Three million dollars. To Julian Mandel, that figure was a mountain—a sum so vast and imposing that it felt as though he would have to sell his very soul, perhaps multiple times over, just to clear the peak. It was a number that kept him awake at night, staring at the ceiling of his soon-to-be-foreclosed apartment, calculating how many decades of labor it would take to satisfy his creditors. In the brutal economic climate of Crown City, where a single misstep can turn an entrepreneur into a pariah, that three million represented the difference between a future and a permanent residency in the gutter.
But for Ace Kane, the problem was of a completely different nature. To Ace, three million dollars wasn't a mountain; it was a molehill. It wasn't even capital—it was pocket change, the financ
