The billionaire's desperation
Adrian Cross had built his empire on certainty.
Not hope. Not luck. Certainly not mercy.
Certainty was cleaner than all of them. It obeyed rules. It yielded to pressure. It could be forecast, quantified, bent until it fit neatly into columns and projections. Numbers behaved if you understood them. Markets obeyed if you were ruthless enough. People—especially people—fell into line when you applied the right leverage.
That belief had carried him from nothing to everything. It had insulated him against doubt, against regret, against the small, inconvenient voice that sometimes whispered that power extracted too much blood to ever feel clean.
But the moment Emilia walked away from him, that certainty shattered.
It wasn’t dramatic. There was no crash, no spe
