Chapter 31

 Liam's POV 

The silence between us was clinical, filtered through three inches of reinforced, sound-proofed glass.

I stood in the observation gallery of the sub-basement lab, a room that had once been used for high-level hardware testing and was now a makeshift prison. Below me, Isabella sat on the edge of a narrow white cot. They had taken her clothes, her identity, her agency. She was wearing a standard-issue grey jumpsuit that hung loosely on her frame. They had even taken the sapphire box, the last link to her mother. She sat perfectly still, her hands folded in her lap, staring at the far wall with an intensity that made my skin crawl.

"Isabella," I said into the intercom. My voice sounded metallic, stripped of its warmth by the cheap speakers.

She didn't move. She didn't even blink.

"The guardianship agreement was the only way to keep the DOJ from moving you," I explained, my voice echoing in the empty gallery. "Arthur is… he’s part of the oversight committee now. It was the price for the stay on the liquidation. If I hadn't signed it, they would have flown you to a black site in Virginia an hour ago. At least here, I can control the environment."

She finally turned her head. Her eyes were hollow, the fire that usually defined her extinguished and replaced by an absolute, strategic distance. She looked at me not as a husband, but as a jailer.

"You traded the marriage for the stock price," she said. Her voice was flat, devoid of accusation, which made it ten times worse.

"I traded the marriage for your safety," I corrected, my grip tightening on the edge of the console. "I’m fighting a war on ten different fronts, Isabella. I need the board on my side to keep the feds out of this room."

"Safety is a relative term in a lab, Liam. You know that better than anyone." She stood up slowly and walked to the glass. She stopped just short of touching it, her eyes scanning the invisible sensors embedded in the pane. "The public believes I'm an object. A patent. An 'it.' And you just confirmed that narrative with your signature. You didn't fight for my humanity. You fought for your equity."

"Isabella—"

"Don't." She cut me off, her voice like a blade. "You made the CEO choice. You did what you were built to do. Now I’m going to make mine."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I'm no longer waiting for the Sterling legal department to find a loophole," she said. "It means I’m done being the 'subject' of your rescue mission."

She turned her back on me and sat back down on the cot, returning to her vigil of the blank wall. I stood there for a long time, the intercom humming with empty air. I wanted to tell her that I hadn't slept, that every time I closed my eyes, I saw her face in the strobe of the emergency lights on the bridge. I wanted to tell her that I was terrified. But the CEO voice—the one that had been drilled into me since I was six years old—told me that emotion was a liability. It told me that the more I showed my hand, the more Arthur could use it as leverage.

I turned and walked out, the heavy steel doors hissing shut behind me.

I spent the next six hours in the war room on the fifty-fifth floor. The air was stale, smelling of ozone and over-caffeinated breath. We were fighting a three-front war: the media was cannibalizing Isabella’s reputation, the market was shorting our stock into oblivion, and the DOJ was breathing down our necks for a full forensic d******d of the Medusa files. Felix was hunched over a terminal, his face pale and sickly in the blue screen-glow.

"Liam," he said, his voice tight with a mix of exhaustion and alarm. "The Vane Global servers… there’s movement. High-level encryption bypasses. Someone is accessing the secondary trust accounts."

"Arthur?" I asked, moving to stand behind him.

"No. The IP is masked, but the bypass protocol is familiar. It’s coming from inside the building. From the lab."

I watched the data streams scrolling across the monitor. A new entity had appeared on the global network, weaving through the Cayman Islands and Singapore before settling into a dormant shell. Aethelgard Consulting.

"What is that?" Sarah asked, leaning over the desk, her eyes narrowed.

"A shell company," I said, a cold realization dawning on me. "Incorporated ten minutes ago. She’s using the Eleanor Vane Legacy Fund. It was a dormant account Arthur could never touch because it required a specific biometric handshake—one that only Eleanor or a genetic match could provide."

I watched as the shell company began to move with surgical precision. She wasn't buying Sterling stock to save us. She was buying debt. Specifically, the high-interest convertible notes that Arthur had used to leverage his recent expansion.

"She’s shorting her own father," I murmured, a flicker of something that felt dangerously like pride sparking in my chest.

"She’s shorting us, too," Felix noted, pointing to a series of rapid-fire sell orders on our subsidiary holdings. "She’s liquidating her Vane interests to create a capital wall. She’s building a fortress, Liam. And she’s doing it right under the noses of the federal guards."

I felt a sudden, sharp spike of adrenaline. She wasn't just surviving; she was building a weapon from inside her cell. She was playing the game better than I was.

My tablet chimed. A message from the board: The proxies are satisfied with the guardianship. The vote of no confidence has been tabled. For now. See you at the gala.

I should have felt relieved. I had the company. I had the control. But I looked at the name Aethelgard Consulting on the screen and realized that by treating her as an asset to be protected, I had made myself her enemy. I had lost the only variable that actually mattered in this equation.

The door to the war room burst open. Agent Vance looked frantic, his tie loosened, his face flushed.

"Mr. Sterling, we have a problem in the sub-basement. The Subject is no longer responding to the biometric stimulus."

"What? Did the hardware fail?"

"She’s flatlined," he said, his voice cracking. "The vitals just dropped to zero across the board."

I didn't wait for the elevator. I ran for the stairs, my heart a frantic hammer against my ribs. When I reached the lab, the glass doors were already open and a team of medics was swarming the room. Isabella was lying on the cot, her face deathly pale, her eyes closed.

"What happened?" I shouted, pushing past a guard.

"She didn't flatline," a lead medic said, staring at his tablet in utter confusion. "She… she recalibrated. Look at the sensors."

I looked at the monitor. The waveform—the glowing green signature of the Medusa core—was gone. In its place was a standard, perfectly normal human heartbeat. The "non-human" markers had vanished as if they had never existed.

"The frequency," I whispered. "She found the resonance. She changed the output to mask the core."

I looked at the small nightstand next to the cot. There was a single, small scrap of paper left where she’d been sitting. I picked it up.

The observer has left the building.

I looked up. The ventilation grate in the ceiling was missing. She was gone, vanished into the guts of the building she knew as well as I did.