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Chapter 851:
Rhodes, his chief of security and operations, passed a slim iPad over the partition. “The target list, sir. The four institutions preparing to bid against Ms. Erickson tomorrow p>
Crawford took it without glancing at the names. His fingers tapped a slow, rhythmic beat against the leather armrest.
“If she won’t accept my shield in the open,” Crawford said, his voice dropping to just above a whisper, “then I’ll slaughter her enemies in the dark p>
He looked up, meeting Rhodes’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Dig into the servers of all four firms. Tax evasion, offshore accounts, insider trading — whatever they’re hiding. You have forty-eight hours to make them bleed badly enough that they withdraw voluntarily p>
Rhodes nodded, already working his terminal. “Understood. Though the fourth bidder — NovaTech, Arthur Pendleton — is notoriously aggressive. He may not scare easily p>
Crawford’s eyes went flat. A cold smile crossed his face. “In New York, there is no such thing as a bone I cannot break p>
The Phantom pulled smoothly from the curb and into traffic. Crawford looked out through the tinted glass at the Apex Bio logo on the building above.
𝗦𝘁𝘰𝘳і𝘦s у𝘰𝗎 w𝗈𝗇’𝘵 𝘱u𝘵 𝘥𝗈𝘸n 𝘰n ѕ.𝖼𝗈𝘮
He would pave her road to the throne with the wreckage of her rivals — and she would never know he was holding the knife.
With less than twenty-four hours until the Sotheby’s auction, a silent, invisible massacre swept through the upper echelons of Wall Street.
At 7:00 AM, the CEO of a prominent hedge fund sat in his Tribeca dining room, sipping his morning espresso. His phone buzzed with an incoming email from an anonymous address linked to a Love Media investigative journalist.
He opened the attachment. His stomach dropped. It was a complete, unredacted ledger of his illegal offshore tax shelters in the Cayman Islands, dating back five years.
The espresso cup slipped from his fingers and shattered on the hardwood floor. He dialed his crisis management team immediately. Ten minutes later, the hedge fund released a terse press statement announcing their “strategic withdrawal” from the Apex Bio patent auction.
One down.
At noon, a senior partner at a massive private equity firm stood in the first-class lounge at JFK, scrolling casually through his phone.
His heart stopped. A tabloid secretly owned by Crawford’s conglomerate had just posted a teaser image — blurry but unmistakable: the partner handing a briefcase to a rival executive at a discreet hotel bar. Textbook insider trading. The caption read: Take a step back, and the sky clears.
Sweat poured down the back of his neck. He pulled out a burner phone and frantically ordered his legal team to revoke their bidding authorization at Sotheby’s. Five minutes later, the image vanished from the internet as though it had never existed.
Two down.
At 3:00 PM, the New York director of a European investment bank was escorted by two security guards into the top-floor executive suite of the Love Media building. Crawford didn’t grace him with his presence. Rhodes sat at the long conference table and slid a manila envelope across the polished wood until it stopped beside the director’s coffee cup.