Serafina watched her fall from the hundredth floor, shattering artwork worth millions.

And her husband's first action wasn't to call the police, but to seal off the scene.


Thirty minutes later, the body disappeared, the party continued, and everyone was smiling.

---

The panoramic elevator carried Serafina from the commotion of the hundredth floor to even higher levels. Her reflection appeared on the titanium-coated glass—Serafina Vanderbilt, tonight every inch the perfect Vanderbilt heir.


Guests chatted about stocks, artwork, and the upcoming Hamptons summer.

Her husband Julian stood at the center of the crowd, explaining to an oligarch the next billion-dollar opportunity for Thorn Capital.


The elevator doors closed behind her. She needed a moment of tranquility.

That's when she saw it.

To her right, a tiny figure was falling from above.

It was the silhouette of a young girl.

Her breath caught, her blood turning to ice in an instant.

The young body cut through the night sky, plummeting straight toward the center of the hall.

Then, a muffled sound.

Not the dull thud of flesh hitting marble, but a crisp shattering sound.

The $12 million sculpture "Broken Future" in the center of the hall lived up to its name.

The elevator doors slid open before her. Panic flooded the hall.

Screams erupted, guests recoiling in horror.

In the center of the fragments lay the girl. Her body twisted at an eerie angle, one leg bent unnaturally.

Julian was the first to react. He didn't scream or back away, but strode through the crowd.

"Seal all exits!" His voice wasn't loud, but carried an undeniable authority that instantly cut through the noise. "Shut down all external network communications!"

The security captain barked orders into his walkie-talkie, and the security guards in black suits began to move with military precision.

"My God," someone trembled beside Serafina, "that... that's Anja."

Dr. Marcus Shaw. Both of his sons were receiving tutoring from Anja.

Anja. That Eastern European girl who came three times a week, always with her head down, quietly tutoring their sons in Latin.

Serafina felt a violent wave of nausea. That silent, pale figure had now become the focus of the entire Paradise Tower.

Julian had already reached the corpse. He barely glanced at the bloodless young face, instead quickly scanning the surroundings, assessing the damage—not the loss of life, but the loss of assets.

"It wasn't suicide." Cassandra Sterling's voice sounded in Serafina's ear. She had somehow already moved to Serafina's side, gripping her arm tightly. The internationally renowned soprano, Julian's not-so-secret mistress, showed not a trace of compassion on her face, only shrewd vigilance.

"Look at her shoes," she jerked her chin toward the pile of fragments, "one is still on her foot, the other flew over there. Jump from that height, and your shoes don't stay on like that."

Serafina's gaze followed where she pointed. Yes, a plain canvas shoe, lying alone on the polished marble floor.

"So, she was pushed." Cassandra's conclusion was cold and swift.

This meant there was a killer in Paradise Tower. This realization suffocated Serafina more than the fall itself.

Julian turned around, gathering the core residents of their tower to a somewhat distant corner, forming a small circle isolated from the panicked guests. Besides Serafina and Julian, there were Dr. Shaw, lawyer Kevin Lee, and Cassandra. They were informal members of the Tower Elite Club, representing the core values of this building.

"The matter is simple," Julian began, "a girl has died. Whatever the reason, once the police get involved, Paradise Tower will become the headline of every tabloid in New York."

He paused, allowing the weight of these words to sink in.

"Murder scene, luxury property, Wall Street giant, opera diva..." he coldly listed the keywords, "The media will have a field day, and the Tower's reputation will be ruined instantly. More importantly," he looked at Serafina with piercing eyes, "Thorn Capital's IPO is just three weeks away. Any negative news will directly impact our valuation, resulting in losses of billions, even tens of billions of dollars."

"Julian, you mean..." Kevin Lee, their lawyer, began with a pale face.

"I mean nothing happened tonight." Julian announced decisively.

The entire space fell into dead silence.

"A girl is dead!" Dr. Shaw finally couldn't help but growl, "We can't just..."

"Just a tutor, Marcus." Julian interrupted him, with not a trace of warmth in his voice, "An insignificant orphan. For her sake, you want all of us, this tower, and billions in assets to be buried alongside her?"

He looked around at them, his gaze finally landing on Dr. Shaw, "Do you still want your medical license? If the police discover that you've been illegally prescribing medication to your VIP clients, what do you think will happen?"

Dr. Shaw's face instantly drained of all color.

Julian's gaze turned to Cassandra: "You probably don't want that old business with the Vanguard Academy board of directors to be dug up again, do you?"

Then to Kevin Lee: "If your 'tax optimization' methods for clients were exposed, how many clients do you think you would lose?"

Finally, he looked at Serafina. "Serafina," his voice softened slightly, but it was merely a snake changing posture before striking, "think about our son, think about the Vanderbilt name. Do you want him to be pointed at by classmates at school tomorrow, saying he lives in a murder house where a homicide took place?"

Every word struck Serafina like a slap. He wasn't persuading; he was stating facts, using each person's deepest fears to bind them together as stakeholders with common interests.

No one spoke anymore. Silence was consent.

"Good." Julian nodded with satisfaction, then began issuing directives.

"Kevin, contact your 'cleanup' team. I want the scene restored to its original state within an hour. Any trace that shouldn't be there, including that pile of garbage, must disappear."

"Marcus, you're a doctor, you know what to do. Use your expertise, don't leave any loopholes that forensics could detect."

"Cassandra, go stabilize the guests outside, tell them it's just a malfunction in the electrical system that triggered the fire alarm. Reassure them, then get them to leave as soon as possible."

"Security team," he turned to the captain who had been standing quietly nearby, "delete all surveillance footage from the hall for the past hour, overwrite it with yesterday's archives. Make sure no data can be recovered."

The division of labor was clear, coldly efficient. A tragedy concerning a life was swiftly transformed into a public relations crisis to be resolved within minutes.

Serafina was assigned the simplest task—to do nothing, to stay here, using her Vanderbilt family face as the best proof that everything was normal.

Over the next hour, she watched as this group of New York's elite professionals, in the way they knew best, erased the last traces of a young girl's existence.

Kevin Lee's "cleaning" team, dressed in property management company uniforms, swiftly loaded the heap of remains—a mixture of corpse and art piece fragments—into heavy black bags. They wiped the marble floor with professional chemical agents, leaving no trace of blood.

Dr. Shaw put on gloves and expressionlessly gave quiet instructions beside the body bag, probably about details on how to create wounds that would appear to be from a robbery.

Security personnel skillfully transported the body through the service elevator to the underground parking lot, an absolute blind spot for surveillance cameras.

And Serafina, standing right there, watching it all, felt her stomach churning but couldn't make a sound. She had become an accomplice. All of them were.

When everything was finished, Julian and Kevin Lee drove away in an unlicensed SUV carrying the black bag, disappearing through the underground garage exit. They were heading to Queens, where Anja lived, to arrange an appropriate "ending" for her.

When Serafina returned to the banquet hall on the hundredth floor, the party was still going on.

Music, champagne, laughter and merriment.

Cassandra was circulating among the guests, explaining the earlier "small accident" with her infectious laughter, blaming everything on the tower's oversensitive fire protection system.

The cleaned carpet had been temporarily laid in the center of the hall, perfectly covering what had once been a mess.

"Darling, you don't look well," a familiar banker's wife said to Serafina with concern.

She took a glass of champagne from a waiter's tray and gave herself, as well as the lady, a smile she had practiced thousands of times—one that was absolutely flawless.

"Just a bit tired," she said as the cold liquid slid down her throat, yet failed to extinguish the flame burning in her chest, "You know how it is—a hostess never stops worrying."