Leaving the Headmaster hyperventilating on the asphalt, I dragged the broken wheelbarrow back toward my private sanctuary—a massive, glass-paned greenhouse hidden behind a thick grove of oak trees on the far edge of the campus.
The greenhouse was my temple. It was filled with rows of rare blue hydrangeas, blooming orchids, and deep emerald ferns. The air inside was humid and smelled of pure, uncorrupted life. In the back corner of the structure sat a small wooden potting shed that served as my office.
I walked inside the shed and locked the heavy wooden door behind me. I didn’t wash the dirt off my face or change out of my soiled overalls. Instead, I moved a heavy bag of potting soil aside, revealing a small, steel floor safe hidden beneath the floorboards.
I entered a twelve-digit biometric code. The heavy steel door hissed open.
Inside sat a thick leather ledger, a pristine laptop disconnected from the school’s server, and a heavily encrypted satellite router. I booted up the laptop and connected my gold Vertu phone via a secure cable to bypass commercial networks.
For the first time in a decade, the Apex Leviathan went hunting.
My fingers flew across the keyboard. I didn’t need commercial search engines; I had direct backdoor access to the private clearinghouses that tracked every institutional margin loan on Wall Street. I pulled up the primary corporate filings for Sterling Capital.
Just as I suspected, the architecture of Richard Sterling’s wealth was an absolute house of cards.
He was managing fourteen billion dollars in assets, but twelve billion of it was heavily leveraged debt. He had borrowed massive sums of money to acquire vulnerable companies, using the targeted companies’ own assets as collateral. It was a classic, ruthless corporate raid structure.
But a predator is only as safe as his primary lender.
I traced the origination of Sterling Capital’s largest structural credit facility—an eight-billion-dollar margin umbrella. The debt was held by a private Swiss consortium known as the Avalon Trust.
I stared at the glowing screen, a cold, terrible smile pulling at the corner of my mouth beneath my gray beard.
I owned the Avalon Trust. I had built it thirty years ago as a black-box liquidity pool.
Richard Sterling was running around Connecticut threatening children and attempting to pave over my dead wife’s botanical gardens, completely unaware that the very oxygen keeping his empire breathing was currently sitting in a dirty potting shed, covered in fertilizer.
A loud crash shattered my concentration.
I slammed the laptop shut and stepped out of the shed into the main greenhouse.
Jason Sterling and his friend Bryce were standing in the center of the glass enclosure. Jason held a heavy wooden walking stick he had likely pulled from the drama department’s prop closet. At his feet lay the shattered remains of a terracotta pot. One of my oldest, most delicate blue hydrangeas was crushed against the brick floor, its fragile petals trampled into the dirt by Jason’s expensive leather loafers.
“Nice place,” Jason said, swinging the stick lazily. “A bit cluttered, though. Good thing my dad’s bulldozing it next month to build the new athlete housing.”
My eyes locked onto the crushed flower. Eleanor had planted that specific root system with her own hands twelve years ago. A deep, dormant darkness rose up from the absolute bottom of my soul, drowning out every peaceful instinct I had spent ten years cultivating.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” I said, my voice echoing off the glass walls.
Bryce stepped forward, holding his phone up again. “Or what, dirt boy? You going to cry to the principal? We just saw Harrison kissing my dad’s shoes by the catering tents. You’re done.”
Jason stepped closer to me, his lip curled in disgust as he looked at my soiled clothing. “I told you to clean my tires. Since you didn’t, my dad is going to have you formally evicted for trespassing by the end of lunch. But I wanted to come see you first. I wanted to see the look on a pathetic old loser’s face when he realizes he has absolutely nothing.”