected enough, to pull it off.

Elena.

He poured himself a drink he didn't particularly want, more for the ritual of it than the taste, and stood at the window replaying the last month in his head — every small humiliation stacking on the one before it, until the sum of them felt less like a series of professional setbacks and more like a coordinated campaign he was only now beginning to fully appreciate. The audit. The whispered conversations that stopped when he walked into rooms. The corner office that had once been his, now hers. And now this — his own dog, taken from under his nose, with a housekeeper who'd sounded far too composed on the phone for someone genuinely surprised by the theft.

He didn't have proof. He didn't need proof, not for what he was about to do. He pulled up a contact he hadn't called in months, one he'd been saving for exactly the kind of moment when Vance Enterprises internal channels stopped being useful to him.

The line rang twice before it connected.

"Richard Sterling."

"It's Mark," he said, pacing to the window, looking out over a city that suddenly felt considerably less like it belonged to him than it had that morning. "We need to talk. Properly, this time. Not the polite version where you pretend you're not interested in taking Vance Enterprises apart piece by piece."

There was a pause on the other end — measured, unhurried, the pause of a man who had been waiting, patiently, for exactly this call. "I was wondering when you'd stop being loyal to a family that's already thrown you out of the corner office, Mark."

"They stole my dog," Mark said, and even as the words left his mouth he heard how absurd they sounded, how small a grievance to be the thing that finally broke something in him. But it wasn't really about the dog. It had never really been about the dog. It was about the accumulated weight of every humiliation since Elena had walked back into his life with a corner office and Alexander's full backing — every meeting where his name got quietly removed from a campaign, every whispered conversation that stopped when he entered a room.

"I don't care about the dog," Richard said, and something in his voice had sharpened, gone colder and considerably more interested. "I care about what you can give me. Access. Information. The things a man in your position, properly motivated, tends to have plenty of."

Mark closed his eyes, feeling something shift inside him — not a decision so much as the final collapse of a resistance he hadn't realized he was still putting up. "What do you need to know?"

"Not on the phone," Richard said, and Mark could hear the faint, satisfied smile in his voice, the sound of a man who had been fishing patiently for weeks and had finally felt the line go taut. "There's a place we can talk. Somewhere private. I'll have someone reach out with the details."

"Someone."

"You'll know her when you see her," Richard said, and something in the phrasing made the back of Mark's neck prickle, though he couldn't have said exactly why. "She's very good at what she does."

"And what is it, exactly, that I'm agreeing to?"

"Nothing yet," Richard said smoothly. "Just a conversation. You still have the right to walk away from a conversation, Mark. That door doesn't close until you decide to close it yourself." A pause, deliberate, calculated to land. "Though I'd think carefully about what you actually have to walk back to, at this point. From what you've just told me, it doesn't sound like much."

The words landed exactly where they were meant to, and Mark, standing alone in an apartment stripped of the one uncomplicated relationship he'd ever managed to maintain, found he didn't have much of an answer for that.

"Fine," he said. "Set it up."