The morning light over Belgrave City was soft and deceptive, casting golden hues over glass towers still scarred from the last wave of Syndicate chaos. Inside the KaneCorp penthouse, silence lingered like a storm waiting to break.Jake stood at the edge of the floor-to-ceiling window, shirt half-buttoned, a dark bruise peeking from his collarbone. He sipped cold coffee, the bitterness matching the hollow taste in his mouth. The city sprawled below — quiet, for now. But he could feel it. The pulse of something new. Something coming.Behind him, the room stirred. Elena.She walked in with calculated grace, black pencil skirt, silk blouse, hair pinned into a severe bun. Always composed. Always five steps ahead. But today, her eyes lingered too long on Jake’s reflection.“You didn’t sleep,” she said softly, more observation than concern.Jake didn’t turn. “Didn’t know I was supposed to.”Elena moved to the glass bar and poured herself tea. No vodka this time. That meant something. Her sil

The screen glitched. Static crackled for half a second before stabilizing on Elena’s face.“They pulled it,” she said, voice tight. “We lost the Riyadh node.”Jake stood frozen in front of the wall-sized screen in the war room beneath Arcadia Heights. Around him, a constellation of digital feeds tracked global operations—supply chains, drone patrols, offshore servers. One blinked red.Riyadh. Offline.“They used the satellite decoy,” Mara added from her terminal, eyes racing across code. “Fake heat signature, mirrored protocol… same as we’ve seen before. But this one had signatures pulled from our own archives. Amanda had access.”Jake didn’t flinch, but something behind his eyes dimmed. Elena noticed.She stepped closer, speaking low. “That node handled over a third of our black market crypto flow. It’s not just about money, Jake. The signal piggybacked through a Carter comms relay buried under that desert for ten years. Amanda wanted us to see it go down.”He said nothing.Mara conti

Jake stood at the edge of the rooftop helipad, the wind tugging at his coat as the city glittered beneath him. From here, the world looked calm — neat, ordered, manageable. But inside the war room of the tower he’d built, chaos stirred with every message, every whispered betrayal, every shift in allegiance.Behind him, Elena stepped out of the glass stairwell. Her voice was calm, almost cold. “The Vienna operation was real. Amanda and Diane planted the data leak. You lost more than a communications satellite, Jake. You lost the trust of two partners in Zurich. They're pulling out.”Jake didn’t turn around. “How much?”“Seventy-eight million. Off the books.”He exhaled slowly. Amanda was playing chess with him — and worse, Diane was back on the board. That wasn’t just about old grudges. It was resurrection. The Carter Matriarch had slipped out from beneath the hospital’s radar and into the shadows, quietly bankrolling a slow, strategic dismantling of Jake’s new empire. Elena had warned

Despite the peaceful scene outside, a cold tension settled deep inside him. The war wasn’t raging right now, but that made it all the more dangerous. The silence before the storm.Elena stood behind him, arms crossed, her usual poise tempered by an edge of weariness. She said nothing, letting the quiet stretch between them. They had both survived betrayals and near-destructions, but trust had thinned to something fragile, almost skeletal.Jake finally broke the silence. “How long can we keep this going? The slow bleed, the half-truths, the fractured alliances. It feels like we’re living on borrowed time.”Elena’s gaze didn’t waver. “As long as we have to. Until one of us makes a move that ends it.”Jake nodded, but his thoughts drifted beyond the battle of wits and boardrooms. It was Diane’s presence that unsettled him most. She had slipped back into the game like a shadow resurrected, weaving a web that threatened to choke everything he had built.“Have you heard anything new about D

The midday sun filtered through the glass canopy of the Arcadia Atrium, casting dappled light across the polished floors. Jake stood near the observation deck, the city skyline sprawling behind him like a glittering net. The room was quiet, save for the low hum of servers and distant footsteps from the staff two floors below.He sipped his espresso slowly, watching the world from above, the way kings once did. But even kings fell—sometimes to blades, other times to whispers.Elena entered without a word. She didn’t need to announce herself anymore. She had a way of becoming the silence in a room until she chose to speak.“They’re buying it,” she said.Jake didn’t turn. “Amanda?”Elena nodded. “She thinks you’re hesitating. She thinks the Riyadh hit rattled you.”“It did,” Jake said. He finally looked at her. “But it also told me exactly how far she’ll go to win. That’s clarity, not fear.”Elena smirked. “She wants you unstable. Off-balance.”“She’s not wrong. But she’s not the only on