On the table before him, several files lay open, filled with reports his men had pulled in the last forty-eight hours: board movements, financial shifts, whispered conversations among shareholders. Each detail told him what he already knew and was expecting. Brown Empire was reeling.The rumor had done its work. He could almost picture the scene: Davis pacing in his office, eyes burning with suspicion; Victory, always the cooler one, feeding his skepticism into fuel for his own schemes; Kate, caught in the center of their conflict unsure which way to turn. The chaos was delicious in its precision.And yet Ven knew it wasn’t enough. Not yet. He needed the tremor to become an earthquake.He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. Bryan stood near the window, silent as ever, his presence like the room’s second shadow. Daniella hadn’t arrived yet, but Ven didn’t need her in front of him to give his command. She had been his weapon long before the others even remembered her name.

The chamber was dark, but not silent. The low hum of an old ventilation shaft whispered through the corners like a ghost, the faint flicker of candlelight casting long, jagged silhouettes across the stone walls. Three figures sat apart, cloaked in darkness more profound than their hoods could provide. Their gathering was never casual, each meeting meant a shift, a decision that could redraw the balance of power within the empire they had been circling for years. It's indeed a very deep union everytime.A large monitor sat on a stand between them, muted but playing clips of the news. Across the screen, the chyron blared the headline that had turned the Brown boardroom upside down:“Alex’s son to appear on national television, vows to reveal everything about Brown Empire.”Said one of the figures, the tone of a man who’d been forged in anger, his knuckles pressing into the table.“Look at them,” he sneered. “Like children caught in a storm they never saw coming. The board is fractured,

It began with a flicker and then appeared deadly. At precisely 6:00 a.m., the towering skyscraper of Brown Empire stirred to life as staff poured in for the day. Screens blinked, elevators hummed, coffee machines whirred. But within minutes, everything began to falter.First, the accounting system collapsed. The servers went dark, leaving numbers frozen mid-calculation. Then, emails failed. Phones went dead. By 6:15 a.m., every floor of the Brown Empire headquarters was drowned in confusion.Secretaries whispered, technicians shouted, executives barked orders that no one could carry out. Then the lights dimmed not from a power failure, but from something else, something more chilling. Every screen in the building from the smallest computer to the largest digital wall display, flashed into the same image.A black fog rolled across the screen, the first inscription. Then came the words in bold letters, stark and deliberate.“WE ARE BLACKFOG BROWN EMPIRE HAS 24 HOURS.TRANSFER $5 BILLI

The digital countdown burned across every screen in the boardroom, the numbers pulsing like a heartbeat.08:00:00 then 07:59:59.Henry sat at the head of the long table, his knuckles pressed into the polished wood. He hadn’t slept. None of them had. The smell of stale coffee and cigarette smoke clung to the air like despair itself.Their empire was still shackled, every system in the dark. Hotels ran without central coordination, financial reports hung incomplete, communications bled static. The city knew, the markets knew, the world knew. BlackFog had gutted the Brown Empire in public daylight.Kate’s voice broke the silence first. “Eight hours left. What progress have we made?”Victory leaned back, shadows under his eyes. “None that matters. Every line we throw at them, they reroute. The decoy accounts they cut through them like glass. If we try to stall again, they’ll release something worse.”Davis cursed, slamming his fist against the armrest. “So we’re just going to fold? To som

Zurich at night glowed with quiet wealth. The streets were clean, the trams ran on schedule, and the glass towers reflected a city that prided itself on discretion. But beneath the calm, shadows moved.The Browns had already deployed their resources. Victory had insisted on discretion with no noisy mercenaries, no show of force. Instead, three handpicked operatives arrived from London and Geneva under the cover of business travel. They carried no weapons that would attract attention, no badges of authority. They were ghosts, trained to vanish as easily as they appeared.Their target is Erich Voss, banker of Helvetia International.The man who, whether knowingly or not, had just touched five billion dollars of the Browns’ money.Operative One, a wiry ex-CIA tracker named Mercer, set up across from Voss’s townhouse in Seefeld, a neighborhood of lakeside affluence.Operative Two, a Frenchwoman called Celeste, took the day shift, blending into the cafés and boutiques that Voss frequented.