"I... I..."
Vivian Thorne’s voice was completely gone. The aggressive, venomous corporate shark who had walked into the VIP alcove intending to financially disembowel VanceTech was reduced to a stammering, hyperventilating wreck. She stared at my face, desperately searching the cold, impassive contours of my expression for any sign that this was an elaborate, orchestrated prank. She found nothing but the terrifying, abyssal emptiness of a man who possessed the actual power to execute his threat.
My statement wasn't a bluff. Zenith Consortium’s total market capitalization was roughly twelve billion dollars. For the Nexus Group, authorizing a hostile takeover of that magnitude was a matter of a single encrypted directive to our quantitative trading algorithms in Geneva. It would take less
