The scent of burnt coffee hit my lungs the second I pushed through the swinging glass door of the downtown internet cafe.
Neon lights buzzed overhead, casting a sickly yellow glare over rows of cheap plastic desks. A ceiling fan chopped at the stagnant air, fighting a losing battle against the September humidity. It smelled like stale sweat, hot electronics, and desperation.
I paid the clerk with a wrinkled twenty. I didn't wait for the change. I walked to terminal twelve in the back corner and pulled out the wobbly metal chair.
The plastic keyboard was sticky under my fingertips. The LCD monitor was coated in a thin layer of grime.
I cracked my knuckles. The joints popped, a sharp staccato rhythm in the quiet room.
In my past life, it took me five grueling years of late-night corporate audits to untangle the knotted mess of Marcus's financial firewall. I had bled for that company. I had sacrificed my youth, my sleep, and eventually my life, just to understand how his empire breathed.
Today, it took me exactly fourteen minutes.
My fingers flew across the sticky keys. Lines of green code mirrored in my retinas. I bypassed the outer security shell using a backdoor Marcus wouldn't patch until 2018. I ghosted through the secondary proxy servers. I didn't hesitate. I wasn't searching. I knew exactly where the bodies were buried.
I routed straight into the offshore accounting logs.
There it was. A tiny, obscure shell company registered in the Cayman Islands. Valkyrie Holdings.
Ten thousand dollars a week. Siphoned quietly, consistently, from Marcus's operational budget into an untraceable void. It was a beautiful piece of corporate theft. Small enough to avoid triggering the automated alarm thresholds, but large enough to build a small fortune over a few years.
Valerie. Marcus's executive secretary.
She was twenty-six. She was ruthlessly ambitious. She thought she was a ghost.
I wasn't going to wait three months for Marcus to catch her. I needed seed money today to start building the guillotine for his neck.
I jammed a blank thumb drive into the dirty USB port. I downloaded the raw transaction logs, the IP timestamps, and the routing numbers. The progress bar hit one hundred percent.
I ripped the drive out. I ran a brute-force wipe on the terminal, leaving zero digital footprint, and walked back out into the glaring morning sun.
Thirty minutes later, the automatic glass doors of Marcus's corporate headquarters slid open.
The transition from the sweltering street to the lobby was a physical shock. The air conditioning was aggressive. It bit through my dark polo shirt, cooling the thin layer of sweat on my skin. The floor was polished white marble. The walls were paneled in rich mahogany. It smelled like expensive floor wax and raw capital.
I had VIP clearance. I swiped my keycard. The private elevator doors parted silently, carrying me to the forty-second floor.
The elevator hummed. My stomach tightened. This building was my graveyard. In my past life, I had died up here.
The doors slid open. The forty-second floor was deathly quiet. Thick, plush carpet absorbed all sound.
Valerie's office was an antechamber just outside Marcus's main executive suite. Her solid oak door was cracked open.
I pushed it wide, stepped inside, and closed it behind me.
Click. The deadbolt engaged.
Valerie jumped. Her silver pen clattered onto her immaculate glass desk.
She wore a tight, burgundy pencil skirt that rode high on her thighs when she sat. Her sheer white blouse was tucked in perfectly. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a severe, weaponized bun. She smelled like sharp vanilla perfume and high-end hairspray.
She recovered her composure instantly, her eyes narrowing into a glare.
"Julian," she snapped. Her voice was pure ice. "You can't just lock my door. Marcus is in a meeting."
"I know." I walked slowly toward her desk. My boots sank into the carpet. "He's on a conference call with the Tokyo branch. He won't be out for twenty minutes."
I reached into my pocket, pulled out the black thumb drive, and dropped it onto the center of her glass desk.
It hit with a sharp clack.
"Cayman routing numbers," I said. "A shell company named Valkyrie Holdings. Leaving the initial IP address logged to your personal home network was sloppy."
The color drained from her face in an instant. The ice melted into pure, unfiltered panic. Her pulse hammered visibly at the base of her throat, a frantic bird trapped under her skin.
"I need fifty thousand dollars. Transferred to a secure crypto wallet in the next three minutes," I said, my tone flat. "Or I unlock that door and walk into his office."
"Fifty thousand?" she whispered. The audacity of the demand struck her. She pushed herself up from the leather executive chair, planting her stilettos onto the plastic floor mat. She tried to use her corporate armor to intimidate me. "You're a kid, Julian. You're trying to extort me?"
I didn't step back. I closed the distance.
I backed her up until the back of her thighs hit the hard edge of the glass desk.
"Press the intercom, Val." My fingers hovered over the glowing red button on her desk console. Through the drywall, a muffled baritone drifted into the room. Marcus. "Call him in. Let's see who he buries first."
Her hand snapped out. She grabbed my wrist.
Her grip was trembling violently. Her nails dug sharply into my skin. The metallic tang of fear-sweat mixed with her vanilla perfume. The reality of the steel trap closed completely around her throat.
"You're not bluffing," she breathed. Her pupils blew wide open.
"I don't bluff. I do math. You have two minutes."
The fight drained out of her completely. The pristine, untouchable secretary mask shattered. She was caught. And looking up at me, feeling the bruising grip of my hand on her hip, the terror morphed into a desperate, high-stakes heat. Her survival instinct re-routed.
She dragged her teeth over her glossy bottom lip. Her breathing turned jagged beneath the sheer silk.
"If I drain that much of the account... I have nothing left," she whispered. Her voice dropped, turning wet and raspy. She didn't push my hand away. She leaned into it. "Unless... you and I are going into business together, Julian."
"Transfer the money. Then we negotiate."
She reached blindly behind her. Three rapid clicks on the keyboard. A soft chime rang out.
"It's done," she gasped, her breath hot against my knuckles. "It's yours."
"Good."
I grabbed the collar of her sheer white blouse. I didn't pull gently.
The silk ripped. Buttons popped, scattering across the glass desk like tiny hailstones. Valerie gasped, her hands flying to my chest as I hauled her backward.
I swept my left arm across the desk. File folders and a heavy crystal paperweight crashed to the carpet. I set her down hard on the cleared glass.
Her pencil skirt hiked violently up her thighs. The glass was freezing. Her skin was fever-hot.
"Marcus—" she choked out, her fingers digging desperately into the fabric of my polo shirt. "He's right there. He's next door."
"Then you better keep quiet," I growled.
I didn't bother with romance. This was a transaction. An animalistic claiming of territory right outside the door of the man who murdered my parents.
I stepped between her thighs, my hands gripping her hips, bruising the soft skin above her skirt. I crushed my mouth against hers. Valerie tasted like adrenaline and submission. She bit down hard on my lower lip to muffle her own frantic sounds.
The danger acted like gasoline in her veins. Her nails scored deep, burning lines down my shoulders through my shirt. The sterile corporate office dissolved into the harsh rhythm of heavy friction, ragged breathing, and the creak of the heavy glass desk groaning under our combined weight.
She completely surrendered the control she fought so hard to build, arching her back against the cold surface, her body flushing crimson under the sheer, ruined fabric of her top.
It ended abruptly.
I pulled back. The cold air conditioning rushed between us. I adjusted my belt. My breathing was entirely steady. The ghost of the bullet in my chest was quiet.
I didn't linger. I didn't offer a hand.
Valerie lay disheveled on the desk. Her ruined blouse hung off her shoulders. Her chest heaving, a dazed, glassy look in her dilated eyes.
I picked the thumb drive off the corner of the desk and slid it into my pocket.
"Keep your mouth shut about what happened here today," I said over my shoulder, my hand resting on the brass door handle. "And keep skimming the accounts. For both our sakes."
I stepped out into the pristine hallway. The door clicked shut behind me. My phone buzzed in my pocket—the crypto transfer confirming the fifty thousand dollar deposit.
The seed money was secured. Phase one was complete.
I walked toward the elevator. Tonight, at the Gala, the real war began. Tonight, I was going to look at his wife.
[Author's Note: Want to read the uncensored, R18 extended version of this scene? I will update it soon, so keep checking the comment ]