The dark smile that had twisted Vanessa's lips, a mirror of Julian Thorne's own chilling ruthlessness, had barely faded into the gallery's shadows when the tremors began. Not physical ones, but digital, insidious, a whisper across the global network that Zayn Carter now commanded. He felt it first as a subtle pressure in his mind, the system's omnipresent awareness detecting a disturbance on the edge of Carter Corp's vast digital perimeter.
He sat in his penthouse office, the city lights a silent sentinel outside, his tablet held loosely in his hand. The initial peace after purging the corrupt executives had been fleeting, a false dawn. He had expected retaliation, but not this soon, not with such scale. The system's alert pulsed, growing sharper, more insistent. System intrusion detected
