Vivian Reeves sat in the driver’s seat for a full thirty seconds after Stan disappeared into the rain, her hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, her jaw clenched so tight the tendons in her neck were visible.
Her eyes were still locked on the exact point where his silhouette had dissolved into the gray downpour.
’You just wait.’
The words ford silently behind her teeth, a promise, not a threat. Vivian Reeves did not forget. She did not forgive. And she absolutely did not tolerate being spoken to like a misbehaving child by a pedestrian holding a convenience-store umbrella.
Nobody talked to her like that. Nobody had ever talked to her like that. Not her classmates, not her business associates, not the succession of wealthy suitors who’d spent years trying to buy their way into her good graces. She existed in a social stratum where people asured their words around her the way bomb technicians asure their movents, carefully, respectfully, and with a constant awareness that one wrong step could end everything.
And this, this nobody, had thrown her money back in her face, called her sick in the head, and walked away without a backward glance.
The rain was still hamring against the windshield. Water from the open window had splashed across the dashboard and the front of her dress, leaving dark wet patches on fabric that was almost certainly dry-clean only.
A man in a pressed suit, her actual driver, who had been relegated to the back seat because Vivian had insisted on driving herself today, leaned forward cautiously. He shrugged off his own jacket and held it up through the gap between the seats, shielding her from the rain still gusting through the half-open window.
"Miss, please, don’t upset yourself over this. Let’s get moving before you catch a cold."
He reached carefully past her and wound the window up, sealing out the storm.
Vivian didn’t respond. She was still staring through the rain-streaked glass at the empty street ahead.
The driver hesitated, then tried once more, his voice gentle and carefully diplomatic.
"Lady Vivian... if I may, perhaps I should take over the wheel now? The roads are quite dangerous in this weather, and if anything were to happen, your father would,"
The glare Vivian turned on him could have flash-frozen the rainwater on the windshield.
The driver physically shrank back into his seat.
"I’m sorry," he said quickly, pressing himself against the leather. "I won’t say another word."
Vivian turned back to the road, jamd the car into gear, and pulled away from the curb with the kind of controlled aggression that suggested the accelerator pedal was standing in for soone’s face.
The Ferrari’s tail lights burned red through the rain for a mont, then vanished around the corner.
Under the barbecue vendor’s tarp, Stan chewed his last skewer in relative peace.
The rain was beginning to ease, the violent, hamring downpour softening into sothing steadier and more manageable. Steam rose from the wet pavent in thin white curls. The vendor was packing up his grill, humming tunelessly to himself.
Stan pulled out his phone, wiped the screen dry on the inside of his jacket, and typed Star Entertainnt Company into the search bar.
The results loaded quickly.
Star Entertainnt was a film and television conglorate, one of the most powerful dia companies operating in the Inksea region. Production studios, talent managent, distribution networks, streaming platforms. Their logo appeared on half the billboards in the entertainnt district. Their productions dominated the local box office rankings with the kind of regularity that suggested either genuine talent or very aggressive market control. Probably both.
Stan scrolled through the company profile, cross-referencing what he found with his existing knowledge of the local business landscape.
Powerful was an understatent. Star Entertainnt operated at roughly the sa tier as the Wanhai Group, which ant it wasn’t a subsidiary or a satellite company. It was a peer. An equal. The kind of entity whose chairman sat at the sa table as Grayson Davies and expected to be treated accordingly.
And the system had just handed Stan thirty percent of it.
He did the rough ntal arithtic. If the Wanhai Group’s thirty-percent stake had been enough to put him on equal footing with Grayson Davies, the chairman of one of Inksea’s most dominant conglorates, then a thirty-percent stake in Star Entertainnt placed him in an almost identical position within the dia industry.
Two major conglorates. Thirty percent of each. Plus the additional ten percent of Wanhai he’d picked up separately.
Stan set down his phone and stared out at the thinning rain.
He was, by any honest accounting, one of the most powerful shareholders in the entire Inksea region, and he’d acquired the position through nothing more than the system’s binding rewards and a willingness to spend money on beautiful won.
The absurdity of it almost made him laugh.
He pocketed his phone, tossed his skewer stick into the bin, and stepped back out into the drizzle. The Imperium Motors dealership was still waiting. His first car was still waiting.
And sowhere across the city, Vivian Reeves was driving through the rain in a fury, plotting revenge against a man she had absolutely no idea she’d just made thirty percent richer.
[Vivian Reeves: Favorability −15]
The number glowed in Stan’s peripheral vision like a small, stubborn warning light.
He’d start from negative before. He could do it again.
’But this one,’ he thought, turning up his collar against the rain, ’is definitely going to be work.’
The rain had softened to a fine mist by the ti Stan reached the Imperium Motors showroom.
The building itself was a statent before you even walked through the doors, a long, low structure of black glass and brushed steel, set back from the road behind a sweep of immaculate landscaping.
The company logo was mounted above the entrance in polished chro letters that caught whatever light was available and threw it back with quiet authority. Even the parking lot was curated, a row of display models positioned at deliberate angles behind a velvet rope, each one worth more than most apartnts in the city.
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