"We gave him nothing but cruelty and contempt," Sophia shot back. "And he gave us everything we needed to succeed. That three hundred thousand dollars saved the company. But we never thanked him. We never respected him. We treated him like a servant.""Well, what were we supposed to do?" Derek demanded. "The man collected garbage! He wore torn clothes! He drove a car that barely ran! How were we supposed to know he was secretly some kind of superhero billionaire?""That's exactly the point," Sophia said, finally understanding what Ethan had been trying to teach them. "We weren't supposed to know. We were supposed to treat him with basic human dignity regardless of who we thought he was. We failed that test every single day for three years."The room fell silent.Finally, Richard spoke again, his voice tired: "Tomorrow. We go to his office tomorrow. It's our only chance."As the family dispersed to catch a few hours of sleep, Sophia remained in the study, staring at the pile of documen

The media storm hit like a biblical plague. By 6 PM, every major network led with the same story: **"BILLIONAIRE MARCUS WELLINGTON ARRESTED AT ATLAS EMPIRE HQ - CONFESSIONS OF FRAUD, PREDATORY SCHEMES, AND BETRAYAL."**Sophia Harrison sat in her childhood bedroom, watching the footage on repeat. The video of Marcus on his knees, of her own tear-streaked face, of Ethan's cold triumph—it had 50 million views and climbing. The comments were a massacre:*"She traded a dragon for a snake."**"Three years of testing and they chose... THIS?"**"The Supreme Dragon Commander took out the trash - literally and figuratively."*Her phone buzzed incessantly. Friends she'd bragged to about Marcus. Business associates who'd praised her "smart upgrade." All now sending variations of "Are you okay?" and "I had no idea!"—the social equivalent of rats fleeing a sinking ship.Downstairs, her father was on his fifth whiskey, staring at bankruptcy documents. Wellington's arrest had triggered automatic clau

The Nightshade Collective moved like ghosts through the digital backdoors of Atlas Empire's secondary data center. Their leader, a former Delta Force operative called Cipher, watched code scroll across his screen in the safe house twenty miles outside the city.Seventeen mercenaries, each with a five-million-dollar payday waiting, all thinking they were about to pull off the impossible: breaching the Supreme Dragon Commander's fortress."Outer firewall down," whispered Ghost-3, a woman who'd infiltrated North Korean nuclear facilities. "Moving to secondary encryption layer.""Slow and steady," Cipher commanded. "Wellington's paying for stealth, not speed."They didn't know their every keystroke was being mirrored on a wall of monitors in Ethan's subterranean command center. Lin Yue watched the intrusion progress, a slight smile on her face. "They're good. Military-grade protocols. Cipher's using a modified Stuxnet variant.""Let them reach the core," Ethan said, sitting in the dark,

The screen flickered back to life, but Ethan Cole no longer saw the data streams or the tactical displays. He saw his eight-year-old self standing in the rain as they lowered an empty casket into Arlington National Cemetery.He saw his mother's silent tears, the folded flag in her arms, the military honors rendered for a man who'd supposedly died in a classified operation overseas."The crash was sealed," Ethan whispered, more to himself than to Elena. "Presidential order. No remains recovered. DNA evidence inconclusive.""Ethan—" Elena reached for him again, but his hand shot up, palm out, a commander's halt gesture that stopped her mid-step."Don't." His voice was the sound of grinding steel. "Don't touch me. Don't speak. Not until I know which side of the board you're actually on."Lin Yue's fingers danced across her keyboard, her face pale. "Commander, the signature is authenticated. AR—ARCHITECT—was your father's code designation. But the program was terminated five years ago. B

"Tell your brother that the countdown isn't for what he thinks—it's for his coronation."The line went dead before Ethan could respond, but not before he heard his sister's sharp intake of breath, the sound of a child being yanked away from a phone she wasn't supposed to answer. The dial tone hummed in his ear like a funeral dirge played on a kazoo—absurd and horrifying at once.The burner phone slipped from his fingers. He didn't feel it shatter against the marble floor. He didn't feel anything except the precise, surgical removal of every certainty he'd built his life upon."Ethan—" Elena started, but his upraised hand silenced her more effectively than a gunshot."She's nine years old." His voice was clinical, detached, the same tone he used to order orbital strikes. "The crash was twenty years ago. She'd be twenty-nine. That was a child's voice. Either they've found a voice actor with perfect mimicry, or...""Or he's been holding her in stasis," Lin Yue finished, her strategic min