2025-10-18 18:12:40“Charlie Grant! Are you even listening?”
The lecturer’s voice echoed through the wide, air-conditioned lecture hall of York University. Heads turned, eyes darting at him. Charlie blinked, realizing everyone was staring.
His heart thudded. He muttered a faint apology and tried to look composed, but inside, his mind was a storm.
The professor’s words were flying over his head like dust in the wind. His thoughts were miles away—buried deep in chaos and worry. The first wave of anxiety came crashing through: three assignments.
He had been paid already but hadn’t done any of them. Jacob Brown and his rich friends had hired him to ghostwrite their papers, and those boys were not known for patience. They were cruel when disrespected, and Charlie knew exactly how cruel.
He ran his trembling fingers through his hair, his pen shaking between his fingers. “I can’t screw this up again,” he whispered under his breath.
But that was only the beginning of his torment. The second thought wave hit—harder, sharper. The $3,000 loan he took from Salvatore, the campus’ most notorious loan shark, was due in two hours.
Two hours! And if he didn’t pay… everyone on campus knew what happened to those who didn’t pay Salvatore on time.
Charlie’s throat dried up. His palms began to sweat despite the cool air.
From the back row, a paper ball struck him squarely on the head. He looked up—and froze.
Jacob Brown.
The arrogant smirk on Jacob’s lips was enough to make Charlie’s blood run cold. Jacob’s eyes, filled with disdain, burned into him. “Where’s my assignment, Grant?” he asked, his tone slow and threatening.
Charlie swallowed hard. His lips parted, but no words came.
“Well?” Jacob snapped, leaning forward in his chair. “You took my money, didn’t you?”
Charlie stuttered, “I… I forgot it at home. I’ll bring it right after class.”
Jacob chuckled. “Forgot it? You forgot the one thing keeping your miserable self fed? You’ve got some nerve.”
The students around them laughed quietly, some out of fear, others out of mockery. Jacob’s girlfriend, Brie, who was sitting beside him with a glossy smirk, leaned close and whispered loud enough for everyone to hear, “You should make him pay you a hundred times over if he doesn’t deliver. Let’s see how the poor rat handles that.”
Jacob grinned wickedly. “You hear that, Grant? If I don’t get my work by noon, you owe me ten grand. Each.”
Charlie’s stomach dropped. There were four of them in total—Jacob and his three friends. Ten grand each. Forty thousand dollars.
Forty thousand he didn’t have.
He couldn’t even afford a meal last night.
And yet, life wasn’t done playing its cruel jokes.
Charlie’s phone buzzed twice in quick succession. He glanced down—two messages. One from Angela, his girlfriend of two months, and one from Jacy, his half-sister.
He clicked Angela’s first.
His jaw tightened immediately.
“Babe, I saw this gorgeous necklace trending right now. It’s $4,000, and I have to get it. You’ll send it, right?”
No greeting. No affection. No “How are you?” Just money.
Charlie’s chest burned with frustration. His leg bounced under the desk as he clenched his teeth. ‘Even now?’ he thought. ‘Doesn’t she know I’m drowning in debt because of her endless demands?’
But anger soon gave way to helplessness. He sighed deeply. As much as he wanted to scream, he couldn’t. He loved Angela—pathetically, foolishly—and for her, he had endured humiliation after humiliation.
He exhaled sharply and opened the second message from Jacy.
“Charlie, please come home now! Dad is beating Mom again. He’s forcing her to sign the divorce papers. I’m scared. Please hurry!”
His hands froze. His eyes widened, and the world around him seemed to blur. His pulse raced like thunder in his ears.
He shot up from his seat, knocking his chair backward. The class went silent.
“Mr. Grant!” the lecturer barked. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I—I have an emergency, sir,” Charlie said breathlessly, already halfway to the door.
“Sit down, or I’ll fail you for this course!”
Charlie didn’t even look back. The words meant nothing to him anymore. Ever since two years ago—since everything had changed—he had become a target for disdain. Professors, classmates, even staff who once greeted him with smiles now sneered when he passed.
Because two years ago, Charlie Grant had been someone.
The adored son of Charles Grant, billionaire real estate tycoon. The heir to a billion-dollar fortune. The pride of the Grant family.
Until the day his father destroyed everything.
It was supposed to be a family dinner. But that night, Charles Grant announced he had a “new family.” A new wife—his mother’s best friend—and her three children: Jim, Jey, and Jacy.
That night shattered their world. His mother’s tears, his father’s indifference, the servants’ whispers… since then, he and his mother had been treated as outsiders in their own home.
And now, his father was about to finish the job.
“Let him go,” Jacob’s voice echoed through the room, smirking. “He’s going home to cry anyway.”
Brie’s voice followed like venom. “Oh, and remember, Grant! You owe us forty grand before noon!”
The room erupted with gasps.
Forty thousand dollars. Before noon.
Charlie didn’t respond. He stormed out, his eyes burning with fury and despair.
He hailed a taxi with the little cash he had left. It wasn’t even enough to get him home, so he got off midway and walked the rest—thirty minutes under the sun, his shirt soaked in sweat and humiliation.
When he reached the Grant Mansion, the sight stabbed him like a blade. The grand $20 million estate stood tall, magnificent—and yet it felt like a prison. He was once the prince of this castle, but not anymore. Not since his wicked stepmother came to the house.
The guards at the gate, who once bowed to him as “Young Master Charlie,” now laughed openly.
“Look who’s back. The useless one,” one guard sneered.
“Maybe he’s here to beg for scraps,” another chuckled.
Charlie ignored them. He had long grown numb to mockery.
He pushed through the large doors and stepped inside. Jacy rushed to him immediately, tears in her eyes. “Charlie… it’s over. Dad made her sign. He forced Mom to leave. She’s gone.”
Charlie froze. His chest tightened. Rage flared inside him like fire. He turned sharply and stormed toward his father’s study.
The moment he burst through the door, two sharp slaps struck his face before he could even speak.
Charles Grant stood tall, his expression cold and disdainful. “You dare storm into my office like a wild dog?!”
Charlie’s jaw clenched, blood dripping from his lip. He looked at his father—the man who took everything from him—and for the first time, his eyes didn’t tremble.
They burned.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
CHAPTER 446
Joseph's more by morning arrived at six-fifteen.Charlie read it at the kitchen table with coffee he'd made without tasting and the city outside still doing its pre-dawn thing — the specific quiet of a city that hasn't decided to be loud yet.Avenir Académique. The board name that connected to Rachel's peripheral document was a man called Sébastien Koffi. Forty-four years old. Abidjan-based. His name had appeared once in a financial disclosure attached to a Consortium-adjacent entity — not Cross's core network, something older and further out. Rachel had flagged it as peripheral because at the time the Consortium was the primary concern and Koffi was three degrees removed from anything actionable.Three degrees had become one degree.Joseph's note at the bottom of the file was three sentences: Koffi has no visible connection to Adeyemi's network. The NGO's funding source is currently untraceable — routed through two shell entities registered in Mauritius. The scholarship outreach stop
CHAPTER 445
The flight back from Abidjan was four hours.Joseph slept for two of them, which Charlie had learned to read as a signal — Joseph slept on planes only when he'd assessed the immediate situation as contained. It wasn't reassurance exactly. It was data.Charlie didn't sleep.He had the Senegal file open on his laptop and wasn't reading it. Outside the window the Atlantic was doing what it always did at altitude — an impossible flat grey that looked nothing like water and everything like the edge of something.He thought about what Kouassi had said at the door.Someone who finds your presence in this region inconvenient. It is not a short list.Not a short list. Meaning Adeyemi was one name among others. Meaning the foundation's expansion into West Africa was generating friction in places Charlie hadn't mapped yet. Meaning the work of the next months was not just managing Adeyemi — it was understanding the full shape of what the expansion had disturbed.He opened a new document and began
CHAPTER 444
Charlie arrived in Abidjan on Sunday to a wall of heat. Joseph accompanied him to the hotel, where Céleste met them in the lobby—a quiet, paperless encounter. She briefed them on the opposition's movements and ministry vulnerabilities with surgical detachment, then vanished into the evening, leaving no trace of their meeting behind.The silence she left behind felt calculated, a vacuum that Charlie couldn't help but analyze over a sparse dinner.Joseph, observing the way Charlie’s fork barely moved, broke the quiet. "You’re running the timeline again.""I'm running the math," Charlie replied, his voice barely audible over the clatter of the restaurant. "If Adeyemi’s network was active here before he walked into my office in London, the meeting was a ruse. He wasn't negotiating; he was cataloging my defenses. He wanted to know the limits of my integrity so he could calibrate the pressure here to break it.""He built a trap for a man who plays by the rules," Joseph said, cutting into hi
CHAPTER 443
Céleste Mbaye landed in Abidjan on a Monday, the city humid and pulsing with the specific, unhurried energy of a place that had seen a thousand arrivals. She bypassed the tourist bustle, checking into a hotel that prioritized discretion over luxury. By evening, she was in her room, the curtains drawn against the city lights, placing the call to Charlie.It wasn't a debrief—it was a calibration. They were two instruments being tuned to the same frequency.Her voice was an anchor: direct, devoid of the performative urgency that defined most of their industry. She peppered him with three technical questions regarding the foundation's specific resource allocation in Côte d'Ivoire. She didn't want the brochure version; she wanted the architecture. She listened, noting the cadence of his answers, then promised a substantive update by Wednesday.When she called back on Wednesday at noon, her tone had sharpened."Kouassi is solid," she opened. "He’s been deep-diving into the accountability fr
CHAPTER 442
Daniel called on a Thursday, his timing as precise as the arguments in his own academic papers. They had maintained their rhythm through the past year’s chaos, though the calls had grown sparser and more guarded. They were two men moving at different velocities in different cities, their long-standing friendship thinned by the pull of separate, conflicting orbits.Charlie answered as Joseph navigated the gridlock, the driver’s eyes fixed forward in a masterclass of professional invisibility."You have time?" Daniel asked, his voice steady."Twenty minutes. What’s going on?""I wanted you to hear this from me before the industry starts talking."Charlie watched a cyclist weave through the stalled traffic. "I’m listening.""The book goes to publishers next month," Daniel said, followed by a sharp, quiet exhale. "My editor is pushing hard. With the current discourse on philanthropic accountability, she thinks the timing is ideal.""Okay.""There’s a chapter—Chapter seven. It’s a deep div
CHAPTER 441
Céleste Mbaye’s file arrived at 4:30 PM, a slim, densely packed dossier that felt heavier than the paper it was printed on. Charlie read it that evening at the kitchen table, the low light catching the grain of the wood. It had become a ritual of compartmentalization: his desk was for the sterile, administrative mechanics of the foundation, but the kitchen—with its echoes of domestic permanence—was where he sat with the ghosts.She was forty-one, Senegalese-French, a woman whose career trajectory was as precise as a surgeon’s incision. A decade at the African Development Bank, followed by seven years navigating the labyrinthine corridors of Hartwell’s policy network. The file was a masterclass in neutral observation; it listed her connections in West Africa without a single editorial flourish, a tacit admission from Hartwell that he expected Charlie to do the intellectual heavy lifting.He did. He saw not just a liaison, but a mirror—someone capable of navigating the same murky ethics
You may also like
Becoming A Trillionaire After Divorce
Esther Writes74.3K viewsAn Understated Dominance
Marina Vittori11.7M viewsUnknowingly The Billionaire's Heir
Winner Girl79.3K viewsSecretly The Quadrillionaire's Heir
Viki West123.6K viewsThe Only Powerless is the Apex Predator
Life Survivor 252 viewsBuilt From Ruin
Charms60 viewsThe Grand Warlord’s Accidental Marriage
Rex Magnus537 viewsThe Desire of My Fourth Stepsisters
Black Orchid339 views