2026-05-13 01:00:37It was a cold night, the thunder rumbled in the dark clouds as lightning struck. Soon, it was raining cats and dogs. Cars were driving in the rain, their lights shining on the wet tarred road.
The pedestrians were with umbrellas, each running along to get out of the rain. Alan was walking along the road, with his head fixed in the distance and the wet gift box in his hand.
He didn’t seem to be bothered by the cold or the rush around him. He was heartbroken! As he walked, soaked underneath the rain, lost in thoughts, he stepped off the curb and into the crosswalk.
Suddenly, screeching tires and a sound of horn pierced the air. Rex immediately turned his head and the headlights almost blinded him. The speeding car came to an abrupt halt and was just merely a step away from him.
The driver immediately stepped down. It was a woman.
“I’m very sorry,” She began to apologise. “Are you injured anywhere?”
Alan shook his head. “I’m not injured and you don’t have to apologise, I’m actually the one at fault.”
“Let me take you home. It’s late already and you might not find any taxi at this hour especially in this weather,” The lady said.
“You don’t have to. I will be fine on my own,” Alan replied, he had just returned to the city and hadn’t been in contact with any of his contacts in the city yet. He hadn’t even gone back to the family house yet.
“No, please, I insist. I won’t be happy with myself if I let you go like that.”
“Alright.”
…
“Do you have any place to go?” The lady asked Alan. They have been driving around for the past 30 minutes and Alan hadn’t said a single word.
“Take me to the nearest hotel.”
“Did your girlfriend break up with you?” She asked with concern. Alan turned to look at her sharply.
“I mean, you were walking under the rain oblivious of your surroundings and now, we have been driving round the city and you seem to be out of sorts and now, you want to go stay at a hotel, not many things can be the reason,” She fixed her gaze back on the road, taking a corner.
Alan smiled slightly. “I just had a divorce.”
“What!” The lady exclaimed, glancing at him. “I’m really sorry to hear that, it must have hurt.”
Alan merely nodded and didn’t say another word, thankful for the silence that followed after.
“Here we are,” The lady announced as she drove into the gates of a hotel. “It’s not really an expensive hotel so it’s affordable.”
She had said this because judging from his appearance, he wouldn’t be able to afford a good hotel but Alan was too occupied with his thoughts to notice the meaning to her words.
“I will not forget your kindness, Miss. Thank you,” Alan said with courtesy as he stepped out of the car.
The rain had stopped, leaving a cool breeze that blew from the south.
“You didn’t tell me your name.”
“Alan.”
“I’m Hazel.”
…
The night was a short one and soon, it was morning. Alan walked out of the bathroom with a bathrobe, picking his phone from the bedside table, he made a phone call.
The other party didn’t waste any time in picking his call.
“Mr. Walker,” A man’s voice came back respectfully from the other end.
“Arrange for a meeting. I’m back!” He said, curtly.
“Yes sir!”
The call was brought to an end.
Alan’s eyes shone with fury, if only his ex-wife knew his true identity. For a brief moment, he contemplated ways to make her pay for her actions.
Knock!
Knock!
Two soft knocks came at the door, ripping Alan from his fantasies of vengeance. He opened the door without looking; he thought it was room service because it was already time for breakfast. “You can place the food there,” He said, turning to go back into the room.
On hearing no movements, he was forced to turn around. Standing there was Hazel with a flushed face. Her eyes were fixed on Alan’s abs and she was blushing uncontrollably.
Rex was a handsome man with average height and soft appearance, which made many look down on him, and she had thought he was a baby face. But she didn’t expect him to have such well-chiselled abs and a firm body.
Not being used to women drooling at his body, Alan questioned coldly with a deep frown, “What do you want?”
Hazel instantly composed herself and coughed slightly, knowing that she had not only embarrassed herself but Alan as well. “I’m sorry for intruding so early in the morning, but I ordered breakfast for the both of us. The food here isn’t really that hygienic for one to eat and besides I didn’t tell you much about myself last night. So this might be a good opportunity to talk.”
“I don’t want to talk and I thank you for your generosity but you shouldn’t have,” Alan replied.
“You don’t have to be so cold to me! I was only trying to help,” Her tone sounded rather offended. She was the one who took the initiative to order breakfast for him because she still felt guilty about last night.
Seeing that he had hurt her feelings and having an overnight knowledge of how that felt, Alan sighed deeply and said, “If you are feeling guilty about what happened last night, I already told you that it was my fault and I apologise.”
“Well, that’s not it,” She lied. “The food here is indeed bad and I don’t want you to have a bad stomach and then blame it on me for not taking care of you very well. After all, I brought you to this place myself.”
“…”
Alan was at a loss for words but he finally said, “Fine.”
Alan smiled widely.
…
“Why did you get a divorce? I thought marriages were meant to last forever,” Hazel said, sipping her coffee. They had been talking for almost half an hour now.
Alan stared at the blank wall in front of him, “Maybe this one wasn’t supposed to be forever.”
“I can see that you loved her and you wished that it was the opposite. Why did you leave in the first place? To the border of all places,” from what she knew, the conflict with their neighbouring country to the North had been chaotic for the past few years and only calmed down in the last couple of months. Why would anyone want to join the army at such a volatile period? Was he just that patriotic that he was willing to leave his newly wedded wife to serve his country?
Alan arranged his words in thought and replied slowly as he chose his words, “I wanted to create a future for us both. I just never thought it would take so long.”
Hazel looked at him with pity. Things must have gone out of his control in the army and he couldn’t come home for so long. She could understand his frustration and pain.
She would have cursed him if he had said that he left for the army to serve his fatherland, in fact, she would have praised Alan’s ex-wife for her actions. But now, she could only think that his ex-wife was too materialistic and not worthy of such a responsible and self-sacrificing man.
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Chapter 142
“The supplier contracts have returned, sir,” Jasmine informed after greeting Alan in his office."Hm? So soon?” He turned around in his swiveling chair and gestured for her to place the hot cup of coffee on the table.She did so and stood back, " Three of the five that Fontaine Group had pulled away from Gold Aries' network over the preceding weeks have made contact through Mr Timothy's office, citing revised terms they wanted to discuss. Mr Tim handled two of them personally and assigned the third to a senior contracts manager, and by the end of the week all three had signed back into the Gold Aries supply chain on terms that were marginally better than their original agreements.”“Is that so?” Alan sighed, reaching for the coffee. He could feel a wave of headache coming in the next few days.…And so, he signed off on the paperwork on a Wednesday morning without making anything of it.The luxury goods division was next. Fontaine Group's new line had launched with reasonable coverage
Chapter 141
If Trident had picked up his presence, the note made sense. They would want to know what he was doing here and whether his objectives aligned with or complicated their own. Mutual interests was the language of someone proposing a room for talk rather than a confrontation, which was at least a reasonable opening.Reluctantly, he went to the location at the time specified.It was a mid-range café in the commercial district, busy enough in the mid-morning that two people talking at a corner table would not be remarkable. He arrived early and took a seat with a view of the door. He ordered coffee and waited.The man who came in eight minutes after the specified time was unremarkable in every external detail. Medium height, middle age, a jacket that had been chosen specifically to not draw attention. He found John without scanning the room, which meant he already knew what he was looking for, and sat down across from him with the ease of someone accustomed to these kinds of meetings."Than
Chapter 140
John Bones made the first contact on a Tuesday evening, through a man named Craw.Craw ran a small security outfit in Silver Lace's southern district, one that provided muscle for clubs and private events and asked no questions about the nature of the events in question. He was not powerful, not well-connected in any serious sense, but he was embedded, and embedded people knew other embedded people, and that was the point.John had been watching Craw's operation for four days before he made contact. He wanted to know the shape of the man before he sat across from him, which was a habit he had never broken regardless of how small the meeting.He walked into the bar where Craw held court on Tuesday evenings at eight-thirty, took a seat two down from him at the counter, ordered a beer, and waited.Craw noticed him by eight-forty-five. It was hard not to notice John Bones in most rooms, besides,.Craw was a man smart enough to notice who stood amongst normal men.He leaned over after a few
Chapter 139
"It's close enough to the same thing that the distinction doesn't do much work," Alan replied sternly.Dane smiled at that, a short, genuine one. "Fair point.""Lucia." Alan dropped her name after a brief moment of silence.Dane set his glass down. "What about her?""You don't have to act so aloof. Hazel found out through other channels." Alan kept his voice even. "I want to understand what you asked her to do.""I asked her what you care about," Dane responded reluctantly. "I wasn't asking her to act against you. I was asking her to help me understand you."Alan narrowed his eyes. "Meaning?""I’m not particularly obliged to answer that question, Mr Walked,” Dane shrugged with a small smirk. He seemed to be enjoying his time ther. "But do not fear, I didn't ask her to do anything else. Whatever she's decided to do separately, that's her own."Alan sat with that for a moment. It tracked with what he understood of Lucia's calls, the solicitor visit, the documents she had told him about
Chapter 138
In a small restaurant in the old district, away from the business centre, Alan was calmly seated at a table. He had eaten there twice before, once with Hazel and once alone, and he liked it because the tables were spaced properly and the staff were very good at their job. Their discretion was very professional and he would argue that they showed more etiquette than in higher-class restaurants.He arrived ten minutes early and took the corner table, the one with a clear view of the entrance and the secondary exit near the kitchen. It was an habit of his. He ordered water and looked at the menu without reading it.Dane arrived at exactly the agreed time. He wasn't a minute late, nor a minute early. The man was right on time, almost irking Alan.‘What is he trying to prove?’ Alan couldn't help but ask himself. No one would go that far just for the sake of it.Dane came alone, as Alan had specified. No Sera, no assistant, no lawyer hovering in a car outside. He wore a jacket without a tie
Chapter 137
The documents had been sitting in the bottom of Lucia's wardrobe for six weeks, inside a manila envelope, underneath a stack of sweaters she hadn't worn since winter.She had put them there the day she came back from the solicitor, tucked them under the sweaters, and told herself she was waiting until she knew what she wanted to do with them. Six weeks later, she still hadn't moved them, which she had started to understand was itself the decision to keep not deciding, which worked right up until it stopped working.It stopped working on a Thursday morning.Michael had left early for a meeting with someone from the Donovan family's legal circle, which he had mentioned the night before in the offhand way he mentioned most things these days, a brief summary that didn't invite questions. She had nodded and gone back to Peace, who was at the stage where she demanded constant attention and rewarded it with the kind of complete, uncomplicated joy that made everything else feel smaller by com
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