Chapter3

Vacation Is Over

Just half a month.

I stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows of Rockefeller Center, looking down at the gray streets of Manhattan. New York in the rainy season always carried a sticky, suffocating weight. For some, that suffocation had already bled from the weather into reality.

Andrew pushed open the office door, placing a thick financial analysis report on my expansive desk.

"Sir, Brian Walker sent another demand letter to Ms. Evelyn this morning," Andrew reported clinically. "This is his fourth time this month asking her to advance funds under the guise of an 'additional venture capital margin'."

I flipped open the report. The once clean, beautiful ledgers now looked like a ragged cloth riddled with holes.

Having lost my capital allocation in the underlying architecture, Evelyn's company was already trapped in a severe cash flow paralysis. And Brian, rather than bringing in the top-tier Wall Street resources he had boasted about, was acting like a parasite smelling blood—rapidly draining the last drops of liquidity from her accounts while she was completely overwhelmed.

"Did she pay?" I asked mildly.

"She did," Andrew replied. "She even mortgaged the phase-two property rights of her Long Island villa. It seems she still truly believes Brian's offshore venture capital project will help her turn the tables."

I closed the report and said nothing more.

For three years, I had protected her too well. The commercial traps lurking beneath Wall Street's glamorous facade had been quietly filtered out by me before they ever had a chance to reach her desk.

This had given her a profound illusion—she actually thought that by drinking a few glasses of champagne at high-society banquets and exchanging business cards, people would willingly hand over real money into her pockets.

Now, she was swallowing the bitter fruit she had cultivated herself.

Andrew paused for a moment and pulled out a tablet.

"Also, there have been some developments in her personal life." Andrew tapped on an extracted audio file. "This is an abnormal disturbance record automatically sent back by the Long Island villa's security system."

It was the high-priority alarm circuit I had personally installed to protect the safety of her and the boy.

Harsh static crackled from the tablet, followed immediately by a dull shattering sound. It sounded like an expensive piece of porcelain being smashed against a wall.

Then, Noah's hoarse crying rang out.

"I don't want to eat this! I want the soup from before... I want him!" The five-year-old child's voice carried the frail resistance of sickness, repeating over and over, "I want Daddy! My real Daddy!"

"Shut up!"

That wasn't Evelyn's voice. It was Brian's. Compared to the gentle, elegant man who had casually tossed Porsche keys around at the banquet half a month ago, his voice now dripped with unconcealed rage.

"Shut him up! Evelyn, I have two crucial overseas calls to make. If you can't even manage a child, then stop getting in the way of my business!"

Next came the sounds of chaotic shoving, Noah's screams, and Evelyn's panicked, trembling gasp.

"Brian, you're hurting him! He's still running a fever, you can't treat him like—"

"If you can't take it, get the hell out!"

The audio clipped off abruptly amidst prolonged crying and the violent slamming of a door.

I stared blankly at the darkened screen. The dead, ashen calm in my heart didn't ripple in the slightest.

Taking a leech for a father is a game that demands a heavy price.

Brian had always been nothing more than a beautifully packaged empty shell. He enjoyed the high-profile banquets, enjoyed the vanity of plundering other people's achievements, but he was absolutely unwilling to spend even one minute of patience on a feverish, crying child.

Evelyn thought she had found the perfect guide for her "class ascension." Now, the mirage was fading, and the man who kept claiming he could give her freedom had finally ripped off his glamorous skin.

"Ms. Evelyn is clearly panicking now," Andrew put the tablet away, a hint of routine mockery in his tone. "Coupled with irrational investments and the total loss of control in her home life, she has been extensively contacting several top-tier private detective agencies in New York since the day before yesterday."

"Looking for me?"

"Yes. Looking for you."

Andrew handed over the missing person's assignment list from the detective agency. I glanced down at it and almost laughed out loud.

The scope of the investigation had been painstakingly defined by Evelyn: low-income housing projects in Brooklyn, slums on the edge of Queens, major homeless shelters, and even a few cheap motels that didn't require credit checks.

What a deep-seated, incurable arrogance.

In her mind, me leaving without a dime, stripped of the protection of her network, equated to losing my very ability to survive. She was absolutely certain that I must be shivering and starving in some dark corner of the city right now.

She wasn't paying top dollar to find me out of sudden realization, let alone guilt.

She simply had an urgent need to drag the "free tool"—the one who could clean up all her messes, patiently care for her sick child, and serve hot soup from the kitchen—by force back to that villa, just so everything could return to the comfortable order she was used to.

"How did the detective agency reply to her?" I casually tossed the list into the paper shredder.

"Person not found," Andrew said softly. "They scoured all the lower-class relief files and checked the shelter surveillance in three boroughs. Those detectives told her you've completely vanished from the face of the earth."

I imagined Evelyn's face when she received that report. That high-and-mighty certainty of hers must have already shattered into a floor full of glass shards under the relentless blows.

She was frantically scraping through the mud at the bottom in search of my shadow.

But it never once occurred to her to lift her head and take a single look upward.

The machine hummed softly, ruthlessly churning the paper into a pile of worthless snow.

"Let her keep looking." I turned back around, recasting my gaze to the leaden sky outside the window. The rain was battering heavily against the glass.

The groundwork laid over this half a month was more than enough.

Since Brian's pockets were already stuffed with Evelyn's "advanced funds," it was time for this cat-and-mouse game to enter the actual collection phase.

"Andrew."

"Here, sir."

I stared into my own cold eyes reflected in the glass, and issued the order:

"Notify our short-selling team on Wall Street. Tomorrow at the opening bell, I want to see every single shell fund under Brian Walker's name completely collapse within a second."

Vacation is over.