Jas Brock was your typical loan shark—well, as typical as a man who made a living off people’s blood and interests could be.
As the owner of Avance, he’d seen countless n grovel at his feet, their pride shattered and futures sold for scraps.
But today, the tables had turned. He was the one kneeling and trembling.
The man—no, monster—who now sat leisurely on Jas’ ornate leather chair dubbed his throne wasn’t soone new to him. After all, this wasn’t their first encounter.
The man didn’t look like much. Dressed in a simple black turtleneck and coat, the man sat with the lazy grace of soone who knew he owned the room. One leg crossed over the other and he definitely was younger than Jas.
But Jas knew exactly how dangerous he was, evident by the fact that Jas could hardly breathe in the man’s presence.
"Mr. Brock," the man said, calmly. "You didn’t honor our deal."
Jas tried to speak but only managed a dry croak.
"I thought you said Drake systems would be mine by the end of this week," the man continued, "but what is this I hear about it being acquired by another company?"
The final word dripped with disdain, as if it physically offended him to say it.
Jas swallowed hard, throat burning. "I—I tried b-but this OmniTech Corp ca out of nowhere and paid all that Drake systems owed us."
"What did you just say?" The man’s eyes narrowed at Jas’ words.
"T-they p-paid everything that was owed to us?" Jas’ fear reached a whole new level after the man’s question.
Hearing his reply, the man narrowed his eyes at Jas, wondering if the man was just stupid or he had scared him too much.
With a sigh, he calmly asked again, "what did you say the company’s na was?"
Jas didn’t dare blink. His mouth quickly opened.
"O-OmniTech," he answered. "OmniTech Corp."
"OmniTech..." he said quietly, almost to himself. Then his lips curled into sothing that wasn’t quite a smile. "Now that’s a na that has been annoyingly popping up a lot recently."
"M-Mr Nathaniel?" Jas called out nervously, he was on the verge of passing out, seeing how much darker Nathaniel’s expression had gotten.
He knew that disappointing Nathaniel Langley had already placed his life on a thread so if for whatever reason Nathaniel got angrier than he already was, then his death was confird.
"Don’t worry about it Brock," Nathaniel’s smile, instead of assuring Jas, just made him even more nervous, "let’s just focus on how disappointed in you I am right now."
Nathaniel’s tone was light, conversational even, but every word felt like a scalpel being dragged across Jas’ skin.
"I entrusted you with a very simple task," he continued, slowly rising from the throne-like chair. "A transaction, Mr. Brock. A task with three simple steps, pressure, leverage, and acquisition. The kind of thing you used to be good at."
He stepped closer, deliberately walking slowly to make Jas’ fear as high as possible.
"And yet," he went on, now just a few feet from Jas’ shaking form, "you let a startup walk in and snatch it out from under us.
Nathaniel crouched to Jas’ eye level, resting his forearm casually across his knee.
"Now, how should I deal with you?"
"I’m sorry!" Jas blurted out, eyes wide and watery. "I’ll fix it! I’ll dig into them, I’ll find out who they are, and find a way to reacquire Drake systems—I swear!"
Nathaniel stared at him for a mont, long enough that Jas felt the air start to thin. Then, with a soft, almost mocking chuckle, Nathaniel stood again.
"You’ll do more than that, Mr. Brock. You’ll make yourself useful for once."
He slowly walked towards the floor to ceiling glass that acted as windows before he slowly turned back toward Jas, eyes gleaming with interest.
"Find everything you can on OmniTech Corp. Dig deep. I don’t care what rock they’re hiding under, rip up the ground if you have to. Use every contact, every favor, every rat you’ve stuffed into the gutters of the city they’re in."
"And if I do?" Jas asked, voice barely a whisper but it held a little bit of hope, after all, Nathaniel, as cruel as he was, was very generous when rewarding his underlings.
Nathaniel smiled again, but this ti it did reach his eyes.
"Then maybe... just maybe, you’ll get to keep your pitiful little life, Mr. Brock."
He walked past Jas without another glance, pulling a pair of black gloves from his coat pocket as he reached the door.
"Oh, and Brock?" he added, pausing as his hand touched the knob.
Jas didn’t answer, but he was listening very very closely, his fear not allowing him to miss a single word from Nathaniel.
"If you disappoint again, I’ll make you wish Irina had found you that night."
He opened the door and walked out, leaving behind a trembling Jas who imdiately scrambled to his feet and called out to his assistant.
"Darwin! Get in here!" Jas barked, his voice still trembling a bit.
Darwin, Jas’ assistant nervously scrambled into the office, noting how bad his boss’s mood was.
"S-sir?" He answered.
"I need everything on a company called OmniTech Corp Now!" Jas snapped. "I want to know who they are, who’s funding them, who their board is—hell, I want to know the na of their janitor and what brand of coffee their secretary drinks!"
"R-right away, Sir." Darwin imdiately scrambled out the door leaving Jas who crashed into his ’throne’ before massaging his forehead and saying, "Shit."
anwhile, Nathaniel calmly walked out Avance’s building with two of his bodyguards following closely behind.
One of them walked ahead and opened the door to his car, a black rcedes-Maybach. Nathaniel calmly walked inside and the guard closed the door before walking to the driver’s side.
Inside, Nathaniel sat, looking forward, before he asked, "what were the results?"
Sitting opposite him was an older man with grey hair. This was Nathaniel’s private investigator and fixer—Dmitri Volkov.
A man as quiet as he was dangerous. Forr FSB, he now worked for the Langley family since the pay was tempting enough.
As long as sothing existed, Dmitri could find it, no matter how well hidden it was.
He lifted his gaze from the tablet in his hand, as he spoke in an accented tone. "Initial sweeps show nothing substantial. OmniTech Corp has no social dia, no board announcents, no press releases, nothing."
Nathaniel exhaled slowly, flexing his gloved fingers. "And the Sentinel software?"
"Sa results," Dmitri said.
A frown appeared on Nathaniel’s face as he said, "you know Dmitri, I’m really starting to doubt your skills."
Dmitri didn’t flinch at the veiled threat. Instead, he simply tapped the screen of the tablet in his hand and turned it toward Nathaniel, revealing a confidential email leak stamped with tadata from a small dia company.
"I did say initial sweeps," Dmitri replied, his voice steady as he was used to Nathaniel’s attitude. "But if you allowed five more seconds to speak, you’d see that i did more than initial sweeps."
Nathaniel leaned forward, scanning the screen. The headline read:
"Anonymous Tech Startup to Launch Revolutionary Cybersecurity Suite, Industry Experts on Edge."
"Codena Sentinel," Dmitri continued. "There were no marketing campaigns and absolutely no leaks from the developer side. But the dia agencies OmniTech has contacted were given encrypted demos to help prepare their questions."
"A public release huh?" Nathaniel muttered before a grin graced his face, "well then, I guess it’s ti we test the limits of Sentinel."
He then turned to Dmitri, "I want you to find the best hackers you can"
"And when you do," Nathaniel added, "I don’t want them to just crack Sentinel. I want them to rip it apart and I want them to do it on launch. Line by line, bit by bit. No matter how deep they buried their tracks, I want it all."
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