Ivy swiped her keycard. The heavy steel door of the Tribeca loft slid open. This was her sanctuary, the one place her father's money hadn't touched. She had bought it through a shell company three years ago.
She kicked off her heels. The cement floor was freezing against her bare feet. She exhaled, a long, shuddering breath that rattled in her chest.
The apartment hummed. It was the sound of server fans.
Zoe Vance was sitting cross-legged on the oversized leather sofa. Her hair was bright pink that day. She was typing furiously on a laptop covered in stickers.
"Did you handle the douchebag?" Zoe asked without looking up.
Ivy walked to the kitchen island and poured two fingers of whiskey. Her hands were finally steady.
"Handled," she said. "I got married."
Zoe spun around so fast she nearly knocked her laptop off her knees. "You what?"
Ivy pulled the folded certificate out of her bag and tossed it onto the coffee table.
Zoe picked it up gingerly. She read the name. Her eyes went wide.
"Dominik Mack?" She looked at Ivy. "The Dominik Mack?"
Ivy took a sip of the whiskey. It burned, grounding her. "You know him?"
Zoe's fingers flew across her keyboard. "Do I know him? Ivy, he's a ghost. He's a legend."
She turned her laptop screen toward Ivy. It showed a profile of Dominik. Net worth: redacted. Location: everywhere and nowhere.
"He eats companies," Zoe said. "He's dangerous. You're playing with fire."
"The enemy of my enemy," Ivy said. "He scared Preston. He'll scare Harris."
"He might eat you, too," Zoe warned.
"I have nothing left to lose," Ivy said. "Except this."
She pulled a USB drive from her pocket. It contained the photos of Preston, plus the financial records she had scraped from his laptop while he was sleeping.
"I should leak this to the Journal right now," Zoe said, reaching for the drive.
Ivy pulled it back. "No. Not yet."
"Why? He deserves it."
"If we tank the Hayes stock now, the merger collapses too fast. My Miller shares drop. I need the value high so I can cash out or negotiate."
Zoe sighed. "You're so rational. It's creepy."
"It's survival," Ivy said.
Zoe frowned at her screen. "Wait. Alert."
She pointed to a window on her monitor. "Someone is trying to use a keycard on the downstairs lobby door. It's... Preston's old card."
Ivy walked to the security monitor. The black-and-white feed showed the lobby. Preston was there. He looked disheveled. He was shouting at the intercom.
"He's persistent," Zoe said. "Should I call the cops?"
Ivy watched him on the screen. He was banging on the glass.
"Let him throw a tantrum," she said. "We have bigger problems."
She pointed at the photo of Dominik on Zoe's screen.
"Zoe, I need you to focus on Mack Capital's server architecture. Find a backdoor. I'm going to start mapping his offshore entities and looking for patterns. I need to know his weak spots."
