Chapter 141: Chapter 141: Connections and Calculations
In Jake’s office, the dial tone hummed softly through the Bluetooth earpiece as he leaned back, his eyes still anchored to the glass facade of Apex Plaza towering in the distance. The exhaustion from his eye ability was a familiar, heavy ache behind his temple, but the momentum of a thirty-one billion mark balance wouldn’t let him rest.
The line clicked.
"Mr. Rivers," Alice’s voice came through, crisp and immediately professional. "I was just reviewing the updated asset registries. I take it the afternoon session with Sterling International went well?"
"Better than well," Jake said, his voice level. "The capital is secured. I need you to reach out to the management firm handling Apex Plaza. Let’s get the meeting with the owner arranged. I’m ready to buy the building."
A brief, knowing pause came from the other end. "Actually, Sir, you won’t need to wait for a clearance chain. When I made the initial inquiries last week, the owner’s representatives left a direct message. They explicitly stated that the moment you felt your capitalization was ready, you could bypass the broker and call directly."
Jake’s eyebrows shifted slightly. "Directly? They were tracking our interest that closely?"
"It appears so," Alice replied, the sound of keyboard clicks echoing softly on her end. "The owner kept the transaction under a private, single-entity umbrella. She was quite insistent on dealing with you personally once the threshold was met."
Jake caught the pronoun immediately. He blinked, looking back at the monolith of glass and steel across the district. "She? I never actually looked into the personal deed registry for the holding company. I assumed it was backed by one of the old-money institutional boards."
"Most people do. It’s shielded behind three layers of offshore trusts, but the primary beneficiary is a solo investor. I’m forwarding her direct line and profile summary to your secure terminal now."
A soft chime signaled the arrival of the data packet on Jake’s desktop monitor. He tapped the spacebar, bringing up the decrypted file.
His eyes scanned the top line of the corporate brief, and he froze.
PROPERTY DEED HOLDER: METROPOLITAN ASSET CORP.
PRIMARY BENEFICIARY: MABLE ROYS (LEGAL: MABLE KEES)
STATUS: INDEPENDENT ASSET MANAGEMENT
’Roys.’ The name felt heavy, instantly pulling a cold, calculating focus back into Jake’s mind. The same last name as Elizabeth Roys.
"Alice, explain the registry details," Jake commanded, his eyes narrowing as he rapidly scrolled down the background brief. "Why is she still using the Roys title if her legal surname is Kees?"
"It’s a bit of high-society scandal from twenty years ago," Alice explained, her tone dropping into a quieter, more analytical register. "Mable Roys was originally part of the core Roys lineage—Mr. Roys’ younger sister, in fact. But she was abruptly excommunicated from the family empire. The internal history is heavily scrubbed, but the consensus among our financial intelligence sources is that she became pregnant by the son of the Roys family’s fiercest corporate rival at the time. To make matters worse, she married him behind the patriarch’s back."
Jake leaned closer to the screen, reading the black-and-white text. "An enforcement of asset stripping?"
"Worse. They stripped her of her operational shares, cut her out of the trust dividends, and publicly disowned her to protect the family’s face. The marriage didn’t last—her husband’s family collapsed under market pressure a decade later—but she refused to completely drop the Roys name in her private commercial dealings. It was her way of reminding the city that she still held a piece of the original bloodline. She built Metropolitan Asset Corp entirely on her own out of the wreckage."
Jake stared at the portrait attached to the file—a woman in her late fifties with sharp, unyielding eyes and a faint, knowing smile that looked dangerously familiar. An excommunicated Roys wanting to discount the most prized commercial real estate in the financial district for him couldn’t be a coincidence. Not with everyone knowing he’s part of Aurelia Capitals.
"There’s an angle here," Jake muttered, his finger tracing the edge of his desk. "She must want something foom me if she actually intends to give me a discount of a billion. This isn’t just a real estate liquidation."
"Do you want me to handle the preliminary screening call?" Alice asked safely.
"No," Jake said, his voice absolute. "I’ll call her myself. Let’s see what her actual play is."
Disconnecting from Alice, Jake pulled up the encrypted direct number and initiated the call. It didn’t even ring twice before the line clicked open.
"Jake Rivers," a wealthy, remarkably smooth voice resonated through the speaker. It carried a warm, almost matriarchal cadence that felt entirely out of place for a corporate tycoon. "I must admit, I had expected this call the same day your assistant got my contacts. But this is still fine."
Jake didn’t return the warmth. His expression remained stone-faced, his voice cutting through the pleasantries like cold iron. "Mrs. Roys—or do you prefer Mrs. Kees?"
A low, melodic chuckle came from the other end. "Mable is perfectly fine, Jake. And please, let’s not let my family’s ancient paranoia dictate our tone. I am no longer a piece on their board."
"Then let’s get straight to business," Jake said evenly. "I’m calling because I have the liquid capitalization required to clear the title on Apex Plaza. I want to commence the acquisition immediately. Name your valuation structure."
"Straight to the throat. I love it," Mable sighed, the sound of a porcelain teacup settling onto a saucer audible in the background. "The main branch always lacked that raw, predatory efficiency. They always wanted to talk about legacy and bloodlines before they talked about numbers. Very well. Let’s discuss the specifics face-to-face. A multi-billion mark property transfer shouldn’t be finalized over an encrypted network feed. How does lunch sound?"
Jake calculated the timeline in his head. "Name the location."
"Oh, I think it’s only fair we meet on your territory," Mable said, her voice dripping with amusement. "Let’s say 1400 hours? At the Meridian Crown. I believe you own the penthouse suite now. It feels appropriate."
Jake’s eyes glinted. She knew about the Meridian Crown acquisition despite it being processed through a shell layer. "1400 sharp. My security team will have your clearance ready at the lobby elevator."
"I look forward to it, Gold King," she said smoothly before the line went dead.
Jake slowly lowered his phone to the table, his mind working through the variables. ’Gold King? What’s that about? Does she know about my trades with Sterling International? It seems there’s more to this Mable than I had thought.’
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The Sterling Executive Suite
On the top floor of the Sterling International Bank headquarters, the atmosphere was completely detached from the high-voltage chaos of the trading floor below. Thick white carpets swallowed the sound of footsteps, and floor-to-ceiling glass overlooked the entire capital district.
Silas Thorne stood in the center of the massive executive office, his hands clasped behind his back. His uniform was still slightly disheveled from the intense session, his collar unbuttoned.
Across the desk sat Tyler Rollins, the Chief Executive Officer of Sterling International. Standing just to his left was Mr. Reed, his senior secretary, holding a sleek digital ledger.
"Sit, Silas," Rollins said, his deep, resonant voice carrying the absolute authority of a man who controlled the flow of institutional wealth across the continent. He didn’t look up from the document he was reviewing. "Take a breath. You look like you’ve just survived a artillery barrage."
Silas took a seat in the leather armchair, his posture rigid. "It certainly felt like one, Mr. Rollins. The velocity of the order routing today was unprecedented."
Rollins finally closed his folder and leaned forward, interlocking his fingers on the glass desk. "I’ve been watching the central collateral alerts pinging my terminal for the last two hours. The clearing house had to manually verify our overnight liquidity lines twice because of the sheer volume your desk was pushing into the spot gold matching engines. Give me the summary report on the Rivers account."
Silas took a tight breath, opening the folder he had brought up from the floor. "Yesterday, as you know, Mr. Rivers initiated his institutional account with a three-billion-mark deposit. Across two distinct positions—a macro short from 2,348.65 and a secondary continuation script utilizing our 1:100 prime multiplier—he closed the afternoon session at exactly 10,015,000,000 marks."
Mr. Reed, the secretary, adjusted his glasses, his pen hovering over his tablet. "Ten billion. An exceptional run, but not entirely unheard of during a liquidity sweep if a client catches the tail of a central bank intervention."
"That was yesterday," Silas countered, his voice tightening as he flipped to the fresh ledger sheet. "Today, Mr. Rivers logged onto the terminal precisely fifty minutes before the London liquidity overlap. He didn’t consult our advisory desk. He didn’t review the Reuters or Bloomberg terminals. He uploaded a multi-phase matrix directly into our high-priority queue consisting of three sequential trade slips."
Silas cleared his throat, reading directly from the verified clearing house receipts.
"Slip 1 was a max-leverage short entry of exactly 1,000,000 standard lots at 2,317.50. He targeted a specific stop-hunt zone, capturing a seventy-one pip drop down to 2,310.40. Gross profit: seven point one billion marks."
Rollins didn’t move, but his eyes narrowed slightly.
"Before the desk could even process the settlement," Silas continued, the excitement creeping back into his voice, "Slip 2 activated automatically. It was a counter-trend reversal buy order at the absolute floor of that drop—2,310.20. He deployed the expanded balance into a 1,700,000 lot block, capturing a lightning-fast twenty-three pip bounce back to 2,312.50. Gross profit: three point nine-one billion marks."
Mr. Reed stopped typing. He looked up at Silas, his expression shifting from detached professionalism to absolute bewilderment. "He caught the exact bottom of a high-frequency flush? With 1.7 million lots live?"
"There’s more," Silas said, looking directly at the CEO. "Slip 3 was the final hammer. A trend-continuation buy order of 2,100,000 lots loaded at 2,314.00, riding the secondary daily momentum up for fifty-one pips to the equilibrium line at 2,319.10. The position was flattened cleanly forty-eight minutes after the first order was filled."
Silas closed the folder with a soft thud.
"Total combined volume across the three slips: four million eight hundred thousand standard lots. Total gross profit for today’s session: twenty-one billion seven hundred and eighty-five million marks. Mr. Rivers’ current liquid balance with Sterling International Bank is officially sitting at thirty-one billion eight hundred million marks."
The office went completely silent. The only sound was the distant hum of the building’s climate control.
Mr. Reed’s hand was visibly frozen above his tablet. "Thirty-one billion... in two days? Total trading time?"
"Less than two hours across both days combined," Silas answered quietly. "He explicitly commanded the desk to stand down the exact microsecond the third target was hit. He told us, and I quote, ’Don’t get greedy. The market will always be there tomorrow.’"
Tyler Rollins sat completely motionless. He had run institutional funds for thirty years. He had seen legendary hedge fund managers, sovereign wealth executioners, and algorithmic anomalies sweep billions from the markets. But those operations required rooms full of quantitative PhDs, millions of dollars in low-latency infrastructure, and weeks of compounding risk.
This was a single man, sitting in a private office, treating the most volatile asset class in the world like a pre-written script.
"When I met young Rivers last week," Rollins murmured, his voice low and contemplative as he stared out at the city skyline, "I saw an ambitious, incredibly wealthy young man who had managed to catch a massive wave by getting into Aurelia Capitals. I wanted to see the face of the new power rising in this country. But this..."
Rollins stood up, walking toward the high glass window, his reflection staring back at him against the backdrop of Apex Plaza.
"This isn’t luck, Silas. Luck doesn’t survive a full reversal and continuation cycle down to the single pip with a trillion marks of leveraged buying power on the line. He doesn’t just trade the gold market. The boy knows it. He lives it. He breathes it. It’s as if he’s looking at the order book before the major central banks even print their tickets."
"The traders are calling him the Gold King, sir," Silas added, his tone entirely respectful. "They’re convinced he’s a masterclass entity."
"He is," Rollins said flatly, his sharp eyes reflecting the sunlight off the glass. He turned back to Silas, his expression gravity-intense. "Thirty-one billion marks makes him one of the most liquid private individuals on our entire institutional registry. If he takes that capital allocation to a rival prime brokerage, it would severely dent our quarterly settlement depth."
"What are your instructions, Mr. Rollins?" Silas asked, standing up.
"You are to protect that relationship at all costs, Silas," the CEO commanded, pointing a finger directly at the desk chief. "Your execution desk is now permanently reserved for his exclusive deployment. If he wants to trade at three in the morning, your team is in their chairs. If he wants a customized leverage structure, you clear it with me immediately. I want a summary report of his account activity sent directly to my private terminal the moment his queue logs an active slip."
"Understood, sir. I’ll keep you updated on his every move," Silas bowed slightly, picking up his folder.
As Silas exited the office, Tyler Rollins turned back to the window, his eyes locking onto the towering structure of Apex Plaza.
"Thirty-one billion," Rollins whispered to himself, a cold smile touching his lips. "The old families think they own the chessboard. They have no idea what kind of monster just walked into their casino."
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