She looked at me.
She didn’t look at the trooper.
She didn’t look at the flashing lights.
Her hand—still trembling with the residual current of the defibrillator—reached up once more, her thumb brushing the blood on my cuff, her eyes locking onto mine with an unyielding, un-appealable authority that made my spine snap straight:
*”Vanguard…”* she whispered through her blue lips:
*”…Eight-thirty.”
*
Then the ambulance from Saint Anthony’s had arrived, the paramedics swarming the shoulder with stretchers, spine boards, and IV bags, pushing me back into the gravel.
I had looked at my watch.
`08:38 AM.
`
The pitch meeting with Apex Health Logistics had started eight minutes ago.
I had jumped back into my Honda, my hands shaking on the wheel, my clothes covered in dirt and dried blood, driving sixty-five miles per hour through the red lights of West Colfax Avenue, praying that Nick would understand.
Praying that human life still carried equity in the twenty-first century.
I had walked into the lobby of Vanguard Creative Group at 08:52 AM.
And Nick had fired me before my heels cleared the carpet of the reception vestibule.
The knocking on my driver’s-side window was not polite.
It was three sharp, metallic raps delivered with the heavy signet ring of an executive who believed that glass was something you tapped when you wanted a waiter’s attention:
*TACK.
TACK.
TACK.
*
I opened my eyes.
Standing on the asphalt outside my car, leaning down with his hands on his hips, was **Nick Sterling**.
My boss.
The thirty-six-year-old managing partner of Vanguard Creative Group.
He wore an unbuttoned, two-thousand-dollar slate-gray Zegna sports coat over an open-collar Italian linen shirt, tailored trousers with razor-sharp creases, and Gucci driving loafers without socks.
His dark hair was pomaded into an immaculate slick-back; his face was flushed with that ugly, post-adrenaline arrogance of an insecure middle-manager who has just executed an underling to mask his own structural incompetence.
Beside Nick stood **Carter Holbrook**.
The Senior Vice President of Commercial Acquisitions for **The Holbrook-Vance Syndicate**—the ten-million-dollar prospective client we had supposed to pitch at eight-thirty.
Carter was sixty-two years old, tall, lean, with silver hair cropped into a severe military high-and-tight cut, wearing a double-breasted navy blazer with gold anchor buttons.
Across his wrist gleamed a platinum Patek Philippe.
He didn’t look angry about the missed pitch.
He looked like a man who had just inspected a slaughterhouse and found the carcass properly hung.
