Chapter 6: The Unwanted Contact

Chapter 6: The Unwanted Contact

The world outside Alex Sterling’s office was a silent, sprawling tapestry of steel and glass. From the fiftieth floor of the Sterling Holdings Tower, the city was an abstract map, the bustling chaos of the streets reduced to a noiseless, orderly flow. This was his element. His desk was a single, uncluttered slab of polished obsidian. Three holographic displays shimmered in the air above it, scrolling with market data, project timelines, and encrypted communications. The air itself seemed different up here, tasting of clean, filtered ambition. It was a world of absolute logic and control, the physical manifestation of the fortress he had spent twenty years building in his mind.

“Mr. Sterling?” The voice of his executive assistant, Sarah, was a model of calm efficiency, coming through the discreet intercom. “Your ten o’clock with the Tokyo board is confirmed. And a package has arrived from Legal.”

“Thank you, Sarah,” Alex replied, his eyes tracing the downward trend of a rival’s stock. “Anything else?”

“One thing, sir. A personal call. A woman named Cassandra Thorne. She was… quite insistent.” Sarah’s tone was professionally neutral, but Alex could read the subtle subtext. ‘Insistent’ was a sanitized word for what was likely a barrage of emotional manipulation.

Alex felt no jolt, no spike of adrenaline. The encounter in the restaurant had been a strange echo from a buried life, but it had also served as a final, definitive inoculation. He had seen the ghost, and it held no power over him.

“Put her through,” he said, his voice level. He leaned back in his ergonomic chair, the supple leather sighing faintly. He swiped a hand through the air, and two of the holographic displays vanished, leaving only one, which he dimmed to a soft, ambient glow. He gave the call his full, dispassionate attention. It was, he supposed, just another piece of business to be handled.

A click, and then a voice dripped into his ear, sickly sweet and oozing a synthetic nostalgia that made his teeth ache.

“Alex? Darling, it’s me. Cassie.”

“Cassandra,” he corrected, his tone cool and impersonal. The single word was the first brick in the wall, placed with deliberate precision. Using her full name was a rejection of any shared intimacy, a reminder that the ‘Cassie’ she was pretending to be had ceased to exist for him two decades ago.

There was a fractional pause on her end, a beat of surprise that he hadn't immediately fallen into their old dynamic. “Oh, so formal,” she purred, recovering quickly. “I was just thinking about the other day. The restaurant. Wasn’t that just the craziest coincidence? Seeing you… and Leo! He’s so grown up. He has your eyes.”

She was casting her line, baiting the hook with their son, the strongest link she imagined they still had. The heartbroken young engineer she remembered would have latched onto that, drawn into a whirlpool of shared memories and forgotten feelings.

Alex remained silent, offering her nothing to work with. His silence was not awkward; it was tactical. It was an empty space, forcing her to reveal her intentions by filling it.

“Anyway,” she continued, her voice taking on a slightly more wounded tone. “I’ve just been thinking so much since then. About the old days. You know, before… everything. We were so young, weren’t we? We had so many dreams.”

He could practically hear the manufactured tear in her voice. He remembered that voice from the witness stand, a finely tuned instrument of deceit. The memory didn't bring pain, only a cold clarity, like looking at an old case study of a failed project. The data was noted, the error identified, the lesson learned.

“What is the purpose of this call, Cassandra?” he asked, his voice cutting cleanly through her performance.

The question seemed to startle her. She had expected to guide him down a path of emotional reminiscence, to soften him up before making her move. His directness was a roadblock she hadn't anticipated.

“Well, I… I saw you’ve done so well for yourself, Alex,” she stammered, the sickly sweetness curdling into something more desperate. “Sterling Holdings. It’s all so impressive. I’m so proud of you. But it got me thinking… about how things are. For me.”

Here it was. The pivot.

“Life hasn’t been… as kind to me,” she went on, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial, victimized whisper. “Richard’s business, it’s a struggle. Brenda’s boy, Jacob, has his issues, as you saw. We’re a family, we stick together, but it’s hard. It’s so incredibly hard sometimes, watching from the outside while you’re living in a palace in the sky.”

The veiled threat was now laid bare, wrapped in a cloak of self-pity. You have so much. I have so little. It isn’t fair. It was the same parasitic logic that had underpinned their entire marriage. His successes were not his own; they were a resource to be drawn from, a communal well from which she was entitled to drink.

“I see,” Alex said. The two words were as flat and impenetrable as the armored glass of his office window.

Her frustration was now palpable, a high-frequency whine beneath her words. “Do you? Do you really see, Alex? You have everything. We—your first family, the ones who were there before all of this—we have nothing. Doesn’t that seem wrong to you? A man of your… stature. Surely, you can see how it looks.”

She was no longer using a key to try and open his vault; she was trying to pick the lock with a rusty wire. She was talking about public image, about appearances, about the story she could tell. She still thought she was dealing with the young engineer who was terrified of what people thought.

Alex looked out at the city, at the empire he had built not with bluster or threats, but with cold, hard, unassailable competence. He had built it to be a sanctuary, a fortress. And she was standing at the gates, rattling them with the same old, tired weapons that had worked on a boy twenty years ago.

She was speaking to a king in his castle, and she had no idea how high the walls truly were.

“Cassandra,” he said, and his voice was no longer just cold; it was clinical. It was the voice he used when liquidating a failed asset, a voice devoid of malice or anger, a voice that dealt only in finality. “You and I have no business to discuss. You relinquished any and all claims two decades ago in a legally binding settlement, for which you were generously compensated.”

“That was a pittance! I was young, I was bullied—”

“My relationship with my son is my own,” he continued, speaking over her protests as if she were a faulty recording. “It does not, and will not, involve you. Do not contact me again. Do not contact my son. Do not contact my office. Is that understood?”

There was a choked, sputtering sound on the other end of the line. She was speechless. This was a response so far outside her calculated scenarios that she had no script for it. There was no anger to feed on, no guilt to manipulate, no weakness to exploit. There was only a closed door. A vault sealed from the inside.

“But—you can’t just—”

“Goodbye, Cassandra,” Alex said. He didn’t slam the phone down. He didn’t hang up with a flourish. He simply pressed a button on his console, and the connection was severed. The line went dead.

Silence returned to the office, clean and absolute. The last, toxic tendril of his past had been snipped. He didn't feel relief, or triumph, or even anger. He felt… nothing. A quiet finality. The last echo had faded.

He sat for a moment, looking at the silent city below. He had not been provoked. He had not been baited. He had simply handled a problem. But he knew, with the same certainty that guided his multi-billion-dollar investments, that this was not the end. A cornered narcissist does not retreat; they escalate.

Alex pressed the intercom button again. “Sarah.”

“Yes, Mr. Sterling?”

“Get me Marcus Thorne on the line. Head of my personal security detail.”

“Right away, sir.”

He wasn't going on the offensive. Not yet. But the walls of his fortress were about to get a little higher.