Chapter1
The day my wife, Hollywood’s newly crowned Best Actress, landed an S-tier deal, she arrogantly tossed a separation agreement in my face.
“I’m moving into Beverly Hills. A salaried office worker like you will only drag down my status. If you can’t come up with a ten-million-dollar mansion, then get out of my life.”
She thought she had latched onto a media tycoon, and eagerly signed the “fake divorce loan” agreement I had tailored just for her.
What she didn’t know was that I wasn’t just the pathetic husband she thought I was. I was also a quantitative strategist from Wall Street, a man who could turn the markets upside down.
That ten million dollars became the seed capital I used to short the tycoon backing her.
When she was ruined at her movie premiere, burdened with crushing debt, and crawled barefoot like a stray dog up to the hillside mansion, begging hysterically for me to remarry her, I was already toasting a successful acquisition with my Wall Street partner.
Then I watched coldly as the security guards threw her into the Los Angeles night like a piece of rotten industrial waste.
——
The night wind on Mulholland Drive carried the Pacific’s signature salty bitterness. I stopped and looked up at the sign with its pitch-black background: Red Flame Private Club.
A red light blinked on the access panel, indicating that a diamond-studded solid gold VIP card was required. I ignored it, took half a step back, and drove my right leg forward.
Bang—crack!
The heavy nanmu wood door and its custom brass lock were destroyed in one muffled blast. I kicked open the door to Suite 888 in one strike, and the cold air from the corridor instantly flooded into the enclosed space reeking of luxury and decay.
Under the glaring crimson lights, every sound came to a dead stop.
In front of the leather sofa lay an entire handwoven Persian carpet. And now, my wife Nicole—the woman who publicly branded herself as an untouchable ice queen, the new pure and elegant darling of Hollywood—was kneeling on it in humiliation.
She was wearing a cheap black lace bunny-girl outfit, with barely enough fabric to count as clothing, and a fluffy tail pinned to the small of her back. Standing in front of her was Harvey, a top-tier producer with cloudy eyes and several shirt buttons undone.
On the armchair beside them, David, an executive at Starlight Media, sat with one leg crossed over the other, idly swirling a martini with ice cubes in his hand. His custom leather shoe rested arrogantly on the carpet, pressing down on a contract stamped with the Starlight Media logo: Lead Actress Agreement for Kiss of the Abyss.
“Pick it up with your mouth. If you fetch it like a good little dog, this S-tier role is yours.” David’s tone dripped with lofty condescension.
Nicole lowered herself without a shred of dignity.
I said nothing. I simply took out my phone, aimed it at the absurd scene, and pressed record. The click of the shutter was unnaturally sharp in the dead-silent room.
All three of them froze at once.
Harvey frowned and slowly adjusted his waistband. David’s face darkened.
And Nicole—when she turned her head and saw that it was me standing in the doorway, there was not even a trace of shame on her carefully made-up face.
After a brief flash of surprise, her features twisted with fury.
“Are you insane?” Nicole sprang to her feet, not even bothering to cover her barely dressed body, and pointed straight at my face. “You barge in at a time like this? Do you have any idea how much effort I’ve put into getting this opportunity? Are you trying to ruin my career?”
She strode toward me, glaring down at me as if I were the criminal sabotaging her sacred ambitions.
“You’re just a pathetic salaried office drone who stares at a computer all day! What can you possibly give me? Red carpets? Haute couture? Or a mansion in Beverly Hills?” Her eyes were full of disgust. “Stop embarrassing me here.”
Looking at this woman completely warped by vanity, I felt no ripple in my heart.
David let out a mocking chuckle. He set his glass on the marble coffee table and pulled a thick stack of Franklins from inside his suit jacket.
Smack.
He casually slammed the cash against my chest, and the bills scattered across the floor.
“Take the money and leave. Your wife knows the rules. Stick with us and she’ll have a great future. You might even get a few leftovers yourself.” David nudged the bills on the floor with the tip of his shoe, looking at me like I was a stray dog on the street.
I didn’t lower my head to look at the money. My gaze passed calmly over all three of their faces. That suffocating level of composure made Harvey sense that something was off.
His hand moved behind his waist. Click. He pulled out a black Glock and pressed the barrel directly against my forehead.
The cold metal transmitted through my skin.
“Kid, I’m not in the mood for some cheap blackmail stunt.” Harvey’s finger rested against the trigger guard, his voice carrying the ruthlessness of a man long immersed in Hollywood’s darker underworld. “Delete that video in front of me. Clean. Or tomorrow there’ll be one more male corpse in an L.A. sewer that nobody gives a damn about.”
The temperature in the room plunged to freezing. Nicole took a frightened step back, but there was no concern in her eyes for my safety. If anything, there was a glimmer of vindictive satisfaction, as if I deserved it for provoking men with real power.
With a gun at my head, the quantitative models in my mind were already running at full speed.
When strength and information are asymmetrical, charging head-on is the move of a low-IQ brute. My goal wasn’t to win some momentary argument here. My goal was to devour them whole, skin and bone.
I looked into Harvey’s eyes, the corner of my mouth lifting into the faintest hint of a smile.
No one spoke. I maintained a chilling kind of obedience, raised my phone with one hand, and opened the video I had just recorded in front of them.
I pressed delete. Then I entered the Recently Deleted folder and permanently erased it. The entire process was smooth and immediate, without the slightest hesitation.
“Good. At least you’re not stupid. Now get out.” Harvey lowered the gun and waved me away in annoyance.
Nicole let out a breath of relief and immediately turned back to Harvey with a flattering smile.
I turned and left, pulling the half-broken door shut behind me. The air in the corridor was still filthy, but my steps were lighter than before.
Ten minutes later, underground parking garage.
I got into an unremarkable black sedan. The interior light stayed off. The Los Angeles night cast shifting shadows across my face through the window glass.
I picked up the ordinary-looking smartphone and quickly tapped a series of commands onto the screen, entering a complex string of hexadecimal code.
The normal interface instantly switched, opening a deep-level hacker terminal.
As a quantitative strategist who could turn Wall Street upside down, data security was my lifeline. I had long since rewritten the phone’s underlying code. Any signal generated by the camera would never pass through local memory. The moment footage was captured, it would be encrypted with 256-bit high-strength encryption, sliced, and uploaded directly to a private cloud server in the Cayman Islands.
A green dialog box lit up on the screen: Sync complete, size 1.4 GB.
In the video, Nicole’s degrading posture, David’s arrogant face, and the dirty lead-actress contract stamped by Starlight Media were all captured in perfect clarity—clear enough to zoom in and read even the fine print.
They thought they had forced me to delete the video? All they had made me erase was a meaningless local shell path.
I leaned back in the driver’s seat and looked at the file in the encrypted vault—a nuclear weapon powerful enough to trigger a magnitude-ten earthquake across the American entertainment industry.
Nicole, you think you’ve secured your ticket into high society.
David. Harvey. You think having power means you can judge and crush anyone you want.
I started the engine. The glow from the dashboard reflected in my eyes, calm and completely undisturbed. The data model was complete. In this predator’s game, the first domino had already been set.
Enjoy your final moment in the spotlight.
