All Chapters of My Sister's Fiance: Chapter 171 - Chapter 178

Northlake’s twenty-first floor changed in under ten seconds.No alarm screamed. No red lights spun overhead like some cheap movie. Expensive buildings had their own way of panicking.More polite.Quieter.More disgusting.Outside the glass walls of the war room, the small light above the elevator access panel shifted from white to amber. The executive suite door at the far right end of the hall locked automatically with a soft click, far too elegant a sound for a situation where someone had just used a token under Nathaniel de Sanctis’s name from this very floor to terminate every session my team had open.An assistant carrying a stack of folders stopped mid-step.The finance guy who’d been pretending to check the wall clock like gossip could somehow be disguised as an interest in time looked at the elevator, then at the person beside him. That person looked at their tablet.The tablet suddenly looked like evidence.It was as if everyone on this floor had abruptly remembered they had

“I haven’t said you did.”“But everyone’s looking at me.”“Everyone looks at whatever’s easiest to see.” I glanced at the badge sitting in the tray. “That’s how tricks work.”“Your badge registered near the old executive records room two minutes before the session termination,” Zach finally said, his voice flat.Emily started crying.The tears came all at once, her face crumpling with the realization that the professional world didn’t care how many times she said no or how desperately she meant it.“I wasn’t there,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I’m scared of the records corridor. The lights go out all the time. I even asked Marissa to get a folder from there yesterday because... I know this sounds stupid, but that room is creepy.”“Valid,” Levi said.I glanced at him.He immediately looked down.“Wait.” Arun suddenly sat straighter.Everyone stopped.I was behind his chair in a second. “What?”He zoomed in on the badge-access subsystem log he’d managed to pull from a small cache

An hour later, Northlake’s twenty-first floor looked like an office again.I made sure of it.The old executive records room had been sealed. The black laptop, the sticky note, the charger, and everything else on that desk were now in evidence handling under Claire’s supervision, Zach’s security team, and a forensic crew whose names I hadn’t even learned before they started putting on gloves and speaking in sentences deliberately designed to be boring.Emily was back at her desk after spending almost twenty minutes crying in the restroom with Marissa.The finance guy in the gray shirt turned out to genuinely just have a habit of staring at elevators when he got nervous.Sad, but not criminal.The elevators were running again under new restrictions. People could move between floors once their badges had been reverified. The executive suite was open. There were still twice as many security people as before, but they’d moved out of the middle of the hallway and gone back to being expensi

He walked over to his desk, picked up the tablet, then turned the screen toward me. A preschool authorization message was already drafted, with two blank signature fields.My name.His.Not sent.Yet.I looked at it, then at him.“You waited for me to sign it,” I said.“Yes.”“Character development. I’m almost touched.”“Almost?”“Don’t get greedy.”A small smile appeared, then faded before it could fully form. Maybe because of my face. Maybe because he’d finally realized I hadn’t come into his office to fight.At least not at full capacity.I took the tablet and skimmed the wording.Updated pickup authorization. Marco De Luca. Northlake secure transfer. Parent approval: Arabella Gómez, Zachary de Sanctis.Our names side by side.I stared at them a little longer than necessary.Parent approval.I added my digital signature. “Don’t let Max bring Red Rex if Marco stops by Blackpine.”“Marco isn’t stopping by Blackpine.”“Good.”“If Max asks for a car snack?”“Give him one. Otherwise he’