I folded my arms. “You first.”
One corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile.
“Adrian Vale.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t waste my patience.”
I hated the way my breath caught. Hated even more that he noticed.
“Rowan Hale.”
Something flickered in his eyes at my last name, then vanished.
“How did you know the bourbon was poisoned?”
“I smelled it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is if you understand chemistry.”
“I understand more than you think.”
I held his gaze. “Then you understand bitter almond does not belong in a fifty-thousand-dollar bottle of bourbon.”
He leaned back slightly.
“Cyanide?”
“Or a related delivery compound. Enough to kill you.”
“Confident.”
“My father was a toxicologist. Confidence was kind of his hobby.”
His attention sharpened.
“Hale,” he said again, quieter now. “Nathan Hale?”
The use of my father’s name hit like cold water.
“You knew him?”
“I knew of him.”
That was billionaire language. Men like Adrian always knew of people. It let them keep distance while pretending intimacy.
“My father worked for Helix Biolabs,” I said. “He died eleven years ago. Officially, it was ruled a suicide. Unofficially, somebody made him drink something that smelled exactly like what was in your glass tonight.”
The SUV went silent.
Adrian’s thumb stopped moving over his phone.
Up front, Jace glanced in the rearview mirror.
Helix Biolabs had once been a promising New Jersey research company before being swallowed whole by Vale Holdings after my father’s death. The acquisition had barely made the news. One more corporate meal in a city built on them. But I remembered every article, every buried quote, every polite lie about tragic circumstances and strategic restructuring.
Adrian watched me for a long moment.
“That’s interesting,” he said.
“Interesting is one word for it.”
The car dipped underground into a private garage beneath a tower of dark glass on the Upper East Side. We rolled to a stop in a secured bay, and before I could decide whether to fight or run, Adrian was already out of the SUV. He opened my door himself and extended a hand.
I stared at it.
“Take it,” he said.
“I’d rather bleed out on this concrete.”
“Dramatic,” he said. “Get out anyway.”
I ignored the hand and climbed out on my own.
He did not like that.
I could tell because something almost amused and almost irritated passed through his face at the same time, like I had violated a minor royal custom.
We entered a private elevator with no visible buttons. He scanned his palm. The doors sealed. The elevator rose fast enough to make my ears pop.
When it opened, I stepped into a penthouse that looked less like a home than a high-budget threat. Floor-to-ceiling windows. Black stone. museum-grade art. A view of Manhattan glittering below like a pile of stolen jewelry.
“Sit,” Adrian said, gesturing to a cream-colored sofa.
“I’m not your employee.”
“No,” he said. “You’re the woman who knows what was in my glass.”
I stayed standing.
He loosened his tie, removed his jacket, and set it over a chair with the care of a man who believed the world existed to be arranged neatly around him. Then he crossed to a bar, opened a different decanter, poured himself two fingers of amber liquid, and paused.
I laughed once, sharp and humorless.
“You trust that one?”
He set the glass down without drinking.
“Talk.”
So I did.
Maybe it was the adrenaline. Maybe it was the way his penthouse made everything feel stripped and artificial, as if lying in it would sound ridiculous. Maybe I was tired of carrying my father’s death around alone.
I told him about Nathan Hale, brilliant and absentminded, who used to let me sit on lab stools and sniff raw materials while he quizzed me like other fathers taught baseball. I told him how he started coming home tense the year I turned eleven, how he stopped letting me answer the phone, how he installed deadbolts and taught me what chemical antidote kits looked like.
Then I told Adrian about the day I found my father dead at the kitchen table.
No blood.
No struggle.
Just the smell.
And the silence after.
“I was placed in foster care three weeks later,” I said. “Helix was acquired six months after that. Funny timing.”
Adrian listened without interrupting.
When I finished, he poured water instead of whiskey and handed me the glass himself.
I took it, because passing out from dehydration in front of him felt like giving away stock.
“Why were you working at the Ledger?” he asked.
“I needed the money.”
His eyes stayed on mine.
“That’s not the whole answer.”
I looked away first.
Because that, unfortunately, was also true.
Three months earlier I had seen a business article announcing that Vale Holdings planned a full strategic relaunch of Helix through a sale to a defense and biotech conglomerate called Graywatch Systems. Same lab. Same skeleton, different suit. I had applied to every Vale-owned venue with a fake polished smile and a résumé scrubbed of anything that might sound threatening.
I had not expected to end up ten inches from Adrian Vale’s murder attempt.
“I wanted proximity,” I said.
“To me?”
“To Helix,” I said. “To anyone in your orbit who might know why my father died.”
The room changed.
Not loudly. Not visibly. But something in Adrian’s posture cooled another ten degrees.
“So you came into my company under false pretenses.”
“I came to get answers.”
“And if tonight hadn’t happened?”
“I still would have kept looking.”
He stepped closer.
“Did you know someone was going to poison me?”
“No.”
“Were you sent?”
“No.”
“Have you spoken to Marcus Draven in the last thirty days?”
Marcus Draven. Casino king, East Coast rival, tabloid villain, rumored enemy of everyone with more than one luxury property.
“No.”
He studied my face like an investor deciding whether to destroy a startup.
Then the penthouse intercom buzzed.
Jace’s voice came through.
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