The Weakling He divorced

Forty-Eight Hours

Dominic stood at the head of the Vance Global conference table at seven the next morning, jaw freshly shaved, tie knotted with surgical precision, as though the previous night hadn't happened at all.

"Status on the flagship fund," he said, not sitting down.

Harlan Reyes, head of security, exchanged a glance with the firm's chief risk officer before answering. "We contained the initial short position overnight. Whoever hit us pulled back before the market opened. No further movement since three a.m."

"So it was opportunistic." Dominic's voice carried the flat certainty of a man who had already decided the answer before he asked the question. "A single trader who got lucky and knew better than to push it."

"With respect, sir, the entry and exit were too clean for luck. Whoever did this had access to our internal liquidity windows. That's not public information."

Dominic waved a hand, dismissing the concern the way he dismissed most things that didn't fit his version of events. "Run a full audit on the compliance team. Someone got sloppy with access credentials. That's the extent of it."

He turned to the rest of the room, seven senior executives seated in tense silence, none of them willing to be the one who mentioned the empty side of his desk, the missing wife, the story that had surely already started circulating through every trading floor in Manhattan.

"I assume everyone's heard," Dominic said, before anyone else could. Better to control the narrative himself than let it spread through Bloomberg terminals and trading desk group chats as secondhand gossip. "Eliana and I are divorced, as of last night. It changes nothing operationally. She was never involved in the business."

A pause. Nobody in the room corrected him, though two of the senior quants exchanged a look that lasted half a second too long.

"She'll be back within forty-eight hours," Dominic continued, checking his watch as though the timeline were already written into his calendar. "She has no income, no name that opens doors, and nowhere to stay. Once her card declines at whatever hotel she's crawled into, she'll call. I'd like this handled quietly when she does. No press."

Genevieve Hart chose that exact moment to appear in the glass doorway of the conference room, dressed in cream silk that looked far too polished for seven in the morning, an assistant trailing two steps behind her with a coffee tray.

"Dominic, darling, you didn't tell me you had a board meeting this early." Her voice carried easily across the room, soft and pointed at once. Every executive at the table straightened slightly, uncertain of the new hierarchy forming in front of them.

"It's a status meeting, Gen. Not the board." Dominic's tone shifted, warmer but strained, the practiced patience of a man managing two competing demands at once. "Give me twenty minutes."

"Of course." She smiled at the room, a smile that did not reach her eyes, and let her gaze land deliberately on the empty chair to Dominic's left, the one Eliana had occupied during every quarterly review for the past two years. "I suppose that seat's open now."

Nobody spoke. Harlan's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.

Dominic did not answer her. He turned back to the table instead, jaw set, and resumed as though the interruption hadn't happened at all. "Where were we. The audit. I want compliance results by end of day, and I want a name attached to that access breach by Friday."

"Sir." The firm's head quant analyst, a young woman named Priya Shah, spoke carefully, choosing each word. "I need to flag something else. Overnight, we found irregularities in the core execution model. Nothing catastrophic yet, but latency spiked twelve milliseconds across three trading desks around eleven p.m."

Dominic frowned. "Twelve milliseconds is nothing."

"It's not nothing if it's new," Priya said. "The model's run flawlessly for over a year. This is the first anomaly we've logged since implementation."

"Run diagnostics. It's probably a server load issue, nothing more." Dominic waved it away, fast and automatic. He had never had to worry about the deepest layers of the architecture beneath him. "I don't have time to chase phantom lag spikes today."

He gathered his folder and started toward the door, already mentally moving on to Genevieve waiting in the hall, to the version of his morning where nothing had actually changed.

Harlan caught his arm just before he reached the threshold, voice low enough that only Dominic could hear it. "Sir, one more thing. I ran a trace on the encrypted signal that hit us last night. I couldn't break the account, but I got a partial location ping before it went dark."

"And?"

"It routed through a private server registered to Sterling Holdings."

Dominic went still.

"Lucien Sterling," Harlan said, watching his employer's face carefully, "made contact with whoever attacked us. Last night. Within an hour of your divorce going through."

For the first time since he had walked into the building that morning, Dominic Vance's carefully constructed calm cracked, just slightly, just enough for Harlan to see the color drain from his face before he forced his jaw shut and said nothing at all.