Interruption

***POV: Hazel***

The multi-line console at Thorne Industries never ceases its relentless flashing, but I command the chaos with calculated efficiency. I am the gatekeeper to an empire. My headset is a permanent extension of my body, a conduit for the endless demands of the city's elite. I filter, I route, I block. Every breath I take in this chair is measured, until a blocked caller ID suddenly illuminates my primary screen. No company label. No name. Just a dark void of a number demanding my immediate attention.

I let it ring twice. A controlled hesitation. Then I answer, forcefully injecting a hollow warmth into my tone. "Thorne Industries."

"Hazel Hayes?" a low, gravelly voice asks, slicing right through my professional facade.

My spine instantly snaps rigid against the ergonomic mesh of my chair. A jolt of sheer adrenaline floods my system, turning the blood in my veins to ice. I blink at the glowing monitor, grounding myself in the present reality.

"Yes," I say.

"This is Detective Kross with the city police department."

My hand stills on the keyboard. For a fraction of a second, my body betrays me. Detective. Police. City. My brother. The words echo in my skull, threatening to tear down the fragile walls I spent the last three weeks building brick by agonizing brick. To maintain the desperate illusion of normalcy, I force my fingers to continue typing on the keyboard. I strike meaningless keys, opening a blank document just to give my hands a task. I refuse to look like a woman whose world is collapsing.

"Okay," I say, my voice tight. "What is this about?"

"You tell me," Kross replies.

The tone is not friendly. It is not neutral. It drips with a heavy, suffocating suspicion right out the gate. The sterile, conditioned air of the lobby suddenly feels far too thin to breathe. I keep my eyes fixed on the pristine surroundings, focusing on the imported glass doors and the gleaming elevator bank. Anywhere but the cold, expanding hollow in my chest.

"If you’re asking about my brother, Owen," I remind him, keeping my tone flat and even, "I already filed a comprehensive report. I surrendered my official statement. I already gave—"

"Yeah. I read it," Kross cuts me off with a sharp, dismissive clip.

He says it like my brother vanishing into thin air is just another annoying file cluttering his desk, and I am merely the nuisance attached to it. I swallow the bitter taste coating my mouth.

"Then you know everything I know," I state.

A pause stretches across the line, thick and deliberate.

"Where were you last night, Ms. Hayes?" Kross abruptly demands, shifting the ground beneath my feet.

I grip my pen. "At home."

"Alone?"

I stare at my digital calendar. The bright blocks of color blur together. "Yes."

"Anyone confirm that?"

My jaw clenches. The sheer audacity of the question rattles my cage. "Why are you asking me this?"

Before I can process the shift in his interrogation tactics, he drops a massive, suffocating weight onto my chest.

"Because," Kross says calmly. "Your brother’s phone pinged."

My breath catches. My pulse hammers a frantic rhythm against my ribs. The room tilts, but I refuse to let the shock bleed into my voice.

"Where?" I ask, keeping the word crisp and professional, like I am booking a standard conference room.

"Before we get into that, I want to clear something up," Kross dictates, ignoring my question. "Your brother has been missing what, three weeks?"

"Twenty-three days," I correct him without a second of hesitation.

I hear a faint hum on his end, a noise that suggests he is taking notes, marking my quick correction as another red flag in his investigation.

"And in those twenty-three agonizing days of silence," Kross notes, "you didn’t hear from him. Not a call, not a text, not a social media login. Nothing."

"No."

"Yet you seem remarkably willing to accept the narrative that he is simply the type of person to vanish into thin air."

"I never said that."

"You implied it."

"I said he’s an adult," I snap back, my fingernails digging into my palms as I violently clamp down on my rising temper. "I said he's done this before—gone quiet for a few days. I didn't say he disappears."

"You live together?" Kross asks.

"No."

"You see him often?"

"As often as we can."

"That’s vague."

I exhale slowly through my nose. The plastic casing of my pen groans under the pressure of my grip, a tiny, pathetic sound against the deafening roar of my own heartbeat. I force my voice to flatten into a dead calm. "Detective, if you have something to tell me, tell me. If you don’t, then this call is wasting my time."

Kross chuckles—a dry, humorless sound that scrapes against my ear. He makes it overtly clear he isn’t buying my composed demeanor for a single second.

"Oh, I don’t think your time’s being wasted," he says. He casually implies the real issue. "I think you are simply unaccustomed to fielding questions you cannot manipulate or control."

I force myself to place the pen back onto the desk. My hand shakes. I press my palm flat against the cool wood of the reception counter to steady the tremor.

"I am at work," I tell him, my tone dropping an octave. "If you’re accusing me of something, do it plainly."

The silence that follows is thick with tension. Then, Kross replies with a smooth, terrifyingly lethal patience.

"Accusing you? No. Not yet."

My stomach plummets. "What does that mean?"

"It means I have a few inconsistencies I want to clear up," he explicitly demands. "In person."

"I already came down to the station."

"Yeah," he says, openly mocking my supposed perfect cooperation. "And you were polite. Cooperative. Perfect."

He twists the word 'perfect' into a weapon, presenting it as a flaw he intends to exploit.

"Now I want you to come again. Tonight."

"I work," I argue.

"I know. I’m looking at your employment verification right now."

The lobby remains spotless and silent, but my reality is fracturing into sharp pieces. I stare blankly ahead.

"Why tonight?" I ask.

"Because I’m asking," Kross dictates. "And because I don’t like playing phone tag when I’ve got a missing persons case that smells wrong."

"Owen isn’t a smell," I say, a sharp edge bleeding into my words as I defend the only family I have left. "He’s a person."

"Mm," Kross grunts. "People do dumb things. People run. People hide." The words land like wet cement, heavy and inescapable. "I think something happened. And I think you know more than you’re saying."

My heart pounds a brutal rhythm against my sternum. I plaster the exact same tight, dead-eyed smile I reserve for entitled executives onto my face, even though he can't see it. It is a reflex. A desperate shield.

"You're wrong," I insist.

"Then prove it," he challenges.

"How?"

"Come in. Stop by the station on your way home tonight. Six p.m."

I narrow my eyes at the blinking console. "That does not sound like a request."

His comeback is casually devastating. "No. It isn't." A brief pause hangs in the air before he adds, "And Hazel? Don’t leave town."

The line goes dead with a harsh click.

I sit completely paralyzed. I stare blankly at my glowing monitor, my lungs refusing to expand as I struggle to pull in a single breath. The dial tone hums a flat, mocking note in my ear. Owen's phone pinged. The police suspect me of knowing the truth, of hiding him, of orchestrating this nightmare. I am trapped in a cage of questions I cannot answer.

Yet, survival instinct overrides the panic. I cannot afford to break. I force my trembling hands to resume typing. I drag the mouse across the screen, opening a scheduling window I do not need, clicking through emails I do not read, and rearranging appointments that require no adjustment. I refuse to crack. Not here. Not in a lobby constructed of imported glass and old money, surrounded by sharks who would relish the sight of my public downfall.

I keep my posture flawless. I do not look toward the elevator bank. I do not look toward the executive suite.

However, even as I battle to steady my racing pulse, a distinct shift occurs in the atmosphere. The hairs on my arms stand up. I feel a heavy, oppressive, and threatening attention physically bearing down on the back of my neck from high above. The weight of that stare is undeniable, emanating directly from Gideon’s executive wing.

He is watching me. The realization sends a fresh wave of dread crashing through my system.

Before I can process the terrifying weight of his attention, another incoming call violently flashes on my screen. Briggs again. The persistent, entitled councilman who refuses to accept that Gideon Thorne’s schedule is an impenetrable fortress.

Operating entirely on frantic, frayed muscle memory, my hand reaches for the console. My voice slides back into its mandated professional cadence before my brain even registers the movement.

"Thorne Industries—"

But my stomach violently drops out from under me.

I look down at the illuminated buttons on the console. The wrong line is lit. The wrong extension is active.

In my deeply distracted, panic-stricken state, I hadn't answered the general switchboard line. I had tapped the transfer sequence. I blindly forwarded the incoming call.

Direct.

I just forwarded a blocked call from an infuriating politician straight through to Gideon Thorne’s ultra-private office line. A line that is never supposed to ring unless I clear the caller first. A line he explicitly ordered me to keep silent for the remainder of the day.

My hand jerks in sheer terror. I frantically stab at the blinking buttons on the console, my nails slipping against the smooth plastic. I desperately try to yank the electronic connection back, to reroute it, to sever the line before the ring echoes across his desk.

The internal system spins on the screen. It lags for a catastrophic fraction of a second too long.

A heavy click echoes through my headset.

The connection is made. The line is open.

My breath lodges in my throat. I sit frozen in the pristine lobby, the polished marble floors feeling like a trap door ready to swing open beneath my feet.

I fucked up.

And Gideon Thorne doesn’t tolerate fuck ups.