Seven women rejected me at a charity gala in front of nearly four hundred guests, and by the seventh, people had stopped pretending they weren’t counting. Six months earlier, I’d been one of Chicago’s most sought-after millionaires, but that night I escaped into an empty courtyard feeling completely worthless, until a hotel janitor looked at me and asked the one question nobody else had bothered to ask.

I stared at the glowing phone screen, the words burning into my retinas.

Rrouted from a private server inside Nolan’s penthouse.

Fifteen years of brotherhood. Fifteen years of building an empire together, side by side, sleeping on office couches and eating cold pizza while writing code that revolutionized clean energy storage.

And Nolan had destroyed me from the inside out.

"Sir?" the hotel worker asked again, taking a cautious step closer. "Do you need me to get security? You look like you're about to pass out."

I slowly looked up at her, swallowing the bitter taste of betrayal. "No... no, I'm okay. Thank you."

She read my badge—the heavy gold-embossed name tag every VIP guest was given at registration. ETHAN MERCER.

Her eyes flicked to my face, then down to her own brass name tag pinned to her navy hotel jacket: ELENA.

"You're Ethan Mercer," Elena said, her voice dropping into a quiet, calm register.

"You know who I am?" I asked bitterly. "I thought I was the most hated man in Chicago tonight."

"I clean the executive suites on the top floor, Mr. Mercer," Elena said, leaning leaning on her mop handle. "I don't read the financial newspapers, but I see how people act when they think nobody is watching."

I narrowed my eyes. "What do you mean?"

Elena looked over her shoulder toward the quiet courtyard entrance before looking back at me.

"The man who took your suite this evening—Mr. Pierce," she whispered. "He spent twenty minutes on his private phone in the parlor before the gala started. He left three printed financial ledgers in the recycling bin. He didn't even shred them."