The rain had stopped, but the sky over Manhattan remained a bruised, sullen grey.
Ryan stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows of his office, watching the city crawl through the morning commute. The glass was cold against his fingertips.
Behind him, the war room was quiet. The manic, adrenaline-fueled rush of the morning had settled into a heavy, watchful stillness.
He hadn't defeated the Grand Syndicate.
He knew that.
The data cascading across Iralis's screens, the freezing of proxy accounts, the panicked sell-offs—it was a deep, bleeding wound, but it wasn't a kill shot.
The Syndicate wasn't a single entity you could bankrupt in an afternoon. They were an entrenched, parasitic organism wrapped around the global financial system.
They had deep reserves. They had political cover.
What he had done was buy time.
