Genre: Corporate Drama / Revenge Word Count: Approx. 2,100 words
The lobby of the Sterling & Vance Tower in downtown Manhattan was a cathedral of glass and steel. It was designed to intimidate. The ceiling soared three stories high, and the floor was a seamless expanse of Italian marble that cost more per square foot than most people’s cars.
For Elias, however, it was just a floor. And right now, it had a scuff mark.
Elias was seventy-two years old, though his weathered face and the slow, deliberate way he moved made him look older. He wore the standard-issue gray jumpsuit of the building’s maintenance staff, a name tag that simply read “ELI” pinned crookedly to his chest, and a pair of worn-out sneakers that squeaked faintly against the marble.
He dipped his mop into the yellow bucket, wrung it out with practiced hands, and began to erase the scuff mark left by the morning rush of investment bankers and tech consultants. Elias hummed a low, unrecognizable tune as he worked. He loved this building. He knew its pulse. He knew that the HVAC system on the 40th floor rattled when the wind blew from the east, and he knew that the elevator in Bank B tended to stall if you held the door too long.
He was invisible. To the hundreds of people who streamed past him every morning, clutching their Starbucks cups and checking their iPhones, Elias was just a fixture—like the potted ferns or the security desk.
“Move it, old man.”
The voice was sharp, cutting through the ambient hum of the lobby.
Elias paused, leaning on his mop handle. A young man was standing dangerously close to the wet floor sign. He looked to be in his late twenties, dressed in a bespoke navy suit that screamed Savile Row, with a Patek Philippe watch glinting under the lobby lights. He was holding a leather briefcase in one hand and a phone in the other.
This was Marcus Thorne. He had been hired three weeks ago as the new Senior Vice President of Operations. A Wharton MBA, a “cost-cutting visionary,” and a man who had famously slashed the workforce of his previous company by 30% to boost the quarterly earnings.
“I said move,” Marcus snapped, covering his phone’s microphone. “You’re blocking the flow of traffic. This is the face of the company, not a janitor’s closet.”
Elias looked at the young man, his eyes calm and unreadable behind wire-rimmed glasses. “Just cleaning up a spill, sir. Someone dropped a latte. Sticky. Safety hazard.”
“I don’t care,” Marcus sneered. He stepped forward, impatient, and his polished Oxford shoe landed squarely on the damp spot Elias hadn’t finished drying.
Marcus slipped. It wasn’t a fall—just a stumble, enough to make him flail his arms and drop his phone. The device skittered across the marble floor.
The lobby went silent. The receptionists stopped typing. The security guard looked away, pretending to study his monitors.
Marcus regained his balance, his face flushing a deep, angry crimson. He looked at his shoe, which now had a faint streak of soapy water on the leather, and then at his phone lying five feet away.
“You clumsy idiot,” Marcus hissed. He didn’t pick up the phone. He stepped right up to Elias, invading his personal space. “Look at what you did. Do you know how much these shoes cost? Do you have any idea who I am?”
Elias didn’t flinch. He didn’t apologize, either. He just held the mop. “I know you’re the new VP of Ops, Mr. Thorne. And I know the floor is wet. That’s why the yellow sign is there.”
The lack of fear in the old man’s eyes seemed to infuriate Marcus even more. He was used to fear. He thrived on it. In his worldview, a janitor should be trembling.
“You think you can talk back to me?” Marcus laughed, a cold, humorless sound. “I was brought here to clean up this company. To trim the fat. To modernize our image.” He looked Elias up and down with visceral disgust. “And you? You are exactly what’s wrong with this place. You’re slow, you’re dirty, and you’re an eyesore.”
“I do my job, sir,” Elias said softly.
“Not anymore,” Marcus spat. “Give me your badge.”
Elias hesitated. “My badge?”
“Hand it over. Now. You’re fired. I want you out of this building in ten minutes. If I see you here when I come back down for lunch, I’ll have security throw you out on the pavement.”
Elias looked at the badge clipped to his pocket. It gave him access to every room in the tower, from the basement boiler room to the penthouse boardroom. He slowly unclipped it.
“Mr. Thorne,” Elias said, his voice steady, devoid of anger. “Are you sure you want to do this? Experience is hard to replace.”
“I can replace you with a Roomba and save the company forty grand a year,” Marcus scoffed, snatching the badge from Elias’s calloused hand. “Get out. You’re polluting the air.”
Marcus turned on his heel, retrieved his phone, and marched toward the executive elevators without looking back.
Elias stood there for a moment. He looked at the mop. He looked at the bucket. Then, he smiled—a small, sad smile. He placed the mop neatly against the wall, took off his work gloves, and placed them on the rim of the bucket.
“Okay,” Elias whispered to the empty air. “Have it your way.”
The next morning, the rain lashed against the floor-to-ceiling windows of the 80th-floor boardroom. The atmosphere inside was electric.
This was the Quarterly Strategy Meeting. The entire Board of Directors was present, along with the C-suite executives. At the head of the table sat the empty chair reserved for the Chairman, a recluse who rarely attended operational meetings, preferring to let the CEO run the day-to-day.
Marcus Thorne stood at the front of the room, clicking through a PowerPoint presentation. He was in his element. The projections were on the screen, the graphs were going up, and he was selling his vision of a “Leaner, Meaner Sterling & Vance.”
“Efficiency isn’t just about numbers,” Marcus lectured, pacing the room with the confidence of a predator. “It’s about aesthetics. It’s about branding. When a client walks into our lobby, they need to see power. They need to see the future. They don’t need to see relics of the past.”
He paused for effect, making eye contact with the CEO, David Sterling.
“I took the liberty of initiating a personnel audit yesterday,” Marcus bragged. “I terminated a member of the maintenance staff on the spot. He was insubordinate, sloppy, and frankly, he smelled like yesterday’s garbage. We need to contract a third-party cleaning service. Invisible. Night shift only. No more clutter in the daylight.”
David Sterling, a silver-haired man with a nervous tic in his left eye, looked uncomfortable. “You fired someone? Who?”
“Some old guy named Eli,” Marcus dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “Doesn’t matter. He’s gone.”
A strange silence fell over the room. It wasn’t the silence of awe; it was the silence of people who realized a bomb had just been armed, but they weren’t sure when it would explode.
The board members exchanged glances. One of them, a woman named Sarah Jenkins, cleared her throat. “You fired Eli?”
“Yes,” Marcus said, annoyed by the interruption. “And I saved us a pension payout in the process. Now, if we look at Q3 projections—”
The heavy oak double doors of the boardroom swung open.
Marcus stopped mid-sentence. He hated interruptions. He turned around, ready to berate whichever assistant had dared to barge in.
But it wasn’t an assistant.
Walking through the doors was a man in a charcoal grey three-piece suit. The tailoring was exquisite, the fabric catching the light. He moved with a grace that belied his age. He wore a platinum watch that cost more than Marcus’s entire wardrobe.
It was Elias.
But it wasn’t the Elias of yesterday. Gone was the stoop. Gone was the grime. His hair was combed back, silver and distinguished. The only thing that remained the same were the wire-rimmed glasses and the calm, penetrating eyes.
Marcus blinked. His brain couldn’t quite process the image. “You?” he stammered. “What are you doing here? Security! How did you get up here?”
Marcus looked frantically at the CEO. “David, call security! This is the janitor I fired yesterday! He’s trespassing!”
David Sterling didn’t reach for the phone. Instead, he stood up.
So did Sarah Jenkins. So did the CFO. So did every single member of the Board of Directors.
They stood in respectful silence as Elias walked to the head of the table—the empty chair. He placed a leather portfolio on the mahogany surface and looked around the room.
“Good morning, everyone,” Elias said. His voice was deep, resonant, and commanded absolute authority.
“Good morning, Mr. Chairman,” the room chorused in unison.
Marcus felt the blood drain from his face. His knees turned to water. He gripped the edge of the podium to keep from falling. Chairman?
Elias Vance. The “Vance” in Sterling & Vance. The co-founder who had built this empire from a garage in Queens fifty years ago. The man who was rumored to be eccentric, who liked to “walk the floor” to understand his employees.
Elias remained standing. He turned his gaze toward Marcus. It wasn’t a look of anger. It was a look of profound disappointment.
“Mr. Thorne,” Elias said. “You seem confused.”
“I… I…” Marcus stuttered, his arrogant veneer shattering into a thousand pieces. “I didn’t know. Sir, I had no idea. You were wearing… you were holding a mop.”
“Yes,” Elias said. “I was. Do you know why?”
Marcus shook his head, unable to speak.
“Because this building is my home,” Elias said, his voice quiet but carrying to every corner of the room. “And because I like to know what is happening in my home. I like to know how my people are treated when they think no one important is watching.”
Elias walked slowly toward Marcus. The room was so quiet you could hear the rain hitting the glass.
“You speak of efficiency, Mr. Thorne. You speak of branding.” Elias stopped two feet from him. “Yesterday, you told me I was ‘polluting the air.’ You told me I was ‘garbage’ because my clothes were dirty.”
“It was a misunderstanding, sir,” Marcus pleaded, sweat beading on his forehead. “I was stressed. It was a bad day. If I had known it was you—”
“That,” Elias cut him off sharply, “is exactly the problem.”
Elias turned to face the board. “If he had known it was me, he would have opened the door for me. He would have offered me a coffee. He would have licked my boots.”
Elias turned back to Marcus, his eyes hardening. “Character isn’t defined by how you treat the people who can help you, Mr. Thorne. It is defined by how you treat the people who can do absolutely nothing for you.”
“Sir, please,” Marcus whispered, his voice cracking. “I have a family. I have a mortgage. I’m the best operations guy you have.”
“You were the operations guy,” Elias corrected. “But you failed the most important operational test.”
Elias reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a plastic object. It was the ID badge Marcus had confiscated yesterday. He tossed it onto the table. It slid across the polished wood and stopped right in front of Marcus.
“You fired a janitor yesterday for a smudge on the floor,” Elias said. “Today, the Chairman is firing a Vice President for a stain on our culture.”
“You can’t do this,” Marcus gasped. “I have a contract. I have a severance package.”
“Read the morality clause in your contract,” Elias said coldly. “Gross misconduct. Harassment. Abuse of power. I have the security footage from the lobby, audio included. You shouted at an elderly employee, humiliated him, and physically intimidated him. In this state, that’s grounds for immediate termination with cause. No severance. No reference. Nothing.”
Marcus looked around the room for support. He looked at David Sterling. David looked down at his papers. He looked at the other board members. They looked at Elias with reverence.
Marcus was alone.
“Security is waiting in the hallway,” Elias said, checking his watch. “I believe you gave me ten minutes to vacate the premises yesterday? I’m feeling generous. I’ll give you five.”
Marcus Thorne, the man who wanted to modernize the company, looked small. He looked defeated. He grabbed his briefcase, his hands trembling violently, and walked the walk of shame toward the door.
As he reached the handle, Elias spoke one last time.
“Oh, and Marcus?”
Marcus paused, looking back, hope flickering in his eyes that maybe, just maybe, this was a lesson and not a termination.
“Don’t trip on your way out,” Elias said dryly. “The floor might still be wet.”
Epilogue
The elevator ride down was the longest of Marcus Thorne’s life. When the doors opened to the lobby, two security guards were waiting for him. They escorted him past the reception desk, past the turnstiles, and out the revolving doors into the pouring rain.
Back in the boardroom, the tension had dissipated, replaced by a sense of solemn purpose.
Elias Vance sat down in his chair at the head of the table. He took off his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief.
“Now,” Elias said, putting his glasses back on and looking at his team. “Let’s talk about that cleaning contract Marcus mentioned.”
“We’ll cancel the third-party search immediately, sir,” David Sterling said quickly. “We’ll hire a new internal team.”
“No,” Elias said. He smiled, and for a moment, the mischievous glimmer of the old janitor returned to his eyes. “We don’t need a new team. The old one is fine. But I think the night shift is too isolating. Keep them on the day shift. I want everyone in this company to see the people who make their work possible.”
He opened the portfolio in front of him.
“And David?”
“Yes, Mr. Chairman?”
“Order some new mops. The one on the ground floor has a loose handle.”
“Right away, sir.”
Elias nodded. He looked out the window at the city below, a concrete jungle where wolves like Marcus Thorne roamed, hunting for weakness. But in this tower, at least, the wolves would find no quarter.
“Item one,” Elias announced. “Let’s get to work.”
