The jet descended through low clouds, London glimmering beneath … a web of silver lights threaded through fog. Rain swept across the wings like restless fingers, the city below pulsing faintly through the mist like a living circuit.Ethan Cole didn’t look out the window. He didn’t need to. London was already in his mind. the heartbeat of power, the weight of order, the familiar hum of numbers that built and broke empires. Paris had been beautiful, yes … but beauty never lasted. Balance did.Across from him, Lily Harper watched silently. The man she had shared laughter with in Montmartre. the one who had smiled softly beneath starlight and held her like the world could wait … was gone. In his place sat the strategist again: precise, silent, unreachable. The lines around his eyes looked deeper now, carved not by age but by restraint.For a long time, neither spoke. The hum of the engines filled the space between them. Lily wanted to reach for his hand but didn’t. She could already fee

The rain had not stopped all week. It fell on London’s financial district like judgment—an unrelenting, metallic rhythm against the skyline. Each drop streaked down the glass towers that once stood as symbols of certainty, of control.But inside Orbitway Tower, control had become a memory.The trading floor below flickered in chaotic red. Dozens of digital tickers streamed across mirrored panels, reflecting collapsing graphs in a merciless wash of numbers.Wilson Flake stood before the data wall like a priest before an altar that no longer listened. His reflection shifted in the glass…warped by falling indices, by ruin disguised as light. Every alert, every collapse was another wound in his empire. But Wilson did not flinch.He had built his power on intimidation, on silence, on being the man who could not be shaken.Now, both intimidation and silence were turning against him.A thunderclap rattled the windows, followed by the echo of footsteps.The heavy door to his private office bu

The morning sky over London hung low, as though the gray clouds themselves carried the city’s accumulated secrets. A thin drizzle clung to the windows of the black cab winding through Chelsea’s narrow streets, turning the world beyond into a distorted blur of headlights and wet stone.Inside, Lisa Sanders sat rigidly, the anonymous note resting like a shard of ice across her knees. She had unfolded it so many times since dawn that the creases now looked like scars.Elizabeth never knew the whole truth. Wilson wasn’t the only one watching.The System sees everything.The handwriting was clean, purposeful … the kind a person used when they wanted to disturb without revealing themselves. It wasn’t the words alone that unsettled her. It was the timing. The note had appeared behind one of her mother’s old, untouched files. Files she had avoided for years. Files she feared.Her fingers traced the edges of the paper, trembling.She had barely slept. Each time she drifted off, she heard her m

London woke uneasy.A cold, nervous dawn stretched over the skyline, painting the glass towers in a weak, colorless light. The storm had passed, but it left behind a city buzzing like a shaken beehive. Drones zipped through the pale sky, their lenses trained on Cole Tower, which remained a looming silhouette against the morning fog … silent, polished, inscrutable.Across every holographic billboard, newsfeeds flashed like a heartbeat:“Cole Tower Lockdown: AI Malfunction or Deliberate Test?”“Ethan Cole Refuses Statement Following Twelve-Hour Blackout.”“Cole Consortium Stock Dips Amid Transparency Concerns.”The public wanted explanations. The government wanted accountability. The competitors wanted blood.Inside Cole Tower’s boardroom, however, explanations were the last thing anyone had.Soft footsteps echoed off the marble floor. The long obsidian table, usually a symbol of order, felt like a trench dividing two sides of a quiet war.Jonathan Hale stood with his tablet projecting

The morning light over London was pale and uncertain, as if the sky itself hesitated to commit to a direction. From the upper levels of Cole Tower, the city looked muted beneath a thin wash of silver mist. Not a storm, not quite calm ... something in between, waiting to declare its intentions.Inside the founder’s office, silence settled with an almost ceremonial weight. Ethan Cole stood alone in the room his grandfather rarely allowed anyone to enter. Alexander Cole had been meticulous about boundaries ...his own, and the world’s. Ethan, despite inheriting every stone of the empire, still felt like a trespasser here.The faint scent of sandalwood lingered, trapped forever in the grain of the mahogany desk. On the far wall hung a single framed quote, handwritten in Alexander Cole’s unmistakably bold script:“Power should never outlive compassion.”Ethan had read those words a hundred times over the years, but this morning they felt different ... like a judgment rather than an instruct