Chapter 32

Isabella's POV 

The city smelled of wet iron, exhaust, and the salt-tang of the approaching storm.

I was standing on a gravel-strewn rooftop in Long Island City, three miles from the Sterling Tower. I was wearing a black windbreaker and heavy jeans I’d lifted from a maintenance locker during my crawl through the HVAC system. My hair was tucked under a dark beanie, my face obscured by the grime of the tunnels. To the world, I was a ghost. To the sensors, I was invisible.

I pulled a new phone from my pocket—not a burner, but a custom-built, hardware-encrypted device I had stashed in the bakery cellar weeks ago as a contingency. I tapped a single icon on the screen.

"Aethelgard," a voice answered on the first ring.

"Report," I said. My voice felt raspier than usual, raw from the dust of the ventilation shafts.

"The buyback is complete," said the woman on the other end. She was a former Vane compliance officer, a woman Arthur had fired and forgotten, and someone I had spent months quietly funding. "You now own forty percent of the Vane debt. Arthur is overleveraged and his margin calls are starting to trigger. If you call the notes, he’s insolvent by the time the markets open tomorrow."

"Not yet," I said, watching the lights of Manhattan flicker across the water. "Wait for the gala. I want him to feel the floor drop while he’s standing in front of the cameras."

"And Sterling?"

"Sterling is Liam’s problem," I said, the words tasting like ash in my mouth.

The cold air felt good against my skin—real, biting, and honest. For the first time in years, the low-frequency hum in my bones was gone. By recalibrating my biometric signature to mimic a standard human pulse, I hadn't just hidden from the federal sensors; I had severed the invisible umbilical cord that tied me to the tower’s core. I was no longer Subject 0. I was just Isabella.

"The board has issued a Level 4 alert," my contact continued. "They’re telling the press you were kidnapped by an unknown group. They’re trying to save the stock price by framing you as a victim again."

"Let them think it," I said. "Victims are underestimated. It’s the only advantage I have left."

I looked toward the Manhattan skyline. The Sterling Tower stood like a needle piercing the clouds, glowing with a cold, corporate light. Somewhere in those upper floors, Liam was probably staring at a spreadsheet, trying to calculate the cost of my disappearance. He was looking for his asset. He was looking for the wife he’d traded for a seat at the table.

He wouldn't find her. The woman who loved him had died in that glass cell.

A black sedan—battered, mud-flecked, and utterly inconspicuous—pulled up to the curb in the alleyway below. A man in a long grey coat stepped out, his movements fluid and precise. It was the man from the bakery cellar, the one who had guided me through the first transition.

"Who are you, really?" I asked as I descended the rusted fire escape and met him in the shadows.

"I'm the one who pulls the slides," he said, holding up a small glass sliver between two gloved fingers. It caught the dim light of the streetlamp. "The blood on the bridge was a lure, Isabella. A way to get you back into the system so you could see the truth for yourself. But the code… the code was a message from the real Eleanor."

A tremor ran through my hand, the first sign of weakness I’d allowed all night. "She’s alive."

"She’s in Zurich. Deep cover," he said, opening the rear door of the sedan. "And she’s waiting for the Chair to take her seat. She didn't build you to be a patent, Isabella. She built you to be a successor."

I could have run. I had the money, the encryption, and the anonymity to disappear into the mountains of Switzerland or the beaches of Brazil. I could have left the Vanes and the Sterlings to tear each other apart in the wreckage of their own greed. But I thought of the video of the woman in the chair, her eyes reflecting the tower. I thought of the look on Liam’s face when he signed that guardianship—the look of a man who thought he knew better than the woman he claimed to cherish.

"Take me to the airport," I said, my voice hardening.

"The airport is watched by every federal agency and Sterling security detail in the Tri-State area," he noted.

"I don't need a plane," I replied, looking toward the dark, churning expanse of the East River. "I need a ship. We’re going to the docks."

As we pulled away from the curb, my phone buzzed with an aggressive, high-priority alert from the Aethelgard server.

WARNING: SHELL COMPANY DETECTED BY STERLING TECH CYBER-SECURITY. TRACING INITIATED.

Liam. He was already hunting me. Even now, with his world collapsing, his first instinct was to pull me back into the grid, to re-establish control. I felt a cold smile touch my lips. I tapped a single, pre-programmed command on the screen.

DELETE TRACE. TRIGGER POISON PILL.

The Sterling servers would be busy for the next twelve hours trying to keep their own infrastructure from melting down. It was a distraction—my own little parting gift, an apology for the cage he’d built and the heart he’d broken.

The narrative was no longer about the Designer Daughter or the Vane Heiress. It was about the Independent Variable. And the variable was moving toward the sea.