All Chapters of Adrian Vale: A Second Chance: Chapter 81
- Chapter 90
115 chapters
Chapter 81
Morning came with a steady sense of purpose.Adrian moved through his routine quietly—stretching to wake his body, a quick set of pushups and sit-ups, then breakfast eaten while skimming notes from the night before. Nothing rushed. Nothing sloppy. When he was ready, he grabbed his jacket and stepped into the hallway.Elana’s door opened almost immediately, like she’d been listening for him.“Morning,” she said, smiling as she fell into step beside him.“Morning,” Adrian replied.They headed out together, the city easing awake around them. For a few blocks they talked about small things—the weather, a new café that had opened nearby, how the office still felt unsettled after everything that had happened.Elana glanced at him sideways. “You were pretty busy last night.”He nodded. “Yeah. Had a few things I needed to finish up.”She didn’t press, just gave him a curious look. “Work stuff?”“Mostly,” he said honestly. “Trying to close out some loose ends before they become bigger problems
Chapter 82
The second half of Adrian’s day unfolded in near silence.Once the meeting room door closed behind Ethan Morales, Adrian returned to his desk with a different kind of focus. The people side of this was moving in the right direction. Now it was time to look outward again.Holloway Investments.He didn’t access anything proprietary. That would leave footprints. Instead, he worked from the edges—public filings, archived press releases, litigation summaries, regulatory disclosures that most people skimmed once and forgot. Automatic Learning quietly sorted the noise from the signal, surfacing patterns without forcing him to hunt for them.He built a timeline.Deals that had closed unusually fast.Acquisitions that had been quietly unwound months later.Subsidiaries that appeared for a single quarter and then vanished.Shell entities that shared directors, addresses, or legal counsel.Individually, none of it screamed fraud.Together, it told a story.Adrian noticed clusters—periods where H
Chapter 83
Morning came softly, filtered through pale light and the quiet familiarity of shared space.Adrian woke to the steady rhythm of Elana’s breathing beside him. For a moment he stayed still, letting the simple reality of it settle in—no urgency, no tension, just the comfort of waking up next to someone who felt like part of his life now. Elana stirred a few seconds later, blinking sleepily before turning her head toward him.“Morning,” she said, voice still warm with sleep.“Morning,” he replied, brushing a loose strand of hair from her face.They moved through the routine together without needing to talk much at first. The bathroom filled with steam as they took turns getting ready, trading quiet smiles in the mirror, the kind that said more than conversation ever could. In the kitchen, breakfast came together easily—coffee brewing, toast crisping, fruit cut and shared. They sat across from each other at the small table, unhurried, letting the day begin gently instead of all at once.“S
Chapter 84
Adrian settled into his desk as the office came fully online around him.He started with the basics. Emails first—nothing urgent, mostly confirmations and routine updates. A couple of replies to the meeting invites he’d sent out the day before had come in overnight. Polite. Willing. No one asking too many questions yet. That, in itself, told him plenty.He opened his calendar next, scanning the day. Clear blocks where he’d deliberately left space. Time not for meetings, but for observation.Perfect.By midmorning, he’d logged out of the internal systems and stepped away from the building, blending easily into the late commuter flow. This recon wasn’t official, and it wasn’t something he wanted tied to company networks. Public-facing work only. Walking. Watching. Verifying.The first few locations tied to Holloway Investments were exactly what they claimed to be—office buildings with legitimate tenants, shell addresses that existed only to forward mail, consulting firms that were thin
Chapter 85
Adrian didn’t return to his desk immediately.Instead, he stopped at a quiet co-working space a few blocks away, the kind that catered to freelancers and consultants—anonymous, transient, and forgettable. He chose a seat near the back, opened his laptop, and began documenting everything while it was still fresh.First, the “security company.”He logged the registered address, the holding entity that owned it, and the shell company two layers above that. He added timestamps for observed activity, behavioral notes, and discrepancies between the company’s stated services and what he’d actually seen on the street. Nothing speculative. Just facts, observations, and context.Then the second location.The residential building took longer.On paper, it was owned by a property management LLC with a bland name and a spotless public profile. Adrian pulled the incorporation records, traced the registered agent, and followed the trail outward instead of inward. That was where the cracks began to s
Chapter 86
The rest of the afternoon settled into a steady, deliberate rhythm.Adrian returned to his desk after the second meeting with a clearer sense of direction. Ethan Morales had been measured and principled. Rachel Kim had been sharp, blunt, and unafraid of friction. Different approaches, same spine. It confirmed what Adrian had suspected from the start—integrity didn’t look one way, but it always behaved the same under pressure.He logged brief notes, locked them behind personal encryption, and shifted his attention outward again.Holloway Investments wasn’t finished.The question wasn’t whether they’d made mistakes. It was how long they’d been doing it, and how carefully.Adrian pulled public deal records from the past decade, filtering by subsidiaries, advisory firms, and shell partnerships that appeared and vanished with suspicious timing. He wasn’t hunting for a smoking gun. He was looking for repetition. Patterns. The kind of consistency that only showed up when someone thought they
Chapter 87
The shift came quietly.Adrian noticed it the next morning, not as an event but as a change in texture. The office felt the same on the surface—emails flowing, meetings filling calendars—but beneath it, something had tightened. Processes that once moved smoothly now required confirmation. Requests that had never been questioned were suddenly reviewed twice.George Holloway had started pulling threads.Adrian didn’t rush. He adjusted.He spent the morning moving deliberately through his routine—checking internal reports, reviewing access logs, preparing notes for the upcoming conversations with his shortlist. Each task stretched longer than usual, not because it was harder, but because he was doing several things at once. Reading data. Watching reactions. Tracking delays.The system remained quiet, but the awareness it had given him made the silence informative.By late morning, he left the building under the pretense of a client errand. This time, he didn’t revisit the Holloway-linked
Chapter 88
Adrian waited until the apartment was quiet.Elana’s door across the hall had been closed for a while now, the soft hum of the building settling into its usual nighttime rhythm. He stood by the window for a moment, watching the city lights flicker and shift below, letting the day finally loosen its grip on him.Then he sat at his desk and opened the system interface.Three open slots waited for him.He didn’t rush.Strength sat at the top of the list, solid and unyielding. The options carried weight—raw power, structural reinforcement, control. Adrian thought back to the past week. The restraint he’d practiced. The moments where strength had been present but deliberately unused. The realization that the most dangerous mistakes weren’t born from weakness, but from excess.Force Control held his attention.It wasn’t about hitting harder. It was about knowing exactly how much was enough. Applying strength with intention instead of impulse. Preventing overreach before it happened.That ma
Chapter 89
Adrian knew he was being watched before he ever saw proof of it.It wasn’t a person. Not yet. It was the absence of coincidence.His morning routine shifted subtly. He left the apartment a few minutes earlier than usual, took a different stairwell, changed streets twice before reaching the main road. Nothing dramatic. Just enough variation to see if the world adjusted back.It did.Not quickly. Not clumsily. But with intention.Adrian let himself blend into the crowd, Spatial Threading smoothing his movement until it felt like the city itself was opening lanes for him. He didn’t push speed. He didn’t slow down. He moved at exactly the pace people expected—unremarkable, forgettable.Agility wasn’t about velocity anymore.It was about freedom.He crossed through a busy plaza, cutting diagonally instead of following the flow. People shifted without realizing why. A man with a phone stepped aside a half second early. A couple veered without breaking stride. Adrian felt the invisible paths
Chapter 90
Adrian took the long way back to the office.Not because he needed the time, but because he wanted to feel what it meant to arrive without hurry. The city pressed in as usual—traffic, conversations, the subtle friction of other lives moving close—but he didn’t let it bleed into him. He kept his pace steady, posture relaxed, attention wide. Endurance, he’d learned, wasn’t about strain. It was about staying present long after others had begun to leak tension.By the time he stepped into the building, he hadn’t lost a step.The atmosphere inside had changed. Conversations dipped when he passed. Not silence—just recalibration. People looked at him longer now, measuring something they hadn’t before. Adrian acknowledged them with small nods, easy smiles, nothing that demanded anything in return. Charm wasn’t performance. It was permission—letting people feel comfortable adjusting around him.As he moved deeper into the building, the attention sharpened. A senior manager hesitated near the e