Heirs To The City: The Quartet

Chapter Eight

Adrian Winters

When I stepped into the elevator at the end of the day I pulled off my jacket before neatly folding it and resting my head against the back of the elevators metal frame.

"You're not supposed to look bored after making almost a quarter of a billion dollars currently," Olivia says stepping into the elevator as the doors shut and began to carry the two of us to the ground floor.

"We both know I could stop working today and never run out of money. But I won't, because I owe the people who made me that money a future," I reply.

"And what about our future?" she asks folding her slender arms and staring up at me. She was the only person in this whole world who could checkmate me in life, but she never had to, and even in rare moments she couldn't stop my reactions.

Most of the time though, she was my stop button.

"You don't want to hide us being together?" I ask looking down at her and attempting to gauge her emotions. The small problem was that Olivia wasn't looking at me, and I knew if I reached for her and the doors opened for someone else to get on, it could spark questions.

"No, I want to be able to attend all the Galas and events, to go on dates and have the media try and get public photos of us even though, you never would let any of them be public. There are no public images of you, at least not many and in most of them your face is hidden or its not entirely clear who you are in them. I just want to be with you, and being apart from one another has never been a good idea, I miss you a lot when we're apart" Olivia says tilting her head back to stare up at me, and I could see the faint glossiness in them, as she spoke.

Reaching across the short distance between us I wiped away the lone tear forming on her cheek and had to resist holding her close to me.

"I am haunted by your ghost when you're not in my house, and though we can't immedately go back to all our homes I will have my security start leaking purchase rumours so that when we're spotted, and or various parts of our old lives return it's not out of the ordinary," I say and she nodded before the doors dinged and we walked out of the elevator past the night shift which was coming in just to survey the building one last time before they would put on the security features which did include an isolation program that would run diagnostics on whoever had entered down to decrypting any voice and interfereance until the police arrived and arrested whoever thought it was a good idea to break into Winters Group.

In one of my past interviews I'd been asked why just the outside of the building took four years and the interior took all five which I ended up explaining that because of how much sensitive date the company dealt with, and how public the building was during the day there was perhaps the most advanced security measures ever produced and coded for a single building in all of New York. I'd left out that I was the one who had coded and designed the software that allowed WGI to have such capable security measures but if it was known that I had a polyencrypted password and software cycle that itself swapped between twenty different servers so that no single server could be hacked and gain access to the information. It had even allowed such potent energy to be let off in the form of head and small amounts of radiation that the server room had to be cooled on it's own power system.

And people wondered how I ended up with a twelve figure net worth.

Crossing the large lobby that like everything else about this tower was designed to make anyone who entered feel small if you were a guest, and proud if you worked here. I had also asked for it to be this way since the first time Olivia ever got to see this room the tower was still being constructed though the top floor was completed because it was easier to have all the supports and glass made before doing the interior and only once it was sealed could the crews come in to do all the work across the vast interior. Which I only found once the building was completed, all materials would have covered Central Park, and yet I was still allowed to have the building and nod directed by Air Rights New York to take the tower down.