Marcus had never truly intended to follow Mia there, not because he had somewhere more urgent to be, nor because he was too tired to continue the day’s movements, but because in the deepest and most private part of his thinking he did not consider her problems important enough to deserve his actual time unless her problems also created a path toward his own advantage, and after the humiliating spectacle at JSK Luxury, after standing there while Ethan somehow turned an impossible card into public authority and reduced him from a man of influence to a man escorted out under silent observation, Marcus’s first instinct had not been companionship, support, or concern, but withdrawal, calculation, and damage control, because that was how he survived every insult life threw at him, by converting embarrassment into strategy and pretending every reactive move had been part of his plan from the beginning.He did not want to follow Mia to Everton Lasgri because, in truth, the entire idea felt be

For a long, suspended moment after those words left the woman’s mouth, it was as though the entire space in front of the building had been pulled into a vacuum where no one quite remembered how to breathe properly, because disbelief has a peculiar way of silencing even the loudest people when it arrives in a form too complete to argue with immediately, and that was exactly what happened to Mia, to her secretary, and most especially to Marcus, all three of them struck still by the plainness with which the truth had just been revealed, the truth that the imposing property they had spent more than an hour trying to wrest back into possibility was no longer some abstract opportunity lost to unnamed elites, but belonged directly to the woman now standing before them beside Ethan with the ease of someone arriving not as a guest, not as a negotiator, not as a hopeful tenant, but as the person to whom the place now answered.Mia’s first reaction was not speech but expression, her face tighten

At that moment in time, standing there beneath the polished front of the newly purchased complex, with the weight of too many humiliations from a single day pressing into his chest all at once, Marcus was no longer merely irritated, no longer simply annoyed in the ordinary sense that powerful men often become when events do not bend quickly enough to their convenience, but genuinely angry in the deep, private, dangerous way that begins first as wounded pride, then hardens into resentment, and finally grows into a cold determination to retaliate against whoever has made that pride feel small, because for Marcus, the issue had long since ceased to be about the building alone, and had become instead about the repeated, increasingly intolerable pattern of Ethan’s presence undoing him at exactly the wrong moments, in exactly the wrong places, always in front of witnesses, always in a way that chipped at the image he had spent years building around himself.He was angry with the whole situa

Mia stood in the center of the sitting room for a few seconds after her mother had asked her to talk, and although she had already said enough for it to be obvious that her day had gone terribly, the full weight of it still sat on her chest in such a way that she almost did not know where to begin, because some days are bad in a simple, singular way, one disappointment following another in a pattern that can be explained plainly, but what had happened to her that day felt more like being dragged through one humiliation after another, each one stranger than the last, each one somehow tied to Ethan, and the more she thought about it, the more the whole thing offended her pride in a way that made her hands tighten unconsciously at her sides.Her mother, who knew her daughter well enough to recognize when anger was competing with embarrassment, moved a little closer and watched her carefully, waiting, impatient in the way only a mother can be when she knows something has happened but has

Her mother shook her head slowly at first, then more sharply, as if the motion itself could dislodge the absurdity.“You don’t mean it,” she said. “You cannot possibly mean what you just said.”Mia, exhausted and still simmering from the memory of the day, looked at her with the tired bitterness of someone who wished she were exaggerating.“I do,” she said. “I mean exactly what I said.”But her mother was not yet ready to accept it. Not fully. She paced again, lifted one hand in agitation, then let it drop against her side with a sound of frustration.“Are you trying to tell me,” she said, voice rising with disbelief, “that Ethan is actually this powerful? That bastard? Are you telling me that he is rich and we did not know? What the hell is going on? Did he get rich overnight? Did heaven suddenly open and pour fortune on his head while everyone was looking somewhere else? Since when? Since when did everything start suddenly going well for him? What is this? What kind of madness is th