All Chapters of Shadows of Silk & Steel: A Billionaire's Secret, A Bodyguar: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The lull inside Anton's London penthouse was tangible, thick and dense as wet concrete. Outside, beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city was an eternally expanding galaxy of light, but inside, the only light was the blue cool radiance of Sabatine's laptop and the single, muted spotlight shining above the kitchen island where Anton toiled, grinding coffee beans in deliberate, metronomic clicks. The snapping of the beans was a tick-tock marking the seconds of their standoff.For three days, they'd danced around each other in this cage of glass and steel. Professional, clinical, and beautifully distant. The accusation that hung between them was a ghost that neither would discuss outright. I think you're the leak. The words of Anton had carved out an abyss, and Sabatine had moved to the far side of its depths, his face a mask of carefully neutral indifference, his words limited to brusque, factual assertions.Anton topped the Chemex with hot water, the rich, perfumy bloom of the cof

Geneva rolled out beneath their feet as the Gulfstream touched down with a nostrum of expensive engineering. It was a city of contrasts—the serene, glacial blue of the lake contrasting with the brutalist concrete of international finance, the quaint clockwork precision of the old town set against the soundless, unforgiving flow of money. It was a fitting backdrop for a family war fought with cyber-cons and inherited anger.An unobtrusive, armored automobile sat on the runway, another thread in the unseen safety net that Anton's wealth could spin. They got into the back seat, partition already shut, encapsulating them in a new, movable silence. The plane talk had shifted the pressure of air between them. Now, air was thick with shared confidences and the freezing presence of trust.They were headed for the Hôtel d'Angleterre, an old-fashioned palatial hotel on the Quai du Mont-Blanc. It was Marcus to the letter: elegant, ostentatious, announcing arrival. As the car rode along the clean

Hôtel des Bergues was a Gilded Age fortress, its lobby a gaudy splendor against the high-tech hunt that had led them to its doorstep. But Sabe did not usher Anton in the flashy main entrance. He ushered them down a service corridor, his gaze on a map of the building's pipes and ductwork illuminating his phone."Anywhere except a guest suite," Sabe breathed, his breath misting in the cool night air. "They pay top credits for a long-term rent on an annexe sub-level. Originally designed for storage of archives. He's fitted it out as a lab."A lab to what?" Anton barked, his tone strained. The near-kiss was a fire in his mind, its energy redirected now into a cold, biting focus. "The prototype is code. A line of code."."Code that needs to be hidden, isolated space in order to be used as a weapon," Sabe answered, stopping in front of an empty, reinforced steel door. He removed a magnetic keycard from his wallet, blank and unlabeled. "He's not just hiding it. He's combining it. Preparing i

The safe house was a void, cut off from the world. For twenty-four hours, it was outside of time. The only sounds were the gurgle of the coffee maker, the soft clicking of Sabe's fingers on his laptop as he tried to track the digital ghost of the stolen primary code, and the gentle, insistent pulse of Anton's voice on encrypted video conference calls to his board, a desperate last ditch effort to save his company from the bleeding edge of the abyss.The silence was a fragile peace, woven from shared survival and the unspoken something that hummed between them. They moved around one another with a new, hesitatory wariness—Anton's gaze on the bandage visible from under Sabe's t-shirt, Sabe's hand lightly, automatically, brushing against Anton's when he handed him a mug.It couldn't last.It was Sabe who had destroyed it. He'd had one eye on news feeds on a second screen, a habit as involuntary as breathing. A Swiss finance newsletter had been the first to flash the alert. Then, minutes

The cell was a poured-concrete cube in a form, with nothing but a cold, bolted-hard bunk against the wall and a stainless-steel commode. There was no air, and what there was was cold and stagnant, and it carried the slight, institutional odor of bleach and hopelessness. Sabe sat on the bunk's edge, back to the wall, cuffed hands in his lap. He had been in holding for eight hours. The initial, freezing shock had worn off, leaving a brittle, grinding lucidity.They'd built the perfect cage. Fingerprints, emails, money. It was intended to convince a judge, a jury, and the world. It was intended to annihilate him, to make him question his own sanity. But clinging to the one, unbreakable boulder of Anton's belief—I believe you—had kept him from being swept under by the floodwaters of forged evidence.The steel door grated and clanged with a sound of raw, absolute power as the lock yielded. The door swung open, but it wasn't a guard rolling in a tray of food or Inspector Deschamps for furth