The city spread out below my window; I owned it.
Every streetlight, every glowing office window in the postcode. It was mine, just so you know. I used to think that if you knew the right secrets, you owned the world. All I have ever built was gained because of the only currency I had in abundance, hidden information. I had all of it—the dirt on politicians, the encryption keys to major banks, the private flight logs of people who thought the ‘incognito’ protected them from the government. I had access to more information than some secret elite clubs out there.
And yet up here, in the silence of my penthouse, even that seemed to start slipping from my grip. All because of one woman.
Iris
What a fucking joke.
The screens at my desk mocked me with images of her, disguised in dozens of different women. Her name was a dead space in the data my team of researchers and hackers spent days and months looking through, with no results whatsoever. Maybe she’s just that good. Or maybe someone was helping her on the side, someone who knew how I worked, someone who knew where my cameras were and how I ran my searches. The thought unnerved me more than I wanted.
I took a long sip from the whiskey in my hand, but it did nothing to ease the shaking of my right leg. I looked at my reflection in the dark glass and a typical British posh bloke in luxurious fabrics stared back—silks, superfine wools, with a watch worth more regular person's mortgage, but I was more than that. My dark short hair, in a perm with half curtains framing my face with deliberate perfection, was not mere vanity, but a rebellion against the staid Englishness of old money. None of my blonde peers had the same, piercing and scrutinising, rusty brown eyes as me.
All those lights below me, reflected on the glass, yet they just made the darkness around me heavier.
I have everything, and it’s all useless. Every satellite, every algorithm, every million-pound system… all unreliable to find a single piece of data on a single woman’s real identity.
I need to expand the research; there’s no other way. I thought then. I picked up the phone and called Ashton, my head of security.
“Hello?” a tired voice answered.
“Anything new?”
A pause. “I'm sorry, sir. We’ve hit another wall. Still nothing.”
“Nothing, huh?” I replied coldly. “I’m looking at a ghost on a dozen screens, and your entire division…got nothing new, not a single lead?”
“It’s like she’s built to disappear, sir. We’re following every thread, but—”
“I don’t want to hear about threads,” I cut him off. “I want her found.” I hung up before he could say anything else. I couldn’t stay still. I started pacing the room, from the window to the door and back. The quiet here was thick, and it did nothing to calm me down.
Not while she’s out there, laughing at me.
Glancing at the wall of monitors glowing above the electric fireplace, the obsession hit me all over again. Different angles, different days, all showing the same damn ghost. On the first screen was a grainy shot from some park. A woman with short, practical brown hair sat too still on a bench; she was watching kids on the playground. Even through the pixels, her posture was rigid, military-like, I’d say. On the second screen, through blurry hospital CCTV, a woman in pale blue scrubs and a cap pushed a medication cart, head down, weaving through the crowd of nurses; she moved as if she belonged. The security guard at the desk didn't even glance up. On the third screen, over a traffic camera in Russell Square, a woman with long, dark hair and glasses, swallowed by a cheap beige puffer jacket, moved with the flow of the evening crowd.
I stop dead.
My finger jabbed at the glass.
That stride.
Shoulders back but not stiff, chin tucked just so, eating up the pavement without seeming to hurry. I fell back into my chair, the leather groaning under me, and scrubbed my hands over my face, hard. The ache in my temples was back, a steady throb of frustration. My hand moved to the mouse, clicking rapidly. I zoomed in on her face in the traffic cam shot. The resolution dissolved into a blur of pixels, a mosaic of anonymity. Long dark hair, glasses, and the collar of that cheap jacket pulled up.
Nothing.
“Who are you?” I snarled at her pixelated face. I took a savage gulp of vodka this time, swirling the translucent liquid just to watch it cling to the glass like water. “Where are you?” I muttered, shifting my glare to the frozen image of the woman in the scrubs, head dutifully down. “What’s your play? You can’t just vanish.”
A bitter, cold thought rose from the pit of my stomach, cutting through the heat of the alcohol.
James could.
James, my former Head of R&D. The only man who ever out-thought me, or so he thought before I fired him. Now he had hired Iris to spy on me, poach employees from within my company, as well as recruit highly skilled children to hack into my system, with the sole purpose of building his own company. He was always better at that stuff than me. This had to be his doing, a plausible revenge for his layoff.
A story this good… it had to be his.
The most powerful man in Europe, dethroned by a mere woman? The headlines would write themselves. They’d love the poetic fall of it. My phone buzzed, a sharp vibration against the marble. Not my regular phone. The sleek, lone tablet on the far desk lit up with a notification. An encrypted channel. I walked over; the words on the screen were the shot of adrenaline I needed.
FOUNDATION ASSET 7.
Sharp. Iris Sharp.
Every other thought vaporised. This is it. It wasn't just ‘Iris’ anymore. We could tear into family records, known associates, property holdings—every person with that surname became a thread to pull. It was a surname linked to work history within this unknown ‘Legacy’ company. She wasn’t just a mere employee; she was a dangerous senior professional in her field of work, whatever that was. I didn’t care.
It was perfect, clean.
Maybe, too clean.
A distrustful thought crept in. They’ve given me nothing but static for weeks. Stonewalled my requests. And now this? A full profile, a mission statement, served up on a silver platter? I stared at the message from the Foundation. A silent partner, one of my main investors, suggested to me to find people. Their help always came with strings, I could never quite see.
This could be a trap.
Because they operated in such anonymity, I didn’t trust them completely. It was impossible to. Trust requires a face, a consequence you can hold accountable. The Foundation was a ghost, just as Iris. I felt it then—the old, familiar twitch under my right eye. A faint, fluttering spasm. My father’s genes, announcing themselves. A signal I usually silenced by pressing a firm finger to the bone beneath, but when I glanced back at the wall of screens, at the ghost-stride of the woman who was now Iris Sharp, I thought of James.
No.
And doubts were a weakness my father never tolerated. “A man who hesitates in his own house,” he’d say, the eye twitching, “has already given the keys away.” So with one last, hard look at the tablet and its almost-too-convenient message, I made my decision.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
As long as our goals align, I don’t care.
This wasn’t about trusting them; it was about using their resources to give me an advantage against my adversary. To prove my story was the true one. My fingers steadied, then flew across the keyboard, unleashing commands to the security team.
“Overide all other tasks!” I barked. “I want a full life-cycle analysis on the identity Iris Sharp. Former addresses, financials from her first bank account, family trees down to third cousins, medical and dental records, known associates, and training history. I want to know what she orders at a fucking coffee shop and which shoulder she sleeps on. I don’t care how you get it, I want it done.”
The twitch under my eye finally stops.
On my feet again, powered by a new, venomous purpose, I walked to the window, pressing my forehead against the cold glass.
“You work for the man who stole from me,” I told her, the ghost out there in the world. “Fabricating nonsense to sell to the media.” I turned back to the wall of screens, to the three grainy versions of her: the nurse, the nanny, the woman in the crowd. All lies. All hers.
“You’re good,” I conceded. The die from my father’s old con was cold and familiar in my palm. I rolled it over my knuckles. A charm for a man who made his own luck. “But even you, a ghost, have a heart. A place you call home. Something you can’t bear to lose.”
I closed my fist around the die, the metal biting into my skin.
“I will find it,” I promised the silent room, the words leaving no room for doubt. “And I will make you watch while I take it apart.”
Seeking a distraction from the intensity of my own vow, I walked back to the window. The view was my summit. The peak I’d clawed and schemed my way to, just to prove I could reach a height like his, on my own terms. Below, the city pulsed with life, tiny cars flowing like blood cells through lit arteries. My gaze drifted idly over the countless windows of the buildings across from me, with people living their tiny, messy lives. A couple arguing, someone watching TV alone, and an office cleaner vacuuming an empty floor.
I noticed it then.
A terrace on a building a few blocks away, distinct from the sterile office grids. It was lit. Figures moved there—adults holding drinks, their shapes relaxed. And a small child, darting between them. A lopsided cake sat on a table, its six candles glowing like defiant little stars against the polluted night.
A birthday party.
A small girl’s silhouette stood in front of the cake. The candles' light stretched her shadow upward, breaking into a solid form to a blur mixing with shadows and lights of the city, data patterns that transform into my penthouse window reflection.
A cold knot tightened in my gut; it was something I never had, not the cake, not the lights, not the simple, unquestioned certainty of being celebrated. My father’s idea of a gift was a promise that vanished by morning.
“Don’t ever be sentimental like your mother,” his voice whispers in my head, the only lesson that ever stuck. “Or others will use it against you anytime.”
My jaw clenched. The warmth of that scene was a mockery of my dysfunctional childhood memory. I looked away, sharp and sudden, as if I’ve been burned. The image of that ghost, Iris Sharp, flashed back into my mind, and so I turned my back on the night, on the city, on the tiny, glowing celebration. I strode back to my desk, the die still clenched in my fist and waited for the next update from the Foundation.
10 seconds in, and the awaited signal arrived, urgent and red, on my central monitor.
My heart skipped a beat.
This is it.
A mosaic of secret shots unfolded across the screen. Traffic camera footage, automatically flagged by the Foundation’s AI. It was her. Clearer than any ghost-image I’d chased. There she was, getting into a black sedan, her posture a rod of pure tension even as she ducked inside. The car’s plate was a blur, but their algorithms had painted in the blanks with mechanical efficiency.
The feed cut to a highway toll camera, two hundred miles north. The same car.
Another cut, and she was being recorded by a gas station CCTV, fifty kilometres further still. The trajectory of their drive seemed to lead north, and it kept going, straight for the remote, broken highlands of Scotland. A perfect, empty place to hide something—or someone—you never wanted found.
“Got you now,” I whispered triumphally.
The data was everything I’ve been waiting for, so I called my security chief right away. Not on the official line, but on his private phone number.
It was 3 a.m.
He answered, voice thick with sleep. “Yes, sir?”
“Sharp just got a passport,” I said, my voice low and venomous. “She’s heading to the Highlands, Scotland. I’m dumping all the data to you now. I don’t care what it costs. I want drones overhead before sunrise. I want every satellite we own or lease retasked to that grid. I want thermal, I want signals intelligence, I want eyes on every road in and out of a fifty-mile radius.”
I don’t wait for his “Yes, sir.” I hung up on him.
Nothing could stop me now. I towered over the city below me again from the window. My gaze swept over the countless lit windows—a thousand pathetic, little lives—to land eyes on the birthday party on the terrace without the ache from earlier.
I snorted at the sight.
My father’s whisper was a razor in my ear: “They will use it against you. Take what you want, before they pretend to offer it.”
The thrill disappeared with the same speed it came, in its stead the ache from before returned, mutating into a scornful and profound, bewildered loneliness so acute it terrified me. I violently shoved it down. That child was given cake and unquestioned love, while all I had were ghosts and traitors.
“Enjoy your cake, kid,” I muttered, turning away and putting a final distance between the party and me. “I’ll have mine too.”
In the absolute quiet of the corridor, lit only by low, sconce lighting, I stood outside my suite. It was 3:30 a.m. In front of me was the door to Suite 42B, the suite assigned to my newly appointed personal assistant, Claire Davies. I was holding not a key, but a slim, black card that overrode all locks in the building, because it was my building.
I didn’t knock.
Knocking was a request. It implied the other person had a choice in what was about to happen. I slid the black card from my pocket. A soft, green LED glowed as I held it against the reader. The door yielded without a sound. Her suite was a mirror of my own, smaller, furnished by the corporate interior designer, and even in the dark, I could hear the soft, rhythmic sound of her breathing from the bedroom, the door left ajar. I didn’t rush. I walked through her living room, past the tidy desk with her spreadsheets still glowing on a laptop, and pushed the bedroom door open.
She was soundly asleep under the sheets.
“Claire,” I called out her name twice. Her breath hitched at the third call.
“Wha…?” She stirred, confused, swimming up from sleep. She fumbled for the lamp, clicking it on. The light blinded her for a second. She saw me standing at the foot of her bed, in my suit, perfectly composed. Her face cycled through sleep, confusion, and then a dawning, ice-cold fear. “Mr Sterling?” Her voice was a sleep-roughened whisper. She pulled the duvet up to her chin. “Is everything… What's happening? How did you get in?”
“The ‘how’ isn’t important,” I said, low and calm. “The ‘why’ is. You see, a kid across the city was given a cake tonight for simply being born.”
She stared, uncomprehending.
“I have had to bust my ass since I was born. I had to take everything I was given, because I had nothing, and when they’d forget to even give me food, I had to steal it and more.” I continued, taking a single step closer. The room was so small. My presence filled it. “Today, my team had to stay up all night and morning to finally identify the spy we’ve been searching for a year now. So, I think it’s more than fair to get something from you, for their hard work, you know. I believe in transactions, so here is yours.”
Her expression seemed to slowly understand where this convo was heading.
“I want my cake too,” I explained in lame terms, for the lame woman in front of me. “So you can get out of that bed, do exactly as I say for the next two hours or so. You never speak of it. At dawn, one million pounds is wired to an offshore account of your choice, from which you can retrieve. You can quit tomorrow, vanish, buy your family a house, pay their debts, cure whatever disease they have. Simple.”
Her eyes were wide, glistening. She was shaking her head slowly, a silent ‘no’.
“Or…” I continued unfazed. “You refuse, but I take you anyway. You scream. In ten minutes, security—my security—arrives. They find you hysterical. And they also find, on your work laptop, which I have just remotely accessed, irrefutable evidence of you funnelling confidential merger data to a rival firm. The evidence is… impeccable. You will be arrested before breakfast. You will be convicted and will spend the next decade in a women’s prison.”
The sob that escaped her was a choked, desperate thing. “But I never funnelled-”
“It really doesn’t matter.” I cut her stupidity off. “What matters is what I tell them. So what do you think? I’d say it’s a pretty easy choice.” I commented, shrugging my shoulders.
Then I started to undress, not waiting for her answer. One way or another, I would have my cake.
“This isn’t a choice between right and wrong, Claire,” I whispered, moving to sit on the edge of the bed when I was done. The mattress dipped under my weight, embracing my naked bottom. She flinched back as if scalded. “It’s a choice between two punishments. I’m just letting you choose which crime you’ll live with. Mine? Or the one I’ll pin on you?”
I reached out and turned off the bedside lamp, plunging us back into the intimate dark. Her quiet, shattered weeping was the only sound.
“It won’t be quick,” I said into the blackness, my voice a soft, terrible comfort. “Because I like to eat at my own pace. Don’t worry, though, the money will be enough to make you forget anything by tomorrow. Am I Right?” I asked, already knowing which option she had chosen.
She nodded, trembling under the bedsheets. Irritated by her stillness, I grabbed them and flew them across the room, off of her.
“Now, wipe those tears off,” I ordered her. “And smile for the 1 million pounds you’re about to make.”
She didn’t move or speak, at first, but when she examined my harsh reflecting eyes in the dark, she stood on her knees, cleaned her face of tears and hair strands. The smile she plastered on her face was painfully fake, and because I couldn’t stand fakeness during sex, I left the bed, went over where my pants were, pulled out a small sachet of pills from them and pretended to swallow one.
She looked utterly terrified in her confusion.
I did not give her time to think. I went back to bed, knelt like her and kissed her with force. When I finally let go of her waist, I smiled, knowing the pill was making its way down her throat, into her system. 2 mins later, while giving mea sloppy head, she lifted her head, tried to shake the sudden dizziness away, but I knew it was too late. She was now happily smiling at me, horny and dazed.
I smiled back.
“Now, we can finally start.”