Now You Beg Me

Chapter 6. The Illusion of the Summit

Green numbers glowed brightly across the digital market screen mounted on the wall of Robert’s office. The graph was not merely climbing. It was surging upward in a sharp spike without correction. Sterling Group’s stock had just reached its highest point in five years.

The pop of a champagne cork shattered the tension that had hung thick in the air since yesterday. Robert poured the golden liquid into two glasses. His hand trembled slightly, no longer from panic, but from intoxicating euphoria.

“One night,” Robert said, sliding a glass toward Liam, his eyes gleaming.

“It only took one night to turn everything around.”

Liam accepted the glass. He took a slow sip, letting the sweetness and pride wash down his throat.

For the first time, Ethan’s shadow no longer felt like a noose tightening around his neck. He had proven that he did not need his brother’s dirty tactics to win this game.

“That institution saved our necks,” Liam said, the corner of his lips twitching as he suppressed a smile. He glanced briefly at the phone in his hand. “The media has already started shifting its narrative. This morning they were speculating we would collapse. Now they’re calling our move the miracle of the quarter.”

Robert snorted, a dry, dismissive laugh. He carried his glass to the floor-to-ceiling window, gazing at the line of skyscrapers that looked small from this height.

“Let them worship the Sterling name,” Robert said, tapping the rim of his glass lightly against the glass window.

“The investors who ran this morning are probably busy cursing their own stupidity. Today we proved that no market shock can bring this place down.”

“You’re right,” Liam replied, stepping up beside his father. He stood by the window, looking down at the streets that resembled the city’s veins.

“We proved that Sterling Group is too big to fall just because one person left.”

Robert smirked and finished the last of his champagne. “Ethan? He’s probably cursing his own stupidity at some cheap bar right now. Realizing just how worthless he is without our family name.”

They clinked their crystal glasses once more. In that cloud-level office, they celebrated a hollow victory, completely blind to the ticking bomb they had just set off themselves.

Meanwhile, five blocks away, on the eighty-eighth floor of Apex Tower, there was no celebration.

The red glow of the monitors washed over Ethan’s face. The remnants of last night’s fever seemed to strike again, blending with the sudden suffocating heat of the room.

Yet instead of panicking, Ethan’s hands hovered motionless above the keyboard. His eyes narrowed, tracking the flow of data gnawing at his system.

Beside him, Victoria’s jaw tightened. She stared at the main screen without blinking.

“They breached the second firewall,” Victoria reported, her voice carefully controlled even as her fingers gripped the tablet tightly.

“This isn’t random or amateur hacking. The entry pattern… they know exactly where our network architecture is weak.”

“They’re clean,” Ethan murmured, his eyes fixed on the scrolling logs. “They’re targeting the VIP client directory.”

“Shut down the main server power, sir,” Victoria urged, her voice low but urgent. “We cut external access now before it’s too late.”

“Don’t touch anything,” Ethan said flatly. “If we sever the connection, we lose their real IP address forever.”

Victoria glanced at the d******d indicator creeping upward on her screen.

“They’re draining our data.”

“That’s dummy data,” Ethan replied.

He pressed his temple, which throbbed from the lingering fever, forcing himself to stay focused. “I deliberately opened one port on the backup server. Let them waste time fishing for garbage there.”

Victoria fell silent for a moment, realizing the level of risk in that strategy.

“You’re using our database as bait?”

“It’s the only way to trace it back to whoever’s behind this,” Ethan said.

Suddenly, the terminal on Ethan’s main screen flickered. Lines of yellow warnings appeared in rapid succession, and the data transfer rate spiked dramatically. The attack had changed patterns.

Damn. His opponent was not an amateur. They had recognized the fake data and immediately executed a pivot maneuver, redirecting the attack straight toward the core server.

“They’re pivoting.” Ethan’s jaw tightened. “Close Protocol Gate Four. Now.”

Victoria immediately executed a string of commands on her tablet without hesitation.

“Protocol Four locked.”

Instead of typing frantically, Ethan launched a trap script he had prepared for the worst-case scenario. It began isolating the compromised network segments, slowly sealing off the hacker’s escape routes with precision, subtle enough to avoid triggering alarms on the attacker’s end.

Ethan did not smile. His gaze remained cold and fixed on the screen.

“Got you,” he muttered.

With one decisive press of the Enter key, Ethan executed his final command.

On the screen, the countermeasure script spread instantly. Hundreds of foreign connections in the terminal froze at once. Ethan did more than kick the hacker out. Before the connection fully severed, he seamlessly embedded a small data packet into the attacker’s return route.

A stealth tracker.

“Session terminated,” Victoria reported.

Her exhale of relief was almost inaudible. “VIP data integrity is secure. Network architecture is stabilizing.”

Ethan leaned back, letting the chair support his weight.

The fever still pulsed at the back of his head, but the fading adrenaline was replaced by a cold sense of satisfaction.

“The tracker’s attached,” Ethan murmured, his eyes still on the monitor. “Now let’s see who had the nerve to knock on Apex Capital’s front door.”

He switched to another program window. There was no dramatic satellite map or blaring alerts, only a black terminal screen where the enemy’s proxy IP addresses began unraveling one by one.

Their algorithm was peeling away the hacker’s protective layers, tracing the data route back to its source.

“Geolocation in progress,” Victoria said, stepping closer.

Her eyes locked onto the rapidly spinning numbers in the corner of the screen.

The virtual IP finally broke through the last server layer, producing a set of valid latitude and longitude coordinates. The system interface silently mapped the data onto a topographic view of the city.

A single coordinate blinked steadily. Its position locked with an accuracy of ten meters, right in the middle of an elite residential district.

A red point glowed sharply on the digital map, fixed directly over the image of a grand estate complex.

Ethan narrowed his eyes, recognizing the layout instantly. The remnants of fever in his head were swept away by a sharper shock.

“That’s impossible,” Victoria whispered, one hand reflexively covering her mouth. “The signal source… it’s coming directly from the Sterling residence.”

Ethan leaned forward, reading the coordinate details at the edge of the map. “Not from the main floor or Robert’s office. The tracker points below. The basement.”

A heavy silence swallowed the room.

Ethan knew every corner of that house. He had spent ten years living under that roof. The old basement had once been nothing more than a suffocating storage space where he had been dumped to sort through piles of junk as a teenager.

But that was not what unsettled him.

There was no way the people in that house were responsible. Liam did not have the patience to learn even basic command lines. Robert only understood market numbers. The rest of the family had never cared about anything beyond their credit cards.

“There’s someone else there,” Ethan said quietly. His voice was cold, unmoving. “Someone is using that house.”

“A Northern Consortium spy?” Victoria asked, pressing for a tactical answer.

Ethan did not respond immediately. The corner of his lips lifted into a thin, dangerous line.

“We’re about to find out,” he said. “This game of hide-and-seek is over.”