The glass tower that bore Liam Hawthorne’s name was a cathedral of silence at dawn, the city still heavy with mist outside its walls. He liked those early hours—when the world was slow enough for him to think, when power hummed not from voices but from systems running exactly as he had designed.
But that morning, silence cracked into chaos.
The elevator doors slid open with a jarring clang and his CFO, William Avery, stumbled out. His tie was askew, his face pale with the kind of fear no market fluctuation could ever inspire.
“Liam,” he rasped, holding a trembling tablet in his hand. “We’ve been hit.”
Liam’s pen stilled over the page he’d been signing. He looked up slowly, deliberately, like a general who refused to flinch under cannon fire. “Define hit.”
Avery swallowed. “Three of ou
