The View from Olympus
POV: Silas Vane
New York City was not a city. It was a weeping sore.
From ninety stories up, the height severed the connection to the rot, but it didn't erase the truth of the anatomy below. I stood at the edge of the north-facing glass wall, the cold radiating through the laminated pane against my forehead. Down there, in the gridlock of Fifth Avenue, the brake lights formed arterial clots. Red, throbbing, stuck. The layout was chaotic, an insult to geometry, designed by men who lacked the discipline to look further than their own greed.
I pressed my palm against the glass. The condensation ghosted around the edges of my hand, a temporary blemish I would have to wipe away later.
Up here, in the Spire, there was only silence. It was a vacuum-sealed quiet that cost forty million dollars to manufacture. No sirens. No shouting matches. No grinding gears of garbage trucks eating the filth the rats left behind. Just the hum of the air filtration system, scrubbing the oxygen until it was sterile enough for my lungs.
My reflection hovered over the city, ghostly and translucent. The cut of my suit was sharp—Charcoal wool, threaded with silk. The knot of my tie was an isosceles triangle, mathematically perfect. My eyes were holes in the glass, devoid of the panic that fueled the millions of insects scurrying on the pavement below.
They called me a visionary. The newspapers called me the Architect of the Century. They slapped "genius" on magazine covers because they didn't have a word for what I actually was.
A corrector.
The world was messy. I fixed it. I paved over the swamps, tore down the jagged brick tenements, and erected steel and glass obelisks that scraped the belly of God.
"Mr. Vane?"
The voice was soft, barely a tremor in the immaculate air, but it scraped against my nerves like a nail on a chalkboard. I didn't turn around. To turn around would acknowledge that the interruption had power over me. I continued to stare at the wreckage of the skyline, focusing on the ugly, squat silhouette of the Empire State Building. A relic.
"You are early, Marcus," I said. My voice was low. I never raised it. Volume was a tool for the weak; authority didn't need to scream.
"I—the files came in from the private investigator, sir. I thought you would want them immediately."
"Place them on the desk. Within the lines, Marcus."
I heard the shuffle of leather shoes on the black marble floor. Hesitant steps. The sound of a man walking into a predator's enclosure, trying not to smell like fear. Marcus was competent, usually. But he had a nervous tic—he breathed through his mouth when he was stressed. I could hear the wet, sharp intake of air.
Disgusting.
"Is the cleaning crew finished?" I asked, still facing the city.
"Yes, sir. Left ten minutes ago."
"There is a smudge on the north pane. Coordinate four, relative to eye level." I lifted my hand, tracing the faint, oily whorl of a fingerprint on the glass. Some cleaner had touched my view. "Fire the shift supervisor."
"Sir, it's just—"
I turned.
The movement was slow, fluid. Marcus snapped his mouth shut. He stood by the massive desk—a slab of obsidian I'd had flown in from Iceland. He was pale, clutching a manila folder to his chest like a shield.
"Excellence is binary, Marcus," I said, walking toward him. My footsteps made no sound. I preferred rubber soles; sound was clutter. "A thing is perfect, or it is broken. There is no gray area. A fingerprint on the glass is a structural failure of the service I pay for."
"I'll handle it," Marcus whispered. He placed the folder on the obsidian slab. He was careful. He aligned the edges of the folder with the corners of the desk. He had learned.
I reached for the file. My gloves were kidskin, black, hugging my fingers like a second layer of dermis. I hated the texture of paper—the dryness of it, the way it sucked the moisture from your skin. I peeled the cover back.
SUBJECT: ELENA ROSTOVA
AGE: 26
OCCUPATION: FREELANCE JOURNALIST (formerly The Atlantic, The New Yorker)
CURRENT STATUS: SEVERELY DISTRESSED
I stared at the photograph paper-clipped to the bio. It was a candid shot, taken from across a street. She was leaving a bodega, a cardboard coffee cup in one hand, a notebook in the other.
She was… messy.
That was the first variable that struck me. Her hair was a dark, unruly tangle that fought against the elastic band trying to contain it. Her coat was too big, swallowing her shape, a heavy wool thing that looked like it smelled of damp closet. But her face.
I tilted the image under the recessed lighting.
Her jaw was tight, set in a line of stubborn refusal. There were dark circles bruised beneath her eyes—the telltale sign of someone who spent their nights staring at ceilings, calculating debts they couldn't pay. She looked tired. She looked defeated.
But beneath the exhaustion, there was a geometry to her bone structure that pleased me. High cheekbones. A symmetrical arch to the brow. A mouth that looked soft, despite the grim line it was currently pressed into.
"The debts?" I asked.
"Significant," Marcus answered, regaining some of his composure now that we were discussing numbers. "Her father was a gambling addict. He borrowed from the wrong people in Brighton Beach. The Volkov syndicate. When he died of a stroke six months ago, the debt transferred to the next of kin. Capital plus interest. They're squeezing her."
"How much?"
"Two hundred thousand. And climbing."
I ran my gloved thumb over her picture. Two hundred thousand dollars. I had made that sum in the time it took me to shower this morning. For her, it was an insurmountable mountain, a weight that was slowly crushing her spine.
"And her writing?" I asked.
"She's brilliant," Marcus admitted, almost reluctantly. "But desperate. She's been writing clickbait articles for gossip sites to pay the vigorish. 'Top Ten Botox Fails' type of garbage. She hates it. You can see it in the syntax."
"A wasted resource," I murmured. "A Stradivarius being used to hammer nails."
I wanted a biography. Not a fluff piece, not a vanity project, but a record. I wanted the world to understand the philosophy of the Spire, the brutality required to build perfection. I needed a writer who understood pain. Someone who knew what it felt like to be stripped down to the foundation.
Most journalists were tourists. They came in, ate the hors d'oeuvres, asked about my childhood, and left.
Elena Rostova looked like she lived in the wreckage.
"She turned down the initial request," Marcus noted.
"Of course she did. She has pride." I traced the curve of her bottom lip in the photo. "Pride is a structural flaw. It makes people rigid. And rigid things break."
I closed the file. The sound was sharp in the silent room.
I looked around my penthouse. It was a temple of minimalist brutalism. Black steel, white leather, gray stone. No pictures of family. No plants. No life. Just the relentless pursuit of order. It was lonely, people said. I found it clarifying.
But I needed a witness.
I needed someone to look at what I had built and acknowledge my godhood. And I needed to break someone. It had been too long since I had taken a chaotic element and forced it into a grid.
"Set the meeting," I commanded.
"She said she isn't interested, Mr. Vane. She called you… I believe the phrase was 'an ego-maniacal gentrifier with a God complex.'"
A rare sensation pulled at the corner of my mouth. A smile? No. A reflex.
"She doesn't have a choice, Marcus. Acquire her debt."
Marcus blinked, his mouth dropping open slightly. "Sir?"
"Buy the note from the Volkovs. Offer them double to transfer the paper to Vane Holdings. Do it tonight."
I turned back to the window, to the sprawling infection of New York City. The sun was setting, bleeding orange pus across the horizon.
"By tomorrow morning," I said, my reflection staring back at me, hard and beautiful and cruel, "I want to own Elena Rostova."
"And if she still refuses?"
I looked at the ants on the street one last time.
"Then we will foreclose."