Chapter 66: A Business Partner’s Appetite
Back at the warehouse, the air was charged with the chaotic energy of Nat Collins threatening aura.
It was 5:00 PM, she could subtly tell. The adrenaline of negotiating with a psychopathic billionaire mafia boss had finally begun to cool, leaving April with a much more pressing, deeply irritating problem.
Her stomach let out a violent, highly undignified growl.
She frowned, her unbothered composure cracking for half a second. Nat’s men had ambushed her around 3:00 PM, right before she could sit down for her midday meal. Now, two hours later, she was thoroughly starving, and her irritation at missing lunch was rapidly eclipsing any lingering sense of danger.
Thanks to eating very well for the past few days, she no longer knew how to starve or manage an empty belly as she did back in the Morgans Estate. And she had no plans of regaining that awful talent.
She turned her gaze toward Nat, who was still standing by the chair, a dark, predatory aura radiating from his towering frame.
"I’m hungry," April stated flatly, her voice cutting through the gloomy space with absolute casualness. "Your men picked me up right before I could have lunch, and now it’s five in the evening. I would like to eat."
Nat paused, his head tilting slowly. His eyes, dark and entirely devoid of human empathy, locked onto her small figure.
A suffocating pressure filled the room as his voice dropped into a dangerous, icy register. "You seem confused, sweetheart. You’re a hostage."
April didn’t even blink. She shook her head, looking him dead in the eye.
"No," she said, her tone entirely matter-of-fact. "I’m a business partner."
Before Nat could even register the sheer audacity of her words, April stepped closer. With complete fearlessness, she raised her hand and lightly patted his massive, muscular shoulder. "So make sure it’s a proper meal. I don’t do fast food."
Then, she casually walked right past him, searching the decrepit warehouse for a cleaner chair to sit on and maybe a table that didn’t have a broken leg.
Nat froze. He stood completely motionless, his gaze dropping to his own shoulder where her fingers had just lightly brushed his suit jacket.
Around the room, his subordinates, who had been deadly quiet, standing a safe distance until now, broke into a cold sweat, their hands instinctively twitching toward their holstered weapons.
They knew their boss. They knew people had been skinned alive for far less actions. And so, they waited for the sudden, explosive movement of Nat snapping her neck.
But it never happened.
Instead, Nat slowly turned around, staring at her back. A terrifying, wide grin gradually split his face. Really, this woman has no fear.
It was a psychological marvel. She wasn’t acting tough to save face; she genuinely, fundamentally did not view him as a threat to her existence as long as she held the cards of the future.
The sheer thrill of her defiance was better than any drug he had ever taken.
"Get her food," Nat commanded, his voice trembling slightly with suppressed amusement. "The best the city has to offer. Let’s see if our new partner can actually swallow a bite with a death sentence hanging over her head."
April glanced at him and she nearly scoffed. Please, I can swallow food anywhere, anytime. That’s what the apocalypse teaches you.
Even when there is rotting flesh around you, even when there are people screaming for help, once you see food, you have to salvage it, and if you can’t, then you have to eat it up like your life depends on it so it doesn’t get stolen.
Rot and blood... She’s seen enough of it to make her stomach turn for years, but she’s grown used to it.
Forty minutes later, a makeshift table had been set up in the center of the warehouse, topped with an absurdly high-end, multi-course feast delivered from a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
April sat comfortably as if she were dining in a luxury penthouse rather than a kidnapping den. She took her time, savoring the food and completely ignoring the heavy, suffocating aura of the man sitting across from her.
Nat hadn’t touched a single plate. For the last twenty minutes, he had been entirely hyper-focused on his phone, checking the global markets over and over again.
His thumb swiped across the screen with a manic rhythm, his eyes bloodshot, watching the ticking down of the clock toward the closing bell.
"Ten minutes," Nat muttered, his voice flat, a dangerous edge vibrating beneath the surface.
April casually took a bite of her dessert, chewing thoughtfully but she was secretly reeling in the sweetness. "Do not worry, Mr. Collins. Because worrying won’t change what’s about to happen."
"If this market doesn’t move in ten minutes, seer," Nat whispered, finally looking up from his screen to glare at her with pure, unadulterated malice, "you won’t live to see the next minute."
April merely smiled, dipping her spoon back into the dessert. She had only mentioned this evening and had been vague about the times, but Nat Collins time frame for venting ends at six o clock.
And because of that, he had planned her execution for a minute after the clock strikes six.
"And if it does?" She asked, her eyes glinting with a hint of the fanaticism she had a moment ago. "Get ready to open your pockets, Mr. Collins. I won’t charge you nicely."
Right on cue, a sudden, violent alert pinged on Nat’s phone. Then another. Then three more in rapid succession.
Nat’s eyes snapped back down to the screen.
The main tech and energy sectors, which had been riding a historic, stable high all day, suddenly experienced an unprecedented, anomalous fluctuation.
A massive, anonymous algorithmic sell-off had just triggered out of nowhere. Within sixty seconds, the stable green graphs spiked violently, fractured, and then plummeted off a cliff in a long red line.
It wasn’t even a gradual decline. It was an instant, catastrophic, blood-red crash.
Billions of dollars of active capital vanished from the global market in a matter of heartbeats. The panic was instantaneous; trading halts were triggering across every major exchange, but the damage was done.
The tech and energy sectors were entirely obliterated.
Because Nat had liquidated his Riders & Ships portfolio and aggressively shorted the exact sectors April had specified, his screens weren’t showing loss.
They were showing an influx of wealth so massive, so obscene, it broke the standard tracking metrics of his private banking application.
April was just raising her spoon to take the very last bite of her dessert, completely unbothered, when a massive shadow abruptly loomed over her.
Before she could even swallow, Nat shoved the makeshift table aside with a violent crash and she flinched.
High on pure, unhinged adrenaline, his brain flooded with a manic rush of excitement he hadn’t felt in years.
With a wild, chaotic laugh that echoed off the warehouse walls, Nat reached down, wrapped his massive arms around April’s waist, and violently lifted her completely off her chair.
"What—!" April was entirely startled, her usual composure shattering as she was suddenly hoisted into the air.
Nat’s arms were locked tightly around her, holding her against his towering build. Her feet were dangling uselessly, barely reaching his knees as the sheer momentum of his grip forced her to instinctively drop her hands onto his broad shoulders to steady herself.
"Mr. Collins, what—? Put me down!" April demanded, her voice sharp, her face flushing with rare irritation as she stared down at his manic, bloodshot eyes.
But Nat was completely gone, riding the ultimate high of a successful gamble and breaking completely out of character as the dangerous Mafia boss.
"I said put me down," she repeated and he looked up at her, a terrifyingly brilliant, unhinged grin stretching across his face as he tightened his hold, refusing to let her feet touch the ground.
"Na-ah," Nat laughed, his chest vibrating against hers. "You’re not going anywhere, little seer. You’re going straight into my pocket."
"What?"
