The heavy oak door of Duke Timber's office hadn't even fully settled into its frame before the silence in the room fractured.
Duke stood paralyzed behind his desk, his chest heaving as he stared at the empty space where the suited man had just been standing. The casual, absolute certainty in the stranger's final words hung in the air like ozone before a lightning strike.
"I'll take care of Mr. Rivers myself."
A sudden, violent chill cut through Duke's anger. He reached out, his hand trembling slightly as he gripped the edge of his mahogany desk to steady his posture. As a seasoned Member of Parliament, he was intimately familiar with the gray areas of statecraft—the backroom compromises, the aggressive regulatory squeeze, the strategic leaks to the press. Those were levers he knew how to pull.
