PRIORITIES
POV: Elena Rostova
The smell of smoke didn't leave the fabric.
It had been twenty-four hours since the "event"—the sterilized, corporate term the news anchors were using for the attempted bombing of Vane Tower. Twenty-four hours since the man I was sleeping with had cracked another man's femur with a brutalist sculpture.
We were back in the Spire.
Silas had refused the hotel. He had refused the police escort to a safe house.
"A captain does not sleep at the Holiday Inn while his ship has a hole in the hull," he had snarled at Marcus.
So we were here. High above the city, in a kingdom that felt like a ruin.
The power was back on, running off the massive backup generators in the sub-basement, but the lighting was different. The soft, ambient glow I had grown used to was replaced by a harsher, slightly flickering white light. The air filtration system was working overtime, creating a constant, low-grade whoosh sound as it tried to scrub the scent of ozone and burning insulation from the air.
I sat at the kitchen island. My laptop was open.
VANITY FAIR: THE ARCHITECT'S CONFESSION. READ THE EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT FROM 'THE GOD IN THE GLASS MACHINE'.
Silas had done it. He had leaked the manuscript.
And the world was eating it up.
Twitter wasn't condemning him as a sociopath. They were psychoanalyzing him. They called his obsession "tortured genius." They called our toxic dynamic "darkly romantic." We were the trending topic in five continents.
But looking at Silas now, "romantic" was not the word I would choose.
He was standing by the damaged south wall, where the terrace door had been forced open. He was shirtless. The bandage on his arm was stark white against his skin. His right hand was in the black splint.
He was scrubbing.
He held a chemical solvent and a rag in his good left hand. He was scrubbing the frame of the door, trying to remove a scorch mark left by the cutting torch the fake firemen had used.
"Silas," I said quietly.
He didn't stop. Scrub. Scrub. Scrub.
"Silas, you have stitches."
"The carbon residue is acidic," he muttered, not looking at me. "If I don't remove it, it will pit the aluminum. The integrity of the frame will be compromised."
"You need to rest. The doctor said you need to keep your heart rate down."
"My heart rate is fine. My fenestration is damaged."
He was manic.
Since we got back from the clinic, he hadn't slept. He hadn't eaten. He had spent ten hours on the phone with structural engineers, three hours yelling at the security firm he had just fired, and the rest of the time doing... this.
Cleaning. Fixing. Obsessing.
He was prioritizing the building over the body.
I closed my laptop. The sliding click echoed in the tense room.
"It's just a door frame, Silas."
He stopped. His back muscles tensed, corded and rigid.
He turned slowly. His face was pale, emphasizing the dark circles under his eyes and the bruising on his jaw where Volkov had hit him days ago. He looked like a statue that had been dropped and glued back together wrong.
"Just a door frame?" he repeated. His voice was dangerously soft.
He walked toward me, dropping the chemical rag on the floor. A violation of his own rules.
"That door frame," he said, tapping the granite counter with his splinted hand, "is the thermal barrier. If it fails, the pressure differential changes. The humidity rises. Mold grows in the drywall. The artwork warps. The floor buckles."
He leaned in close. He smelled of bleach and sweat.
"Entropy, Elena. Chaos. It starts with a smudge. It starts with a scorch mark. If you let one flaw exist, you validate all the flaws. And then the whole thing comes down."
"You're not talking about the door," I said, meeting his gaze.
"I am talking about everything."
He ran a hand through his hair, messing up the perfect style he usually maintained.
"I let them in," he whispered. "I designed the firewall. I coded the locks. And two men in cheap costumes walked right up the stairs."
"They had tools. They had insider help."
"They breathed on you," he snarled. "They touched you."
He grabbed my shoulders. His grip was tight.
"I failed, Elena. Do you understand? I am the Architect. My only job is to control the environment. And I let the fire in."
"But you put it out."
"Luck," he scoffed. "And violence. Crude, messy violence. I had to become an animal to save the structure. That is not a victory. That is a regression."
He pushed away from the counter, pacing the kitchen like a caged tiger.
"We have to rebuild. Better. Stronger." He pointed to the elevator. "New biometrics. Retinal and vascular scans. Steel shutters on the stairwells. We are turning the Spire into a vault."
"And us?" I asked. "Are we turning into prisoners?"
He stopped pacing. He looked at me.
"Priorities, Elena. Safety first. Then comfort. Then... whatever this is."
He waved his hand between us.
"Whatever this is?" I stood up. My chair scraped the floor. "Yesterday you said we fit. You said '1.618'. You leaked my memoir to the world to save us. Don't pretend we're just roommates again."
"We are liabilities to each other!" he shouted. The sudden volume made me jump.
He winced, clutching his stitched arm.
"Look at us," he said, breathing hard. "I am bleeding. You are traumatized. My stock is fluctuating based on hashtags. This is not efficient."
He walked to the fridge. He pulled out a bottle of water. He struggled to open it with one hand.
I walked over. I took the bottle. I cracked the seal. I handed it back.
He took it. He didn't say thank you.
"I am sending you to the Hamptons," he said.
The water bottle crinkled in his grip.
I stared at him. "Excuse me?"
"The East Hampton estate. It is gated. High walls. Private security is already there sweeping the perimeter. You leave in an hour. The helicopter is en route to the roof pad."
"I'm not going to the Hamptons."
"The Spire is a construction zone," he argued. "There will be crews here for weeks. Noise. Dust. Repairs. It is not suitable for habitation."
"It's suitable for you."
"I am the foreman. I have to be here."
"So you stay, and I run away?" I crossed my arms. "No."
"Elena—"
"No, Silas. You don't get to ship me off like a piece of art you're afraid might get scratched. I stayed when there were hitmen. I stayed when there was a bomb. I'm certainly staying for the drywall repair."
He slammed the water bottle onto the counter. Water sloshed out.
"Why?" he demanded. "Why are you so difficult? Why can't you just let me keep you safe?"
"Because being safe isn't enough anymore!" I yelled back. "I want to be with you. And you pushing me away because you're scared of 'entropy' is just your Pride talking. You're embarrassed."
He froze. "Embarrassed?"
"Yes. You're embarrassed that you're human. You're embarrassed that you couldn't calculate your way out of a fistfight. You're embarrassed that you need me."
Silas stared at me. The air crackled with static tension.
"I do not need things," he said coldly. "Need is a deficit."
"Bullshit. You haven't slept in two days because you're terrified that if you close your eyes, I'll vanish. You're obsessively cleaning door frames because you can't clean your own conscience."
I walked up to him. I placed my hands on his bare chest, right over his heart. It was beating fast. Too fast.
"You aren't sending me away, Silas. Because if I leave now... I'm not coming back."
The threat hung in the air.
His jaw worked. He looked down at my hands on his skin. He covered them with his good hand.
"If you stay," he whispered, "you live in a war zone. I am not going to be 'nice'. I am not going to have time for dates. I am going to be working until my eyes bleed to fix this."
"Fine," I said. "I have a book to finish. I'll write in the war zone."
He let out a shuddering breath. He rested his forehead against mine.
"You are stubborn."
"Structural load," I reminded him. "I hold the roof up."
He closed his eyes.
"The helicopter," he said into the silence.
"Cancel it."
"No. I need it to bring something else."
He pulled back. The vulnerability vanished, replaced by the shark-like focus of the Architect.
"Marcus," he called out.
The poor assistant emerged from the library, holding a stack of NDAs.
"Sir?"
"Redirect the chopper. Send it to the warehouse in New Jersey."
"The archives, sir?"
"Yes. Box 404. Bring it here."
Marcus's eyes widened. "Box 404? But sir, that contains the..."
"I know what it contains. Bring it."
Marcus nodded and retreated.
I looked at Silas. "What's in Box 404?"
Silas walked to the window, looking out at the city that was slowly recovering from the shock of the smoke.
"Thorne has tried to ruin me with rumors," he said. "He tried to ruin me with legal filings. He thinks this is a game of PR."
He turned to me. His face was a mask of cold, terrifying determination.
"He thinks he is safe because the police arrested Volkov and not him. He thinks he kept his hands clean."
"And?"
"Box 404 contains the dirt," Silas said. "Not rumors. Facts. Ten years of data on the urban planning commission bribes. The shoring shortcuts on the Midtown Tunnel project. The bodies—metaphorical and literal—that Aris Thorne has buried in concrete."
"You had this all along?" I asked, stunned. "Why didn't you use it?"
"Mutually Assured Destruction," Silas said simply. "We all have dirt, Elena. In this city, you don't build to the clouds without getting mud on your boots. If I released his files, he would release mine. It was a stalemate."
"So why now?"
Silas looked at his splinted hand. He looked at the door frame he had been scrubbing.
"Because he touched you," he said. "The stalemate ends when the enemy targets civilians."
He walked back to the counter and picked up the chemical rag.
"The helicopter lands in thirty minutes. While we wait... I am going to finish cleaning this frame."
He turned his back on me.
I watched him scrub. The rhythmic motion. The tension in his shoulders.
He had chosen his priority.
He wasn't sending me away. But he wasn't holding me, either.
He was going to war. And God help Aris Thorne, because Silas Vane wasn't planning a lawsuit.
He was planning an execution.
POV: Silas Vane
Three Hours Later.
The box sat on the obsidian desk in my office. It was a simple Banker's Box, dusty, marked '404' in Sharpie.
Error 404. Not Found. My private joke.
Inside was the end of Aris Thorne's career, his freedom, and likely his life if the wrong people read the files on the Jersey construction unions.
I sat in my chair. The painkillers I had finally taken were dulling the edge of the fracture, but they did nothing for the rage.
Elena was in the Library. I watched her on Screen 2. She was writing.
The excerpt in Vanity Fair had gone live an hour ago.
"THE GOD IN THE GLASS MACHINE: HOW SILAS VANE BUILT A FORTRESS AROUND A BROKEN HEART."
I read it.
It was... eviscerating.
She wrote about the way I aligned my cutlery. She wrote about the touch aversion. She wrote about the silence in the Penthouse.
But she also wrote about the way I protected her.
He doesn't build walls to keep people out, she had written. He builds them so he can choose who to let in. And once you are in, you are safer than the gold in Fort Knox.
I traced the words on the screen.
She had spun the narrative. She had turned my pathology into a virtue. She had made me a hero.
My Pride should be wounded. She had exposed my weakness.
But instead, looking at the stock ticker climb back into the green, looking at the box of evidence that would crush my rival... I felt invincible.
My phone rang.
Unknown Number.
I knew who it was.
I answered.
"Hello, Aris."
"You released a manifesto," Thorne's voice was tight, high-pitched. "You think having your girlfriend write a love letter to your psychosis will save you?"
"It already has," I said calmly. "Have you checked the share price, Aris? Or the trending topics? '#KingEnergy'."
"It's a temporary bump! You harbored a known criminal! You have Bratva ties!"
"And you have a shell company in the Cayman Islands that paid off the inspector for the Brooklyn Levee project in 2019."
Silence on the line. Heavy. suffocating silence.
"How do you know that?" Thorne whispered.
I tapped the lid of Box 404.
"I know everything, Aris. I am an Architect. I study the foundation before I attack."
"Silas, listen. We can settle. I can pull the lawsuit. We can—"
"No," I cut him off. "Priorities have changed."
"What do you want?"
"I want you to resign. Tonight. Publicly. Citing 'health reasons'. I want you to sell your firm to Vane Holdings for one dollar. And I want you to leave New York."
"You're insane. My firm is worth billions."
"Your firm is built on fraud. If I release this box to the District Attorney, you go to federal prison for twenty years. If I release it to the union leaders you stole pension funds from... well. Concrete takes a long time to set, Aris. plenty of time to regret your choices."
"One dollar?"
"And the satisfaction that you walk away with your knees intact. Which is more mercy than you showed Volkov."
"I... I need time to think."
"You have one hour. Or I call the NY Times."
I hung up.
I leaned back.
The door to the office opened.
Elena stood there.
"You're threatening him," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I am negotiating."
"You look scary when you negotiate."
"It is required."
She walked into the room. She was wearing the grey cashmere dress I had bought her weeks ago. Soft. Warm. A contrast to the sharp edges of the room.
She walked around the desk.
She pushed the chair back.
She climbed into my lap, straddling me, mindful of the splinted hand resting on the armrest.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"Is it done?"
"In fifty-nine minutes, it will be."
"Good."
She kissed me. It was a slow, deliberate claiming.
"Stop cleaning door frames," she whispered against my lips. "Stop looking at the screens."
"What should I look at?"
She took my good hand. She placed it on her breast.
"Priorities, Silas."
I looked at her.
The wreckage was outside. The enemy was breaking. The world was watching.
But inside the room... inside the master plan...
"Yes," I said. "Priorities."
I pushed the box of evidence aside.
And for the next fifty-nine minutes, I let the empire wait.