They watched him, From the ice palaces of St. Petersburg to the smoke-filled vaults of Riyadh, whispers passed like sacred scripts between those who once thought themselves untouchable. Elias Thorne was no longer a nuisance. He was a threat. A force. A variable they hadn't accounted for.
And someone was finally ready to act.
The snow hadn't even begun to fall properly when Jude stepped into Elias's suite.
"You need to see this," Jude said, sliding a plain silver card across the glass table. No markings. No logos. Just weight. Authority.
Elias turned it in his fingers. "I haven't seen one of these in a decade."
"Magritte thinks it's a calling card. From him."
A name wasn't spoken. It didn't need to be.
The Hawk.
A faceless financier. The last whisper behind six global collapses, three unsolved disappearances, and one vanished country.
Elias's lips curved, but it wasn't a smile. "Good. Let him come."
A mountain estate, fire-lit and iron-clad.
The Hawk's inner circle sat around a long oval table cloaked, anonymous. None knew each other's names. That was the rule.
"He's moved too fast," one said. "He disrupted the Baltic bond pyramid in 18 hours."
"He bought the Arctic mineral contracts under every sovereign's nose," another spat. "And secured NATO compliance."
An older voice coughed. "He needs to be clipped. Not destroyed. Not yet."
Then came the Hawk's voice metallic, filtered, controlled.
"Thorne will be tested. If he survives the next five moves, he joins us. If he fails... we bury his name where light never reaches."
The sky turned orange above the Mediterranean.
Elias stood at the yacht's stern, hands behind his back. Magritte joined him, her face paler than usual.
"I know what they're planning," she whispered.
He didn't look at her. "I was counting on it."
She placed a hand on his wrist. "You need to disappear for a while. No cameras. No press. They'll come at your foundation."
"That's what I want them to do."
She stared at him, searching. "Are you planning a trap?"
"No," Elias said, voice low. "I'm planning a spectacle."
In a tech center Elias had funded, a quiet digital breach occurred. Invisible. Surgical. One that even Jude couldn't trace.
But someone could.
Across the room, a woman with braided silver hair smiled from behind three screens.
Magritte's former handler.
Her name, Nyah. The Ghost Broker.
She traced the hack, unwrapped its layers, and froze.
"Tell the Circle," she said into her comms. "He knows the game board. And he's already moved three pieces ahead."
The elevator descended 200 meters beneath the lake.
Jude looked uneasy.
"Are you sure you want to reveal this now?"
Elias keyed in a sequence. A massive iron vault door hissed open, revealing a curved room filled with servers, old-world safes, and cryo-locked boxes labeled in forgotten languages.
He stepped in and spoke without looking back.
"They think they're dealing with a man who clawed his way to power. They don't realize I was bred for it."
Closing Scene of Chapter 40: Midnight, In a small café in Istanbul, a hand slid another silver card across the table. The receiver: a man with a dragon tattoo curling up his neck. His eyes were black as coal.
The Hawk had released the wolves.
And Elias Thorne had just become their ultimate hunt.
The press was swarming outside the Louvre's east wing not for art, but scandal.
News had broken. A mysterious leak bank documents, phone records, shadowy memos accused Elias Thorne of funneling funds through shell corporations to destabilize key European markets. A crime that spelled treason in some countries. Market indexes trembled. News anchors pounced.
But inside a discreet Parisian penthouse, Elias was laughing.
Magritte stared at him, wide-eyed.
"Why are you smiling? They're charging you with economic terrorism!"
Elias adjusted his cufflinks. "Because the documents they used came from a vault I fed them myself."
She blinked. "You... what?"
"It's a test. And they just failed."
That evening, Elias called a global press conference.
Except he didn't attend.
Instead, the entire event streamed live on every major financial network. Cameras zoomed in on a silver card one of their cards placed on a mahogany desk. A voice over began, pre-recorded, rich and sharp.
"To those who live in shadows, I thank you for the performance. You wanted a show. Now sit back and watch."
Then came the data drop real data. For seventeen minutes, the broadcast rolled through unedited internal communications of The Closed Circle's members. Real estate seizures. Energy monopoly rackets. Falsified relief funds. The public ate it raw.
By the time the stream ended, three global currencies were crashing just not the ones they'd planned.
At the United Nations, emergency sessions erupted.
In Zurich, two Circle members vanished.
In New York, The Duchess Corporation released a statement: "Mr. Thorne is not only cleared of false charges, but will be appointed as our new Global Economic Envoy."
Magritte stood in a hallway, watching Elias on a split screen. He looked calm. Composed. Almost... noble.
"You don't just react," she murmured, half in awe. "You orchestrate."
Elias stepped beside her.
"Reaction is for pawns."
In a dark room, Nyah stared at ten empty chairs. Her team was gone. Hunted.
She opened a safe and removed an old file. One photo.
She traced the faded ink on the corner: *Project Pharaoh.*
"He remembers," she whispered. "Or he's about to."
She placed a call.
"I need a handler extraction team. And a fallback asset."
"Name?"
"Codename: Leviathan."
They were alone on the balcony of Elias's estate overlooking the city that once spat on his name.
Magritte brought him a glass of blood-red wine. They said nothing for a long while.
Then she asked quietly, "How long until they try again?"
"They won't stop," Elias said. "But they'll adapt. And so will I."
He turned to her slowly, meeting her gaze.
"I want you by my side, Magritte. No more shadows. No more handler games. Just you and me."
She didn't answer with words. Instead, she reached for his hand and squeezed.
In the dark, they stood two flames in a world drenched in oil.