The mahogany desk in the corner office of the Thorne Building was an altar to order. Every pen was aligned, every digital display was hushed, and the air smelled faintly of cedar and cold air conditioning. For Elias Thorne, this was his sanctuary. Here, the world made sense. It was governed by numbers, contracts, and the steady, predictable pulse of corporate growth.
Or at least, it should have been.
Elias stared at a spreadsheet detailing the quarterly acquisition of a boutique hotel chain, but the black-and-white figures weren't sticking. Instead, his mind kept drifting back to the Metropolitan Gallery. More specifically, it kept drifting to a smudge of yellow paint on a girl's cheek and the absurd image of a "grumpy octopus" hiding in a twenty-million-dollar masterpiece.
He leaned back, his chair creaking with a sound that felt like a scream in the silent room. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling a strange, lingering restlessness. It was as if she had introduced a virus into his perfectly calibrated system.
The vibration of his personal phone on the desk broke his reverie. He didn't have to look at the screen to know who it was. The caller ID, M. Thorne, carried its own weight.
He let it ring three times before picking up. "Hello, Mother."
"You sound tired, Elias," Margot Thorne's voice was crisp, her tone carrying that "controlled warmth" that always reminded him of a velvet-covered brick. "I assume you've been at your desk since six?"
"Business doesn't wait for the sun to rise, Mother. You taught me that."
"I also taught you that a Thorne who burns out is of no use to the legacy," Margot countered smoothly. "Which brings me to the point. The Autumn Gala is in three weeks. Your father and I have already seen the guest list. The Sterling family will be there. Their eldest daughter, Clara, has just returned from her residency in Paris."
Elias felt a familiar tightening in his jaw. The "marital status" conversation. It was a recurring ghost in his life, appearing whenever the Thorne interests required a strategic alliance.
"I'm familiar with Clara's resume, Mother. I'm also familiar with the fact that I have three mergers to close before the gala. I don't have time for curated courtships."
"You don't have the luxury of time, Elias," Margot's voice sharpened slightly, the steel grey of her eyes almost audible through the phone. "Your father's patience is thinning. He wants stability. He wants to see the next generation secured. A man in your position without a wife is a man with a flank exposed. It makes the board nervous."
"The board is nervous because the market is volatile, not because I'm eating dinner alone," Elias snapped, then immediately regretted the crack in his composure. "I'll consider the gala, Mother. But I won't be paraded around like a prize stallion for the Sterlings."
"Consideration isn't a commitment, Elias. We'll speak on Sunday at dinner. Do try to look less like a man carrying the world on his shoulders. It's unrefined."
The line went dead. Elias set the phone down with a controlled movement, though his grip was tight enough to turn his knuckles white. The pressure was a physical thing, a ceiling that was slowly lowering day by day. His father's shadow was long, and his mother's expectations were the light that ensured he could never escape it.
A sharp, rhythmic knock at the door saved him from his own thoughts.
"Enter," Elias commanded.
Silas Grey stepped into the office. The head of the audit department was a man after Elias's own heart: precise, understated, and utterly devoid of unnecessary drama. He carried a leather-bound folder like it was a sacred text.
"Elias," Silas said, nodding. He didn't waste time with pleasantries; it was why they worked so well together. "We've finished the internal review of the mid-level accounts in the logistics sector. There's a discrepancy. A significant one."
Elias adjusted his cuffs, his professional mask sliding back into place. "How significant?"
"Seven figures. Potentially reaching ten if we factor in the offshore diversions," Silas said, laying the folder on the desk. "It's a clean job, technically speaking. Someone knew the bypass codes for the secondary verification. They weren't just guessing. They knew the Thorne protocols."
Elias opened the folder. His eyes skimmed the data, transaction logs, timestamps, and the trail of digital breadcrumbs that led to a single employee ID.
"Dorian Sinclair," Elias read the name aloud. The name sounded vaguely familiar, one of the hundreds of young, ambitious men who moved through the Thorne ecosystem hoping to catch a stray spark of power. "He's been with us for what, three years?"
"Two and a half," Silas corrected. "He was fast-tracked by the regional manager. Charming, persuasive, and apparently, deeply greedy. He's been skimming from the procurement funds for eighteen months. He thought he was clever enough to hide it behind a series of shell companies registered in his mother's name."
Elias turned a page. "His mother?"
"Vivienne Sinclair. She seems to be unaware of it, based on the communication logs we intercepted. However..." Silas tapped a printout. "He was reckless. He started spending. A new apartment, a luxury car he couldn't afford, and several high-stakes gambling debts that appeared in the last six months. We have enough to hand him over to the authorities this afternoon."
Elias stared at the photo of Dorian Sinclair pinned to the corner of the report. The man looked polished, a bit too flashy, with eyes that lacked the steady weight of true character. He was the kind of man Elias despised, someone who took shortcuts because they felt entitled to the destination.
"And his family?" Elias asked, his voice low.
"The Sinclairs are... complicated," Silas said, pulling a second, smaller file from the folder. "The father, Lucian, was an art teacher. Highly respected, but passed away a few years ago. He left them with very little. The daughter is the primary breadwinner alongside the mother's modest income."
Silas slid a photograph across the mahogany.
Elias's heart did something it hadn't done in years. It skipped.
The girl in the photograph wasn't the polished, business-casual figure of a corporate employee. She was caught in a candid shot, walking down a city street, her auburn hair caught in a breeze, her green-and-gold eyes squinting against the sun. She was wearing a flowing forest-green dress, carrying a canvas that looked larger than she was.
It was her. The girl from the museum.
Lyra.
"Lyra Sinclair," Silas continued, oblivious to the storm brewing behind Elias's grey eyes. "She's an artist. Works out of a studio in the warehouse district. No criminal record, no debt other than a few months of back rent. By all accounts, she's the anchor of that family. If Dorian goes down, the legal fees alone will destroy them. Not to mention the reputational damage to the Sinclair name."
Elias didn't hear the rest of Silas's analysis. The room seemed to expand and contract at the same time.
The girl who had looked at a Thorne-commissioned painting and seen a "grumpy octopus" was the sister of the man who had been robbing his family blind. It was a coincidence so sharp it felt like a deliberate insult from the universe.
Or, perhaps, it was an opportunity.
Elias looked at the photo of Lyra again. He remembered her laugh, the way she had offered him a peppermint as if he were a person and not a monument. He remembered how she had stood in the light of the gallery, completely unaware that she was trespassing in a world of giants.
Now, her brother had given Elias the keys to her cage.
"Does Dorian know we're on to him?" Elias asked.
"Not yet," Silas said. "We've flagged his accounts and restricted his access, but he hasn't been confronted. I was waiting for your word to involve the police."
Elias leaned back, his mind working with the cold, ruthless speed that made him a titan in the boardroom. He thought of his mother's voice. "A man in your position without a wife is a man with a flank exposed". He thought of the endless parade of "suitable" women his parents wanted to chain him to. He thought of the suffocating, predictable path his life was set on.
And then he thought of Lyra Sinclair, with her "destiny" constellation name and her messy, vibrant defiance of everything he stood for.
If he married a girl like Clara Sterling, he would be finishing the tomb his parents had built for him. But if he married someone like Lyra... someone he could control through a debt of blood and loyalty... he could satisfy the board, quiet his parents, and perhaps, for the first time, own something that wasn't part of a pre-written legacy.
It was cold. It was manipulative. It was exactly what a Thorne would do.
"Don't call the police," Elias said, his voice dropping to a register that made Silas go still.
Silas blinked, his brow furrowing behind his glasses. "Elias? The amount he stole is enough for a twenty-year sentence. We can't just let it slide."
"We aren't letting it slide, Silas. We're... reclassifying the debt." Elias stood up, walking to the floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over the city. Below, the people looked like ants, scurrying through their small, chaotic lives. "I want Dorian Sinclair picked up. Quietly. I want him brought to the holding facility at the precinct, but I don't want the charges filed. Not yet."
"And the sister?" Silas asked, his voice cautious.
Elias watched his own reflection in the glass, the slicked-back hair, the stormy eyes, the expression of a man who was about to break a world just to see how it felt to put it back together.
"I'll handle the sister personally," Elias said. "Get me her address. And Silas? Not a word of this to my father. This is an internal Thorne matter. My matter."
Silas nodded, though he looked more unsettled than he ever had in the five years he'd worked for Elias. "I'll have the details on your desk in an hour."
When Silas left, the silence rushed back into the room, but it no longer felt like a sanctuary. It felt like the hush of a theater before the curtain rises on a tragedy.
Elias picked up the photo of Lyra. He traced the line of her jaw with his thumb. She was beautiful, yes, but it was the life in her eyes that bothered him. It was a challenge. She had looked at him and seen a man who needed a peppermint. She had looked at his world and seen a grumpy octopus.
He wondered what she would see when he told her that her brother's life was in his hands.
He felt a pang of something, guilt? No, he didn't allow himself the luxury of guilt. It was more like a dark, magnetic curiosity. He wanted to see those green-and-gold eyes when the light of her idealism met the cold reality of the Thorne name.
He crossed back to his desk and picked up his desk phone. "Sarah? Clear my schedule for tomorrow morning. I have a meeting with a new... associate. And send my tailor to my apartment tonight. I need a new suit. Something in midnight blue."
He hung up, his eyes never leaving Lyra's face in the photograph.
"The Void, Lyra," he whispered to the empty room. "It's not a transition. It's an invitation."
He stood there for a long time, the shadows of the skyscrapers lengthening across his office floor, until the only thing visible in the fading light was the cold, grey steel of his gaze. He had spent his whole life being the son his family wanted. He had spent his whole life being the CEO the board required.
But tomorrow, he was going to be the man who stole a muse. And for the first time in twenty-eight years, Elias Thorne felt like he was finally the one holding the brush.