Ethan spent the days that followed balancing two battles at once, one against his own legs and the other against the people who wanted him to disappear quietly. His body remained weak, and he still needed a hand to move from his bed to his chair most mornings, but he refused to let himself lie there and rot in silence, waiting for the world to decide what happened to him next. Between rehabilitation sessions, he pulled the accident file back onto his desk and read it again and again, searching for anything he had missed the first time, anything that might explain the small, careless mistakes someone had left behind.He called Gina to the villa that afternoon, sliding a folder across the table toward her."I need you to quietly find out everything connected to the Cavesh family," he said, keeping his voice low even though they were alone. "Every company, every partnership, every name that touches theirs, no matter how small it looks."Gina nodded seriously, tucking the folder under her

Before Ethan could dig any further into the name Lena had uncovered, his phone rang sharply, cutting through the quiet of the study. It was Gina, and the moment he answered, he could hear the panic in her voice before she even finished her first sentence."Gale just announced that the Nebula Project is ready for final delivery," she said, words tumbling out quickly, breathless with worry. "And he's already telling people he'll blame you publicly if anything goes wrong tomorrow. Ethan, you need to stop this before it actually happens."Ethan sat back slowly in his chair, strangely calm despite the urgency in her voice. A faint, tired smile touched the corner of his mouth, the kind that came from someone who had already seen several moves ahead of everyone else in the room."Let him do it," Ethan said."What?" Gina's voice cracked with disbelief, rising almost an octave in surprise. "Ethan, he's setting you up to take the fall for whatever they planted inside the system days ago.""I kn

Vittorio Conte finally broke his silence, his voice cutting cleanly through the tense murmur that had settled over the room like a fog. "Where is the man who built this system?"Gale forced a tight smile, trying to steady his voice despite the sweat now visible along his hairline and the tremor creeping into his hands. "Ethan Moretti no longer works here. His performance had become unreliable, so we made the decision to let him go for the good of the company."Vittorio's expression did not soften even slightly at the explanation. "That is strange, because our records show he personally designed the entire security architecture from the ground up. Why is the man who built this system not standing here for its own delivery today?"Gale opened his mouth, but no convincing answer came out of it, only a strained silence that seemed to stretch on forever. The other Jushan executives exchanged quiet, unimpressed glances with one another, and the silence stretched long enough to become its ow

Gale stood in front of Ethan, his pride visibly cracking with every passing second, but Ethan did not move an inch from where he sat in his wheelchair. He studied the man in silence for a long moment before finally speaking, letting the discomfort stretch just long enough to make its point clear before he even opened his mouth to answer him."A few days ago," Ethan said, his voice calm and level, "you stood in front of the entire staff and called me useless. You fired me without hesitation, in front of people I had worked with for years, people who watched you humiliate me without lifting a finger to stop it. Now that your project is falling apart in front of your biggest client, you suddenly want my help."Gale's jaw tightened, humiliation burning behind his eyes, but he forced himself to speak anyway, his voice noticeably smaller than it had been only minutes earlier. "I was hasty. I admit that. Come back to your old position, and we can forget everything that happened between us. I

Ethan wheeled himself back to the console and reconnected his laptop, moving through the corrupted files with quiet, methodical focus while the entire room watched him in near silence, hardly daring to breathe or speak a word out loud. Within minutes, he discovered that the earlier sabotage had only been the surface of something far worse hidden beneath it, waiting patiently for the right moment to be triggered without warning.Buried deep inside the system was a hidden command, carefully disguised to activate several hours after delivery, designed to bring the entire Nebula system crashing down long after everyone had already gone home believing the crisis was safely over and behind them for good that day.Ethan isolated the command and exposed it on the main screen before it could ever be triggered, the code glowing there for the remaining Jushan executives to see clearly for themselves, undeniable and precise down to the smallest detail of every single line written.A ripple of sho