The glass tower that bore Liam Hawthorne’s name was a cathedral of silence at dawn, the city still heavy with mist outside its walls. He liked those early hours—when the world was slow enough for him to think, when power hummed not from voices but from systems running exactly as he had designed.But that morning, silence cracked into chaos.The elevator doors slid open with a jarring clang and his CFO, William Avery, stumbled out. His tie was askew, his face pale with the kind of fear no market fluctuation could ever inspire.“Liam,” he rasped, holding a trembling tablet in his hand. “We’ve been hit.”Liam’s pen stilled over the page he’d been signing. He looked up slowly, deliberately, like a general who refused to flinch under cannon fire. “Define hit.”Avery swallowed. “Three of our offshore accounts—Zurich, Singapore, Grand Cayman—they’ve been frozen overnight. Not regulatory freeze. It’s coordinated. Simultaneous court injunctions filed under dormant compliance codes. Every chann

Liam Hawthorne didn’t sleep that night. Not really. The city outside his glass tower shimmered with a deceptive calm, a false lull before the storms he intended to unleash. Ava remained at his side, perched on the edge of the conference table, her presence a tether to the world he refused to lose himself to entirely. She hadn’t protested, hadn’t begged for a break, because she understood him. She understood the calculation behind the chaos, the need to strike before being struck again.By dawn, Hawthorne Tower was a hive of quiet, controlled fury. Traders tapped into their terminals like surgeons wielding scalpels, monitoring every ripple Cassian’s attacks could cause. Legal teams scrolled through court filings, preparing counters that would invalidate Cassian’s shadow injunctions. Analysts worked through encrypted channels, tracing every ghost transfer, mapping every loophole, every weakness in the structure Cassian had tried to exploit.And at the center of it all, Liam Hawthorne mo

By dawn, the city beneath Hawthorne Tower was bathed in pale gold light, oblivious to the war waging in its heart. Liam Hawthorne stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows, his reflection mirrored against the sprawling skyline, calm, lethal, unbroken. Beside him, Ava leaned slightly into his shoulder, her tablet buzzing softly with the final updates on the operations they had orchestrated.“Everything’s in place,” she said quietly. Her voice carried the weight of exhaustion tempered by triumph. “Zurich, Singapore, Grand Cayman… every last maneuver has executed perfectly. Investors are panicking in his favor for the last time, and the internal betrayals we seeded—he’s falling apart from the inside.”Liam didn’t move immediately. He didn’t need to. His presence alone commanded the room. Calm, controlled, immovable. “Good,” he said at last. “Because today… we finish him.”Ava’s fingers brushed against his as she handed him the tablet. “He doesn’t know what’s coming. None of it.”“That’s the

Ava had long ago learned to associate certain machines with memory. The sound of a relay switching, the almost organic clack of a hard drive seeking, the cool rush of chilled server rooms — each came preloaded with ghosts: projects that failed, the people who took them apart, the confidences spilled into encrypted logs.She sat in a chair that seemed designed for posture more than comfort, laptop open like an exposed ribcage. Liam hovered behind her shoulder, arms folded, eyes narrowed into lines of worry. The room smelled faintly of ozone and lavender — a deliberate choice in the house to soften the edges of strategy sessions. Ava preferred the smell of algorithms.A notification had come from Jakarta — a ghost ping that woke a thousand sleeping things. A code she once dreamed up for a defensive protocol now returned to life in an altered form. She felt it as a physical jolt: betrayal is always a kinetic sensation for her, like being shocked through the sternum.“Seven has restructur

The core room of the Helix Lab felt less like a room and more like an altar. Light bled out of the walls from surfaces nobody could see, and the hum of servers lined the air like prayers muttered in an unknown tongue. The chair — when he first saw it — was less a piece of furniture than a piece of fate designed by someone with taste for the dramatic.Seven stood before him like a prophet in a cathedral constructed from code and silicon. He wore his calm like armor — a man who had learned to make tenderness look like calculation. Around them, the console pulsed, waiting for an authorized neural key. The code hummed, expecting Gabriel’s DNA to complete the circuit.“You were always the interesting one,” Seven said. “Your mother used you like she used me. She builds empires on secrets and breaks the ones who dare to love her.”Gabriel’s fingers hovered over the terminal. His chest was a drum — not with fear but with a weight that had been building for years. The chair glowed more insiste