Watching Sia fight security like a rabid animal was peak corporate entertainment.
Two guys in cheap suits trying to restrain a woman who’d spent fifteen years perfecting the art of psychological warfare? Amateur hour.
She was screaming—actually fucking screaming—in the middle of Amsterdam’s most prestigious tech conference.
Every CEO, CTO, and trust fund baby with a LinkedIn account was witnessing the complete meltdown of my director of operations.
“You chose her!” Sia shrieked, clawing at the security guards like they were personally responsible for her decade-and-a-half of delusion. “That disobedient American bitch who can’t even follow simple orders!”
The irony was beautiful. Sia calling anyone disobedient while literally fighting police custody.
“She doesn’t deserve you, Eric! She doesn’t understand what you need!”
What I needed was for this psychotic breakdown to happen literally anywhere else. The networking opportunities alone were dying a spectacular death.
But Sia wasn’t done with her performance art piece.
She twisted out of security’s grip with surprising agility—fifteen years of corporate pilates, apparently—and lunged toward me like I was her personal savior.
“Please,” she gasped, dropping to her knees right there on the convention center floor. Her perfect hair was disheveled, makeup smeared, designer suit wrinkled. “I just wanted to please you. Everything I did was for you.”
The crowd went dead silent. You could’ve heard a stock option drop.
I looked down at her kneeling there, and something cold settled in my chest. This wasn’t desperation.
This was theater.
One last manipulation attempt, performed for maximum emotional impact.
“Master,” she whispered, the word carrying fifteen years of twisted fantasy. “I’m sorry, master. I’m sorry.”
Master.
The word hung in the air like toxic gas. Every person in that room just got a front-row seat to the psychological wreckage of Sia Morgenstern’s corporate crush.
I placed my hand under her chin, tilted her face up. Her eyes were streaming tears, mascara creating abstract art down her cheeks.
For a split second, I saw what she’d been hiding behind all that professional composure. Pure, desperate obsession. The kind that ruins lives and companies and probably several innocent bystanders.
“Sia,” I said quietly, just loud enough for the crowd to hear.
She looked up at me with something that might’ve been hope.
“You’re pathetic.”
The hope died instantly. Replaced by something raw and broken that made my stomach turn.
I glanced at Floris, standing a few feet away with my laptop evidence of Sia’s betrayal. Her face was pale, eyes wide with something that looked suspiciously like fear.
Not of Sia. Of me.
She’d just watched me reduce a human being to sobbing wreckage with two words and a look. Watched me exercise the kind of psychological control that made grown adults call me ‘master’ in public.
For a moment, I saw myself through Floris’s eyes. And it wasn’t pretty.
“Officers,” I said, stepping back from Sia’s trembling form. “Please escort Ms. Morgenstern from the premises. And make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.”
The last part surprised even me. Some vestigial piece of humanity, apparently.
Security hauled Sia to her feet. She wasn’t fighting anymore. Just crying with the kind of broken-hearted devastation that makes everyone uncomfortable.
“Fifteen years,” she whispered as they led her away. “Fifteen years I waited for you.”
“I never asked you to wait,” I said.
But she was already gone, disappeared into whatever legal nightmare awaited corporate espionage charges.
The crowd began dispersing, probably rushing to update their LinkedIn profiles with “witnessed epic corporate meltdown” as a professional achievement.
I turned to Floris, who was still staring at me like I’d just revealed myself to be a serial killer.
“What?”
“That was…” She shook her head. “That was fucked up, Eric.”
“She betrayed us both.”
“Yeah, but the way you handled it…” She paused. “She called you master.”
“Old habits.”
“Whose habits?”
Fair question. One I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer.
“We need to focus on your brother,” I said instead. “Sia’s arrest just bought us time, but Timothy’s still out there.”
Floris nodded, but something had shifted in her expression. A distance that hadn’t been there before.
Great. I’d just solved one problem and created another.