The penthouse was colder than he remembered. The silence was no longer peaceful; it was deafening, a vacuum that pressed in on his eardrums. Alistair greeted him at the private elevator bank with a respectful, shallow nod. "Sir. The assets are being unfrozen. Your schedule has been cleared for the week." Marcus saw the faint, unspoken disapproval in the older man's eyes. He had played a romantic, foolish game and lost, disrupting the smooth machinery of his empire for a fantasy. He had been a tourist, just as Chloe would soon accuse him of being.
Now, Marcus Thorne re-engaged with his world, but it was a hollow, mechanical performance. He sat through board meetings, his mind sixty stories down and ten blocks east, picturing Chloe's face when she found the letter, the devastation that would cloud her bright eyes. He reviewed financial projections, but the numbers were just symbols; they held no meaning. That imagined devastation, however, fueled something else: a cold, calculating, and wholly focused rage. The time for pretense, for hiding, was over. The time for consequence had begun.
He summoned his most ruthless legal counsel and his head of corporate security to the penthouse. The commands were issued not with shouted anger, but with an icy, surgical precision that had been absent in Marcus Wright. "Derek Vance. Vance Capital. I want a full-scale, multi-agency audit triggered. Leak his predatory loan structures to his investors. Initiate a hostile acquisition of his largest debt vehicle through a third-party shell, and then collapse it. I want it done quietly, efficiently, and then I want the results made deafeningly public." He then turned to the matter of the investigator. "The man named Karras. I want every private investigator license, every business permit, every hidden offshore client account, and every ethically questionable tactic he's ever used exposed simultaneously to the relevant oversight boards and the press. Burn his career to the ground. I want him unemployable and fleeing the city by the end of the week." The machinery of his wealth and influence, dormant and gentle during his absence, now roared to life with terrifying, silent efficiency. He was no longer a man searching for love; he was a force of nature, a king returned to raze the lands of those who had threatened what was his. The vengeance was swift, clinical, and absolute.