Seth looked down at the deeply traumatized Charlotte, who was lying helpless on the cold concrete floor. Even though her hands were unbound, she was so paralyzed by pure shock that she hadn't even attempted to remove the cloth gag from her mouth."It is over. They are gone," Seth said, his tone flat as he knelt beside her. He reached out, gently pulling the gag down to her neck, and helped her to her feet."Where is Jason?" was the first thing that tumbled out of her mouth as she gasped for air.Seth completely ignored the question. He released her arm and stood perfectly still, his posture unreadable.Frantic, Charlotte’s eyes darted around the dimly lit room, desperately searching for any sign of Jason. Instead, her gaze landed on the far, shadowed corner."Ahh! Matthew?!" Charlotte shrieked, her trembling finger pointing at the lifeless, cooling corpse slumped against the wall.The sheer psychological horror of seeing the one-armed college boy with three bloody bullet holes torn dir

Jason wasn't surprised by Seth’s decision to eliminate Matthew. In fact, he completely validated it. Any normal human being with a functioning brain would have done the exact same thing in Seth's position. First, Matthew had tried to publicly embarrass and humiliate him. Then, it escalated to tarnishing his image, recklessly dragging an innocent girl like Charlotte into his petty grudges.Finally, blinded by pure, unadulterated envy, Matthew had graduated to attempted assassination. If a viper like that was spared out of a foolish sense of mercy, he would only grow into a threat beyond anyone's control. Jason was learning the brutal laws of his new reality quickly: once you discover your enemy, you do everything in your power to stop them permanently—even if it means taking their life. This was real life, not a fictional story. It was time to leave the predictable, drawn-out face-slapping plots to a bored author.Matthew deserved exactly what he got.But Charlotte? No. Absolutely not.

The morning haze hung low over the runway as an unmarked private jet touched down at Silverbridge Regional Airport. A tall, commanding Russian woman sighed in cold satisfaction as she took in the sprawling, beautiful city through the cabin window.Anastasia Volkov stepped onto the tarmac, wrapped in an exquisite sable coat, her icy blue eyes scanning the damp skyline. To any casual observer, she possessed the dangerously flawless, captivating features of a woman still in her early twenties. This was no cosmetic trick; it was a striking, age-defying biological reality. Through the continuous use of a highly specialized drug—the exact formula she had just traded to the Pike family in exchange for the Californium-252—she had successfully reversed decades of physical aging from her body.She kept her chin tilted high, her sharp, aristocratic gaze sweeping over the bustling airport with calculating curiosity.“Secure the grandest hotel in the city center,” Anastasia commanded in her low, r

Meanwhile, at the towering headquarters of Apex Investment Management, Gina was sitting at the head of a long, polished glass table. It was an impromptu executive meeting. Greg Worthington, Bruce Hull, May McBride, and seventeen other senior department heads were gathered in the room, deeply curious and slightly on edge about why they had been summoned so abruptly in the middle of the afternoon.Gina did not need to clear her throat to command their attention. She simply tapped her heavy gold pen once against the glass.The low murmurs in the room instantly ceased.“I have called you all here today to announce a temporary shift in our operational structure,” Gina began, her voice crisp and echoing with absolute authority. “The CEO, Mr. Jason Pike, has urgent, external matters to attend to. He will not be able to actively oversee the daily operations of this establishment for the meantime. Therefore, I have liaised directly with him, and he has authorized the appointment of an Acting C

Jason watched the taxi’s taillights vanish into the freezing mist, the cold rain beginning to soak through his coat.He stared at the red notification still glowing on his phone screen. High-risk danger zone. A sudden, chilling realization hit him. If the local transit networks knew the neighborhood was compromised, Anastasia’s foreign scouts and the local godfather's men definitely knew it too. There would be eyes watching her building."We aren't going to your apartment," Jason said, his voice tightening with urgency. "It is a trap. If they are watching your block, we are walking right into the crosshairs.""Then where are we supposed to go?" Charlotte asked, wrapping her arms around herself to stop the shivering."Somewhere familiar. We hide in plain sight," Jason muttered.Instead of wandering the dark streets, Jason led her toward the absolute epicenter of the city's commercial district. He chose the one establishment he knew inside and out: The Silverbridge Hotel.It was the gra