Chapter3

The thunderstorm that night when I left the Astoria Hotel washed away the last trace of weakness on me

The bastard who once groveled before the Roland family for a ridiculous love died in the cold rain and did not leave even ashes behind

Only forty eight hours after that farce I was already standing on the top floor of a premier office tower in Lower Manhattan New York

Below my feet was Wall Street the densest heart of global wealth and greed

I pushed open the glass door of the private conference room

On both sides of the long table sat five middle aged men in bespoke suits

They were infamous bloodthirsty financial predators on Wall Street and also the Roland familys biggest competitors and victims in the European market over the past decade

Arthur Mr Morgan the former head of Asia Pacific at Goldman Sachs swirled a bourbon on ice and examined me with a sharp gaze

The proposal in your email is indeed bold

But you want to use a newly founded hedge fund to bite clean through the Roland familys funding chain

Why should we hand tens of billions of dollars to you a discarded son who was thrown out in public and let you run it

I did not answer

I walked straight to the head of the table and tossed my tablet onto the polished surface

Mr Morgan look at the data on the screen I said as I pulled out the chair and sat down with my hands clasped under my chin

This is the flow chart of funds moving through seventy two shell companies Victor set up in the Cayman Islands over the last three months

He is exploiting a loophole in the Roland family trust to transfer core assets in batches

The faster he swallows the bigger the loophole becomes

The expressions of the veteran capitalists changed at once

They leaned forward and stared hard at the tangled web on the screen a dark network that pointed straight at the Roland familys fatal weak point

How could you possibly get information this sensitive one silver haired venture partner drew in a sharp breath

Because this game was one I allowed him to set in the first place I replied evenly as if it had nothing to do with me

For seven years for Isabella I sealed away my access to the hedge fund markets and willingly played the useless fool they wanted to see

But now the chains are off

I swept my gaze across the giants of greed and my voice carried an undeniable pressure

Gentlemen I do not need your sympathy

What I want is to use this seed capital and within the next seven months turn every dollar Victor swallowed principal and interest into spoils for everyone in this room

Abyss hedge fund is founded today

You only need to decide whether to board the ship or miss this feast of carving up the Roland one hundred billion empire

Ten minutes later five billion dollars of first tranche leveraged capital entered Abyss offshore account

I turned and looked down at the night view beyond Central Park

From this moment on I was no ones fiance

I was the operator who would rule this capital hunt

And across the ocean in Paris

A top tier yacht on the Seine was blazing with lights

Isabella had gotten her wish and married Victor

A holographic screen streamed their banquet in real time

Victor wore an outrageously arrogant silver suit and raised a champagne flute and laughed wildly at the camera

Cheers to my bride and to that idiot Arthur who crawled out of our sight like a stray dog in the rain

The surrounding celebrities erupted in laughter

Isabella nestled in Victors arms a massive pink diamond flashing on her ring finger

She lowered her eyes slightly her expression full of smug satisfaction in a fake happiness

Darling do not mention that kind of filth and ruin the mood Isabella gently swirled her glass her tone languid and vicious

He is probably in the slums fighting homeless men for bread

Without the Roland family he does not even have the right to live

Watching the woman I once treasured I felt only contempt

She thought she had found true love

She thought she had successfully kicked away a humble burden

She could not read the undercurrent beneath it all

While the people on that yacht were drowning in pleasure my fingers tapped on the keyboard

Three massive streams of short selling data like invisible viruses had already slipped soundlessly into the core stock pool of the Roland familys chemical business

Victor was an ambitious fraud but he misjudged his ability to digest what he had taken

I watched the internal intelligence feed updating in real time

During the brief half month of Isabellas honeymoon Victor had already fired three risk control veterans in the Roland enterprises under the name of internal restructuring and handed all financial authority to his own people

He was weaving a net in madness preparing to swallow Isabella whole flesh and bone

And that foolish woman was personally handing the knife to the man who would kill her

Arthur Mr the assistant entered and handed me a top secret file

The first phase bait has been deployed

Victors people just took the hook

They are buying large amounts of the high risk energy subprime bonds we dumped trying to use them to fill the accounting hole created by his asset transfers

Good I took the file and my eyes fell on Victors latest signature on the transfer documents

Do not alert them

Let him keep drawing blood

Wait until he has hollowed out the Roland family completely

Wait until he thinks he is about to succeed

I watched the red and green curves on the market begin to swing violently and I shut off the loud yacht party stream with a flick

Then close the net

Outside the Manhattan night was filling with neon

A capital web that could strangle anything had fully spread across both sides of the ocean