OBJECT PERMANENCE
POV: Silas Vane
There were sixteen security cameras inside the Penthouse.
I did not view them as surveillance; I viewed them as data streams. They provided real-time telemetry on the performance of the building's ecosystem. I could see the humidity sensors in the wine cellar, the thermal output of the server room, and the motion patterns in the East Wing.
Currently, Camera 04 showed Elena Rostova.
I sat in my office, the glow of the monitors washing over my face in cool blue light. It was 11:00 AM. She had been silent for fourteen hours.
On the screen, she was pacing.
The resolution was high enough that I could see the slight frown between her eyebrows. She was walking a tight circle in the center of her bedroom, wearing the black loungewear I had provided. Her feet were bare. Pad. Pad. Pad. I could almost hear the rhythm.
She looked like a tiger in a zoo enclosure—bored, agitated, and dangerously full of potential energy.
Most people crumbled under silence. I had tested this variable on employees before. Without the constant feedback loop of chatter—small talk, complaints, reassurance—people began to doubt their own existence. They needed noise to confirm they were real.
Elena was struggling.
She would walk to the glass wall, press her forehead against it, and mouth words to the city below. Then she would pull away, catch herself, and look guiltily at the ceiling sensor.
She thought I was watching to punish her.
I was watching because she was fascinating.
She went to the desk I had installed in her room. She sat down. She opened the laptop—a pristine MacBook I had allowed Marcus to give her, but stripped of all internet browsers. It was a typewriter with a screen. Nothing more.
She began to type.
I switched windows on my own console. I had remote access to her keystrokes. I didn't just watch her body; I watched her mind.
Letters appeared on my screen in real-time, ghosting her movements.
The architect is not a man; he is a geometry equation that gained sentience. He speaks in angles. He breathes in grids. To live in his house is to live inside a kaleidoscope where every turn cuts you on a new shard of glass…
I stopped breathing for a moment.
I leaned back in my Aeron chair, steepeling my fingers under my chin.
A geometry equation that gained sentience.
It was insulting. It was reductionist.
And it was beautiful.
She wasn't writing a biography. She was writing an autopsy.
I watched the cursor blink as she hesitated. She backspaced. She deleted "shard of glass." She typed "shard of ice." Deleted again. "Shard of silence."
She was wrestling with the prose. She wanted to impress me. I could feel it in the hesitant way the cursor throbbed on the screen. She was terrified of me, she hated me, but she desperately wanted me to call her brilliant.
I checked the time.
Her draft was due in eight hours.
I needed to break her down before I could build her up. If she thought this draft was good, she would become complacent. Complacency was the death of art.
I closed the window. I keyed the intercom to Marcus.
"Is the guest's lunch prepared?"
"Yes, sir. Quinoa salad with poached salmon. Plating now."
"Add the edits I printed this morning to the tray. Place them directly next to the water glass."
"The… red-lined manuscript from yesterday's notes?" Marcus hesitated. "Sir, it's quite… heavy on the ink."
"Do it."
I looked back at Camera 04. Elena was still typing, her posture hunched, her hair falling over her face. She looked engrossed. She looked inspired.
She had no idea I was about to crush that inspiration into dust.
To build a skyscraper, you first have to dig a hole. You have to hollow out the earth. You have to create a void deep enough to hold the weight of what comes next.
I was digging the hole.
POV: Elena Rostova
Silence was heavy.
It wasn't empty; it was dense. It had mass. It sat on my chest like a lead apron at the dentist's office.
I hadn't spoken since Silas put his thumb over my mouth yesterday evening. I had eaten dinner in silence, staring at his perfect tie knot while he ignored me. I had slept in silence. I had woken up in silence.
My throat ached from disuse. I found myself humming internally, just to remember the pitch of my own voice.
You are mute.
His order replayed in my head on a loop. The arrogance of it was suffocating, but the terrifying part was how quickly I had obeyed. I was afraid of the penalty—the extended time, the threat of Nikolai—but I was also oddly determined.
I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of breaking. I would be the quietest thing in this goddamn tower. I would be a ghost.
I channeled all that frustration into the keyboard.
I typed furiously, the keys clacking being the only sound in the East Wing. I was writing about the atrium, about the light, about the way Silas moved through space like he owned the molecules of air.
It felt good. It felt raw. The prose was flowing in a way it hadn't in years. The despair I felt about the debt, about the isolation—it was fuel. I was burning it.
A chime at the door made me jump.
It slid open.
Marcus stood there with a sleek black tray. He didn't enter. He just set the tray on the low table near the door and gave me a sympathetic, tight-lipped nod.
"Lunch," he whispered, breaking the rules of the silence just for a second.
Then he left.
I stood up, stretching my stiff back. My stomach grumbled. I walked over to the tray. The food looked like art—a perfect circle of quinoa, a precisely flaked piece of pink salmon.
But next to the heavy crystal water glass lay a stack of paper.
My notes from yesterday. The first ten pages of observational jottings I had submitted via the server last night.
I picked them up.
My heart plummeted into my stomach.
Red.
The pages were bleeding.
Silas hadn't just edited them; he had massacred them. Every single sentence seemed to have a slash through it.
I carried the stack to the bed and sat down, my hands trembling. I began to read his margin notes. His handwriting was architectural—all caps, small, sharp, uniform.
PAGE 1: CLICHÉ. "The city that never sleeps" is lazy writing. Delete.PAGE 2: REDUNDANT. You used the word "towering" three times in one paragraph. Buy a thesaurus.PAGE 3: EMOTIONAL VOMIT. I do not care how the building makes you feel. I care what the building IS. Focus on structure, not sentiment.PAGE 4: BORING.
The word was circled three times. BORING.
I felt tears prick the back of my eyes. Hot, angry tears. I had been published in The New Yorker. I had been nominated for a Pushcart Prize before my life fell apart. I knew how to write.
I turned the page.
PAGE 5: SYNTAX ERROR. This sentence is a run-on. It has no structural integrity. It collapses under its own weight.
At the very bottom of the last page, there was a summary:
SUMMARY:You are writing like a victim. Victims observe the world happening to them. Protagonists act upon the world. Rewrite everything. 0/10.
I threw the papers across the room. They fluttered like wounded birds and scattered across the pristine floor.
"Bastard," I mouthed. I couldn't say it aloud. The prohibition.
I hugged my knees to my chest. The rejection stung worse than the silence. It validated every insecurity I had buried under my bravado. Maybe I was a fraud. Maybe I was just a hack who wrote clickbait because that was all I was good at. Maybe Silas Vane, with his cold eyes and perfect suits, saw right through me.
I looked at the food. I wasn't hungry anymore.
I looked at the laptop.
Rewrite everything.
I wanted to quit. I wanted to pack my bag and leave.
But I couldn't. I was owned.
I wiped my eyes furiously. I slid off the bed and crawled onto the floor, gathering the red-slashed papers. I forced myself to read them again.
This time, past the insults, I looked at the actual edits.
He had crossed out 'The shadows danced across the floor' and wrote 'Shadows do not dance. They elongate. Be precise.'
He was right. Shadows didn't dance. That was lazy.
He had cut an entire paragraph about my feelings of loneliness. 'Irrelevant to the subject.'
He was right. This wasn't a memoir; it was a biography of a monster.
I sat there on the floor for an hour, dissecting his dissection. It was brutal, heartless, and cruel.
But it was also… correct.
He was forcing me to strip away the fluff. He was forcing me to write with the same cold precision he used to build.
I stood up. I went back to the desk.
I deleted the entire morning's draft.
I started over.
POV: Silas Vane
By 8:00 PM, the silence in the penthouse had shifted. It was no longer the heavy silence of resistance; it was the focused silence of industry.
I stood at the railing of the mezzanine, looking down into the atrium.
Elena was allowed out of her room for dinner.
She sat at the long dining table, which was made of a single slab of raw walnut. It was large enough to seat twenty. We were only two.
I sat at the head. She sat to my right.
She looked exhausted. Her hair was pulled back into a severe knot, likely an unconscious mimicry of the order around her. She wore a high-necked black blouse I had selected.
She ate slowly, her fork making no sound against the plate. She was adhering to the protocol. She had not spoken a single word in twenty-six hours.
I watched her cut a piece of steak. Her hand was steady.
"You read the notes," I stated. It wasn't a question.
She stopped eating. She looked up at me. Her eyes were dark pools of resentment, but beneath the anger, there was something else. Curiosity?
She nodded.
"And?" I asked. "Do you have a defense?"
She placed her fork down. She opened her mouth, then closed it. She pointed to her lips.
I took a sip of my wine—a darker, heavier vintage than the one she had wasted.
"The penance is suspended for the duration of this meal. You may speak. Briefly."
She let out a breath, a sharp exhale that sounded like a deflating tire. She drank half a glass of water before looking at me.
"You're a sadist," she rasped. Her voice was husky from disuse. It sent a low thrum of appreciation through my nervous system.
"I am an editor," I corrected. "Most editors are too polite to tell you the truth. They cradle your ego. I have no use for your ego."
"You called my writing 'emotional vomit,'" she said, her voice gaining strength.
"Was I wrong? You spent two paragraphs describing the feeling of the hallway. The hallway is grey stone. It is six feet wide. It leads to the North Wing. That is the story. Not your existential dread while walking down it."
"Literature is about emotion, Silas. Not just dimensions."
"We are not writing literature, Elena. We are writing history. History is fact."
She gripped the edge of the table. "You destroyed it. All of it."
"I pruned it. A tree cannot grow if it is choking on dead branches."
I leaned forward. The candlelight reflected in my eyes.
"But," I said softly.
She froze. She waited. I let the silence hang there, stretching it out until the tension was palpable.
"Paragraph four," I said. "On the second page."
She frowned, searching her memory.
"The description of the skyline," I prompted. "'The buildings are not reaching for the sky; they are fleeing the earth. They are fugitives of gravity.'"
I recited her words back to her. I had memorized them.
She blinked. "You crossed that out."
"I did."
"So it was bad."
"No," I said. "It was dangerously good."
Her mouth parted slightly. "What?"
"It was the only sentence in the entire heap of garbage that made me stop. It was perceptive. It understood the physics of what I do. I am fleeing the earth, Elena. The earth is rot. The sky is purity."
I picked up my knife again, slicing into the rare meat.
"If you write more sentences like that," I said without looking at her, "I might actually let you keep your laptop."
I didn't need to look up to know what was happening. I could feel the radiation of her pleasure. It was pathetic, really, how easily humans could be manipulated. Break them for twenty hours, give them one crumb of praise, and they would starve themselves to get another.
"I… thank you," she whispered.
"Don't thank me. Just do it again. Better."
"Can I…" She hesitated. "Can I have my phone back? Since I rewrote it?"
I looked up then. Coldly.
"No."
Her face fell.
"But," I added, "you may use the Library tomorrow. Unsupervised. For one hour."
Her eyes lit up. The Library was the inner sanctum. She knew this.
"Really?"
"Don't make me regret it. If you touch a single book with greasy fingers, I will have your hands bound."
I wasn't joking. She seemed to realize that.
"I'll be careful."
"You are learning," I said. "Now. Finish your protein. You look skeletal. It displeases me."
We ate in silence for the rest of the meal. But it was different now. The silence wasn't a punishment. It was a shared space.
I watched her eat. She was taking bigger bites. She held her head a little higher.
I had destroyed her confidence and then rebuilt it in my own image. She was seeking my validation now.
Object permanence.
Even when I wasn't in the room, even when I wasn't speaking, she was thinking about what I wanted. She was writing for an audience of one.
And that was exactly where I wanted her.
POV: Elena Rostova
Back in my room, the silence returned, but I didn't hate it as much.
I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
Fugitives of gravity.
He had remembered the line. He had recited it.
Silas Vane, the man who looked at the world like it was a math problem, had memorized my words.
I rolled over, pressing my face into the pillow to hide the stupid, involuntary smile that crept onto my lips. I shouldn't be smiling. He was a tyrant. He had called my work "vomit." He was holding me hostage in a glass tower.
But he had seen me.
For a moment, in the dining room, when he looked me in the eye and quoted my own sentence back to me, I hadn't felt like a debtor or a prisoner. I felt like… an equal.
A shiver went through me. Not fear. Not entirely.
It was something darker.
I sat up and grabbed the notebook from the nightstand—the paper one. I couldn't sleep.
I turned to a fresh page.
I didn't write about the building.
I wrote about his hands. The way they looked when he took the gloves off. The way the tendons moved when he used a knife. The precision. The violence of his grace.
He is a scalpel, I wrote. And I think I am the incision.
I closed the book.
I looked at the camera in the corner of the ceiling. The small red light was unblinking.
"Are you watching?" I whispered.
I didn't know if he could hear me. But for the first time, I hoped he could.
I turned off the lamp.
The city lights flooded the room, but the cold didn't bite as hard tonight.
I had passed the first test. I was bruised, yes. My ego was battered. But I was still here.
And tomorrow, I was going into the Library.
I fell asleep dreaming of falling upwards, fleeing the earth, caught in the gravity of a black star.
POV: Silas Vane (Epilogue of the Night)
I sat in the server room in the basement—the brain of the house.
Screen 04 showed Elena sleeping.
She was curled on her side. Her breathing was rhythmic. Slow. Delta waves.
I zoomed in.
Her hand was resting near her face, relaxed. She wasn't clutching the sheets in anxiety anymore.
I felt a surge of possessiveness that was irrational. I didn't like irrational things. I usually excised them.
But this… this I let linger.
I opened a command prompt on the secure terminal.
> AUTHORIZE: ACCESS LEVEL 2
> USER: ROSTOVA
> PERMISSION: LIBRARY_ENTRY [GRANTED]
I paused. Then I typed another line.
> TEMPERATURE CONTROL: EAST_WING
> ADJUST: +2 DEGREES
She looked cold.
It wasn't kindness, I told myself as I executed the command. It was maintenance. Cold machinery became brittle. I needed her pliable.
I watched her shift in her sleep as the warmth hit the room. She sighed.
I leaned back, watching her until the numbers on the clock turned over.
She was mine.
And tomorrow, we would see if she could survive the foundation.