Story code: ST-001791
Part 2: The Ruin in the Dark
This was definitively not a powder room. The pale beam of light from the hallway sliced through the gloom, illuminating a massive, wood-paneled executive study that looked as though it had been subjected to a sudden, violent earthquake. Chloe stood frozen on the threshold, her brain sluggishly struggling to process the sheer scale of the destruction. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves had been systematically cleared, their heavy leather-bound contents hurled across the room with vicious force. A massive mahogany desk lay on its side, its drawers yanked out and shattered against the far wall. The floor was a treacherous sea of shredded documents, shattered glass from a broken whiskey decanter, and the crushed remains of what looked like an expensive antique globe.
But it was the sound that anchored her to the spot, overriding the intense, rhythmic throbbing in her bruised arm. It was a raw, wet, pathetic sound.
Deep in the shadows behind the overturned desk, someone was weeping.
Chloe leaned heavily against the brass door handle, her vision narrowing as her depleted blood sugar levels sent a fresh wave of dizzying static through her brain. She squinted into the dim light. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a chaotic snowstorm of torn financial ledgers and red-stamped bank notices, was Vice Chancellor Aris.
He must have utilized a service corridor to beat her to this wing of the estate. The charismatic, untouchable titan of the ballroom was completely gone. His tailored tuxedo jacket had been discarded in a heap, and his crisp white dress shirt was unbuttoned and stained with sweat. He was frantically feeding handfuls of official-looking documents into a small, smoldering fire he had built inside a brass wastebasket. Tears streamed down his flushed, panicked face as he rocked back and forth, sobbing with the breathless, uninhibited desperation of a man who had reached the absolute end of his rope.
Chloe’s sluggish mind pieced the terrifying tableau together in a fraction of a second. The “staggering forty-million-dollar endowment” wasn’t a victory. It was a desperate fabrication. The university wasn’t saved; it was bleeding out, and the man in charge was currently burning the evidence on a Persian rug while the very donors he had lied to clinked champagne glasses three rooms away.
She had to leave. She had to step backward, pull the heavy door silently shut, and vanish into the maze of carpeted hallways before he noticed her.
She commanded her right leg to step back into the corridor. Her body, severely compromised by the afternoon’s double-plasma extraction and running on sheer adrenaline, flatly refused to obey. The sudden surge of terror caused a massive spike in her heart rate, demanding oxygen and glucose that her bloodstream simply did not possess. A cold, clammy sweat instantly broke out across her forehead. The room tilted violently, pitching like a ship at sea.
Chloe stumbled, her borrowed heel catching sharply on the edge of the thick runner rug. She threw her left hand out to catch the doorframe, but her grip was weak. Her shoulder slammed hard into the mahogany wood with a dull, sickening thud. The sudden impact jarred her cheap purse loose. It slid down her arm, slipped off her wrist, and hit the hardwood floor with an echoing clatter, spilling a tube of lipstick, a ring of keys, and her emergency foil-wrapped apple juice box directly into the beam of hallway light.
In the center of the ruined study, the weeping abruptly stopped.
Vice Chancellor Aris froze. He slowly turned his head, his tear-streaked face illuminated by the flickering orange glow of the burning wastebasket. His eyes, red-rimmed and wild with panic, locked directly onto Chloe.
For three agonizing seconds, neither of them moved. Chloe’s lungs burned as she tried to draw a breath, but the air felt impossibly thin. The high-pitched humming in her ears escalated to a deafening roar. She desperately needed to tear open the little foil juice box resting just inches from her shoe, but her fingers felt like they were encased in lead.
Recognition flashed across Aris’s face. He didn’t know her name-he never bothered to learn the names of the adjuncts-but he recognized her face from the bleak breakroom where he had stripped away her healthcare. He looked from her pale, terrified face to the burning documents, and a dark, paranoid realization washed over him. He thought she was spying on him. He thought she knew everything.
The pathetic, weeping executive vanished, replaced instantly by a cornered predator. Aris scrambled to his feet with terrifying speed, ignoring the smoldering fire. He crossed the ruined study in three massive strides, lunging toward the doorway.
Chloe tried to turn and run, but her knees finally buckled, sending her sliding down the doorframe until she hit the floor. Before she could even attempt to crawl away, Aris grabbed the heavy brass handle of the mahogany door and slammed it shut, plunging the room into near darkness. The heavy *click* of the deadbolt sliding into place echoed like a gunshot in the confined space.
“Who sent you?” Aris demanded, his voice dropping to a harsh, trembling whisper. He loomed over her, his chest heaving.
Chloe tried to speak, to explain she just needed a bathroom, but her jaw wouldn’t work. The dark, fuzzy spots in her peripheral vision were rapidly expanding, eating away at the edges of the room. She weakly extended her trembling, bruised arm toward the apple juice box lying near his expensive leather shoe.
Aris followed her gaze. Misunderstanding the gesture, he brought his heel down, viciously kicking the small foil box across the room. It vanished into the shadows beneath the overturned desk.
“I asked you a question!” he hissed, dropping to a crouch and grabbing her by the shoulders, his grip painfully tight on her velvet sleeves. “Who knows? Who else is out there?”
Chloe’s head lolled back against the solid wood of the locked door. The last thing she felt before the darkness completely swallowed her was the vice-like grip of the ruined man, demanding answers she couldn’t give, while her only lifeline leaked silently into the floorboards ten feet away.