The silence inside the boardroom stretched long after the elevator doors closed. It was as if Adrian Cole had taken the air with him, leaving only confusion, unease, and the faint scent of something electric in the room.Vanessa Knight was the first to move. Her manicured fingers tightened around her pen until the metal bent slightly between them. Her eyes dark, sharp, restless darted toward her husband.“Victor,” she said slowly, “who is that man?”Victor leaned back, his hand trembling faintly as he rubbed his temple. “An investor,” he muttered. “A very powerful one.”“That’s not what I meant.” Her voice was low, tense. “The way he looked at me” She stopped, pressing her lips together, realizing she sounded nervous, a thing she despised. “It was unsettling.”Caleb exhaled loudly and leaned back in his chair. “You’re overthinking it, Mother. He’s just another arrogant businessman who thinks money gives him power. We’ll deal with him.”Vanessa shot him a glare. “You think that was arr

The week unraveled like a tightening noose around the halls of Knight Corporation. What began as whispers of admiration for the mysterious investor had turned into quiet fear. Every decision Adrian made seemed to expose another flaw in the company’s foundation. He didn’t shout or threaten; he simply pointed out failures with calm precision, forcing department heads to confront truths they had avoided for years. The employees began to call him the ghost executive, because he appeared without warning, asked questions no one dared to, and disappeared before anyone could catch a breath.But behind that quiet control, something deeper stirred a storm Adrian had spent seven years trying to bury. It wasn’t the hunger for revenge that haunted him most; it was the weight of recognition. Every corridor, every voice, every file he touched carried echoes of a life he used to know. The scent of the building’s polished floors, the distant hum of the elevator, the faint perfume that lingered when El

The next morning began too quietly. The city outside was already awake, horns echoing through the glass skyline, pedestrians weaving through the pale mist but inside Adrian’s penthouse, silence ruled. He stood by the window, watching the slow chaos unfold below him. Every movement of the world felt deliberate, distant, unimportant. His mind was elsewhere, seven years away, replaying a single image: the way Elena looked at him last night, her eyes wide with disbelief, her body frozen between recognition and fear.It wasn’t supposed to matter. She wasn’t supposed to matter anymore. He’d spent years burying the part of him that still remembered the warmth of her laughter, the softness of her voice when she whispered his name like it meant something. But seeing her again had undone everything: the pain, the control, the carefully constructed armor he’d built around himself.“Sir,” Lucas’s voice crackled from the intercom. “Knight Corporation just confirmed the meeting request for today. T

Morning came late to the city, smothered in pale mist and slow-moving clouds that dragged across the skyline like ghosts reluctant to leave. Adrian sat in silence before the wide glass windows of his office, the world spread beneath him small, distant, obedient. The soft hum of the city below was the rhythm he lived by now, predictable and contained. His empire moved with precision; every deal, every call, every calculated silence was a thread in the web he had been weaving for years. But today felt different. The air held weight. Something about the quiet unsettled him. He had always believed that revenge should be executed with patience, cold, clinical, detached. Yet the closer he drew to the heart of his enemies, the more he realized that vengeance was not a game of distance. It demanded blood, sweat, and memory.Lucas entered without knocking, as he always did when the matters were serious. His expression was unreadable, though his eyes flickered with the tension of someone carryi

The night had not yet ended, but the gala’s music had faded into the kind of silence that lives after storms. The ballroom was half-empty now, the air carrying the faint scent of wine and tension. Adrian stood by the window in the private lounge upstairs, looking down at the glittering remnants of the evening. His reflection stared back at him calm, unbothered, but beneath that calmness lay something old and wild, like fire sealed beneath glass. He knew she would come. Vanessa Knight was too proud, too cunning to pretend forever.The door opened softly behind him. He didn’t turn. Her perfume reached him before her voice did — that same expensive sweetness he remembered from his youth, the scent that used to linger in the hallways after she passed, the one that made him feel like a stranger in his own home.“You didn’t tell me you’d be here,” she said, her tone steady but her hands shaking where she clasped them in front of her.Adrian let the silence stretch before answering. “If I ha