Leah didn't walk back to her desk; she stumbled. Every light in the hallway felt like a surveillance eye, and every passing employee looked like a potential executioner. She locked herself in the executive bathroom, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. She splashed ice-cold water on her face, trying to wash away the smell of ozone and copper that seemed to cling to her skin.
She was caught in a suffocating psychological vice. Arthur King didn't just kill people; he deleted their existence and replaced it with a lie.
Suddenly, her phone vibrated. A notification from the "King-Net" internal server. It was an audio file. With trembling fingers, she pressed play. It was the sound of her own voice from three minutes ago, pleading with Arthur in the office. But it was edited. In this version, she sounded like she was enthusiastically suggesting the programmer's "disappearance."
"He owns the sound of my breath," she whispered, a numbing, icy dread settling in her chest. Arthur wasn't just threatening her; he was framing her. He was turning her into the monster so she would never dare to seek the light.
Back in the office, Arthur was standing over the glass floor, looking down at the tiny ants of people on the street below. He felt a divine, cold clarity. To him, the world was a messy equation, and he was the only one capable of solving it. He picked up a tablet and began swiping through Leah's personal history—her debts, her sick mother in the hospital, the secret bank account she thought he didn't know about.
He felt a flicker of predatory amusement. He didn't want Leah to be loyal out of love; he wanted her loyal out of utter, paralyzing necessity.
"Leah," his voice crackled over the intercom, sounding like a velvet caress over a blade. "Come back in. We have a guest. Someone you know very well."
Leah's heart performed a sickening thud against her ribs. She pushed the door open to find a man sitting in the leather chair she had just occupied. It was Detective Miller, the man who had been investigating the string of "disappearances" in King's circle for months.
Miller looked at Leah with a sharp, suspicious intensity. "Miss Leah, I was just telling Mr. King that we found a trace of the programmer's phone signal. It pinged from this building an hour ago. Strange, isn't it?"
Arthur sat behind his desk, leaning back with a calculated, effortless grace. He looked at Leah, his eyes silently challenging her. He was handing her the knife. She could either stab him and fail, or stab the detective to save herself.
"Tell the Detective, Leah," Arthur purred, his voice dripping with mocking encouragement. "Where did we say the programmer went?"
Leah felt the air leave the room. She looked at the Detective—a good man with a family—and then at Arthur, the devil in a three-piece suit. She felt a shattering internal collapse.
"He... he left for the Caymans," Leah said, her voice sounding dead, even to her own ears. "I processed the flight details myself."
The Detective's face fell into a mask of defeated frustration. But as he stood up to leave, Leah noticed Arthur's hand move slightly under the desk. A screen on the wall flickered for a microsecond—showing Miller's car in the parking lot, with a small, glowing red light blinking underneath the chassis.
Arthur wasn't letting him leave. He was just moving the game to the next floor.