Page 9 of Thirty-Two Calls

"Mr... Mr. Rothwood?"

Lance snapped his head around. Mr. Roger, the floor manager—a balding, usually mild-mannered man—was standing nervously outside his glass-walled office, sweating profusely into his collar.

"Where is she?" Lance demanded, his voice a low, dangerous whip crack that made half the floor flinch.

Mr. Roger swallowed hard, misinterpreting the lethal edge in the CEO's voice. He assumed the worst. He assumed the gossip had finally reached the top floor. "Sir, I... I assure you, we tried to handle the situation discreetly. The whispers, the harassment Miss Evie faced from some of the other staff... it’s a difficult environment when... well, when the rumors..."

Lance’s vision actually blurred with rage. "I didn't ask you about the rumors, Roger. I asked you where she is. Is she on leave?"

Before the terrified manager could stammer out a reply, Connor Radcliff pushed through the crowd of gaping employees, having sprinted down the stairwell to follow his boss. He arrived slightly out of breath but maintained his absolute professionalism.

"Connor," Lance barked, not taking his eyes off the empty desk. "Find out where Evie is. Now."

"Right away, sir," Connor said, instantly pulling out a tablet and tapping rapidly into the HR mainframe.

"Please, Mr. Rothwood," Mr. Roger pleaded softly, gesturing to his private office. "Perhaps it would be better to wait inside? Away from the floor?"

Lance barely heard him, but the primitive, frantic instinct to hide his vulnerability took over. He gave one last, desperate look at the sterile, empty desk before stepping into Mr. Roger's cramped office. The blinds were drawn, but the walls felt as if they were closing in on him. He felt like he was suffocating.

The master plan. The power. The choice he was going to offer her.

Standing in the cramped office, waiting for Connor to deliver an answer he suddenly realized he was terrified to hear, Lance Rothwood felt true, absolute terror for the first time in his life.

Chapter Eight: The Anatomy of a Ghost

The air inside Mr. Roger’s cramped, glass-walled office felt unusually thin, as if the panic radiating from Lance Rothwood was consuming all the oxygen.

Lance stood perfectly still, his broad back to the floor manager, staring blindly through the slanted plastic blinds at the empty desk. The silence stretched, tight and fragile as a tripwire, until the office door finally clicked open.

Connor Radcliff stepped inside. The executive assistant, a man who had flawlessly coordinated multi-billion-dollar hostile takeovers without breaking a sweat, looked visibly shaken. He held his sleek tablet in a white-knuckled grip, his usually impeccable posture rigid.

"Well?" Lance demanded, turning sharply. His voice was a low, dangerous rumble that left no room for hesitation. "Where is she? Is she sick?"

Connor swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing against his starched collar. "Sir... Ms. Foster isn't on medical leave. She isn't on the payroll at all."

Lance’s brow furrowed, a flicker of pure confusion breaking through his rage. "What are you talking about? I saw her last Thursday. Fix the system error, Connor."

"It's not an error, Mr. Rothwood," Connor said softly, holding out the tablet. His hand was trembling slightly. "Evangeline Foster resigned. The paperwork was filed and processed exactly fourteen days ago."

The words hit Lance with the blunt force of a physical blow. He stared at the glowing screen of the tablet, but the text blurred into meaningless shapes. "Fourteen days ago? That's impossible. HR requires a month's notice for senior analysts. There are exit interviews. Non-disclosure renewals. Someone would have told me."

"That's just it, sir," Connor explained, his voice dropping to a hushed, disbelieving whisper. "There were no exit interviews. The resignation packet bypassed human resources entirely. It was routed through an automated leftover protocol that hasn't been active in five years. Her final severance was paid out, her corporate access was revoked, and her file was archived... all without a single human being pressing a button."

Lance snatched the tablet from Connor’s hands. He scrolled through the digital exit file. It was flawless. Sterile. Terminal. She hadn't just quit. She had vanished.

The Erasure

Ten minutes later, Lance was back in the fortified sanctuary of his top-floor executive suite, the crisis of the corporate merger entirely forgotten. The room was deathly quiet, save for the frantic clicking of keyboards.

He had summoned the head of Rothwood Industries’ cybersecurity division. Now, three of the most brilliant tech minds on the Eastern Seaboard were huddled around a workstation, sweating under the terrifying, silent scrutiny of their CEO.

"Talk to me," Lance commanded, pacing behind them like a caged predator.

The lead security director, a woman named Aris, pushed her glasses up her nose, her eyes wide as she stared at the scrolling lines of code. "Mr. Rothwood... I've never seen anything like this. It's a localized digital wipe, executed with terrifying precision. Every trace of Evangeline Foster—her emails, her keycard logs, her payroll history, her biometric data—it hasn't just been deleted. It's been recursively scrubbed and overwritten with junk data."

Lance stopped pacing. A cold, heavy dread began to pool in his stomach. "Can you recover it? Run a deep trace on her final routing numbers."

"We tried," Aris replied, her voice tinged with professional awe. "The routing numbers bounced through six offshore shell companies before terminating in a dead-end crypto ledger. And..." She hesitated, glancing nervously at Lance. "It's not just her, sir."