Chris did as he was told, but he was living on borrowed time.
For an entire month, his head was clamped in a vice. The pressure was relentless, a dull, throb behind his temples that never truly subsided. He spent his days in a haze of legal consultations and sleepless nights, staring at the ceiling of another nameless hotel room. He knew, with absolute certainty, that he could not win a breach of contract lawsuit against Elara. The paper trail of his financial skimming was too clean, the forensic audits too damning, and the evidence of his theft too absolute. He was a sacrificial lamb, pushed onto the altar by Axel Williams to buy a few weeks of distraction.
As the walls closed in, Chris reached out to the one person in the city who operated entirely outside the boundaries of the law—the only person who might actually have the leverage to get him and his family out of the country alive.
The Fixer.
