Chapter 4: The Ghost in the Room

Julian’s P.O.V

I had read Sia Laurent's file twice before coming here. The second time, I had read every page slowly enough to memorize the important details.

Founder and CEO of Maison Laurent. Net worth large enough to make most billionaires look modest.

Single mother. One son.

Threat level: severe.

Three confirmed attempts on her life within a year. A history of avoiding the press. A reputation for being cold, ruthless, and impossible to impress.

The file also mentioned that she had a fifteen-year-old child.

That was the part that had shaped the picture in my head. For some reason, I'd imagined a woman in her fifties.

Maybe it was the combination of billionaire CEO, teenage son, and the infamous title the media had given her: The Ice Queen.

In my mind, she'd been a severe-looking woman with short hair, sharp glasses, and a wardrobe consisting entirely of black power suits. The kind of woman who would stare at me over the rim of her glasses and ask for my credentials before deciding whether I was worthy of breathing the same air.

I had prepared myself accordingly.

Professional. Respectful. Minimal flirting.

Christian's voice echoed in my head. ‘Don't flirt with this one.’

Easy enough.

Then the doors opened, and every carefully prepared thought in my head disappeared.

For a moment, I simply stared.

The woman approaching me couldn't have been the same Sia Laurent I'd constructed in my imagination.

She was younger; far younger. Beautiful in a way that wasn't soft or approachable, but striking enough to make a man forget what he'd been saying.

Her long brunette hair was pulled into a sleek ponytail, revealing the elegant line of her neck. She wore a perfectly tailored midnight blue power suit, the jacket fitted at her waist, the trousers falling cleanly over a pair of red heels.

There wasn't a single unnecessary detail about her. Everything was deliberate, controlled.

Perfect.

And somehow, that made her even more distracting.

Because the file had forgotten to mention one crucial detail: her age.

As Sia moved from the glass case toward the desk, the light caught her, and I felt a sudden, sharp jolt of awareness. She wasn't middle-aged. She was, by all accounts, ravishing.

She looked to be in her mid-thirties, possessing a timeless, ethereal beauty that felt almost dangerous. The power suit she wore—a deep, midnight blue—didn't hide her figure; it framed it, hugging her curves in a way that was professional yet devastatingly feminine.

She was a contradiction in human form: a woman who looked like a goddess but radiated the temperature of a glacier.

But it was her eyes that truly stopped me. They weren't just cold; they were fortified.

They were calculating, scanning me not as a protector, but as a potential threat. There was a depth to that gaze that went beyond professional skepticism. I saw a flicker of something buried deep—a profound, root-level weariness.

She didn't just have guards because she was rich; she had guards because she felt the world was a predator, and she was the prey that had learned how to bite back.

She stopped a few feet from me, her presence commanding the air in the room. She didn't look at me; she looked back at the dress in the glass case, her voice dropping to a whisper that felt like a confession.

"It isn't part of my collection," she repeated, the words brittle. "It’s my wedding dress. The one I wore to the biggest mistake of my life."

The raw honesty of the statement caught me off guard.

There was no theatricality in her tone, just a flat, dead certainty. She didn't linger on the memory; she severed it, turning away from the dress with a sharp movement and gliding toward her seat. She sat down with a poised elegance that felt practiced, a mask of perfection that she wore like armor.

"Sit," she commanded, her eyes finally locking onto mine. "Let's get this over with."

I sat down in the chair opposite her, the white marble of the desk acting like a frozen lake between us. I leaned back, my professional instincts kicking in, though my mind was still reeling from the sheer sight of her.

I opened my notebook, clicking my pen. I needed to break through that ice, to find the crack where the danger was leaking in.

"Standard procedure, Ms. Laurent," I began, my voice steady. "I need a full psychological and social map. Let's start with the basics. Your childhood, your upbringing—any lingering resentments from your early years. I want to know about every bridge you've burned and every hand you've shaken."

She stared at me, her expression unchanging. "My childhood was a series of obligations. My family's business was the only thing that mattered. My personal feelings were considered... inconvenient."

"And your enemies?" I pressed. "Business rivals, former employees, disgruntled partners? Anyone in your immediate family or extended circle who stands to benefit from your demise or your removal from the company?"

Sia’s gaze didn't waver. "In my position, everyone is a potential enemy. The board of directors views me as a hurdle; my competitors view me as a target. As for family..." She paused, a shadow crossing her face. "Family is often where the most dangerous enemies hide."

I noted that down. Internal family conflict. High probability of betrayal.

"The incidents in your file—the sabotage attempt, the threats, the shooting—they're sophisticated," I observed. "They aren't the work of a random stalker. They're targeted. Who do you suspect? Is there anything that happened—something minor, something you thought was a fluke—that wasn't recorded in the official reports?"

For the first time, I saw a flicker of hesitation in her eyes. She shifted slightly in her chair, her fingers grazing the marble surface of the desk.

"There was an incident a few months ago," she said slowly. "One of my security guards noticed a recurring glitch in the surveillance feed. A camera in the main hallway would flicker, the recording would drop for exactly ninety seconds, and then it would snap back to normal. It happened three times in one week."

I frowned, my mind already calculating the technical implications. "And?"

"The guard assumed it was a maintenance issue. He contacted the technical crew to calibrate the system. When they arrived, they found that the system hadn't glitched at all. It had been tampered with. Someone had installed a sophisticated bypass loop—a piece of hardware that fed a pre-recorded loop of an empty hallway into the monitors while the actual camera was blind."

I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. A bypass loop wasn't something a hacker did from a basement in another country. It required physical access to the server room. It required a keycard, a knowledge of the guard rotations, and a level of trust that allowed someone to walk through those halls unnoticed.

"Since then," Sia continued, her voice returning to that icy flatness, "the security has been tightened. The systems were upgraded to a closed-circuit encrypted network. But the fact remains: the breach happened from the inside."

I closed my notebook with a soft thud. The puzzle pieces were clicking into place, and the picture they formed was grim. The "Ice Queen" wasn't just fighting an external shadow; she was living in a house where the walls had ears and the cameras had blind spots.

"You suspect someone on the inside," I said, it wasn't a question.

"I suspect that someone I pay, or someone I trust, wants me dead—or simply gone," she replied, her eyes searching mine, looking for a sign of weakness or incompetence. "I just don't know which one of them is holding the knife."

I looked at her—this stunning, broken woman who had turned herself into a fortress—and I felt a surge of something that wasn't just professional curiosity. It was a challenge. She expected me to be just another hired gun, another man who would fail her or betray her.

I leaned forward, a small, confident smirk playing on my lips.

"Well, Ms. Laurent, the good news is that I don't trust anyone. Not the board, not your staff, and certainly not you."

A tiny, almost imperceptible spark of interest flickered in her cold eyes.

"The bad news," I added, "is that the person you're looking for is probably watching us right now. But they've never had to deal with a Cross. I don't just find the leak; I plug it. And if the leak is a person... I remove them."

Sia didn't smile, but she didn't look away. For the first time since I entered the room, the tension between us shifted.

It was no longer just a client and a contractor. It was a game of chess, and the Ice Queen looked like she had finally met an opponent who wasn't afraid of the cold.