Tuesday Night — Ethan's Apartment, Brooklyn
The rain outside tapped lightly against the glass like the ticking of an impatient clock. Brooklyn's evening skyline stretched in tired hues—bruised purple shadows smeared across amber-lit rooftops. Ethan Vale sat on the second floor of his apartment, alone. For once, completely alone.
Roxanne Bellefort—his landlady, widow, and long-standing enigma—had gone to her home in Manhattan for the week. Her usual background wine sips, underhanded comments, and slow passes through the kitchen were absent tonight.
The silence was absolute.
Ethan sat cross-legged at the coffee table, the glow of three screens reflecting in his eyes. One showed trading graphs—minute dips, sharp corrections. The second was a watchlist of stocks he'd been analyzing since last winter, with their geopolitical triggers mapped beside them. And the third... held no entertainment, only a data model he'd built himself. Market timing. Liquidity flows. Investor sentiment cycles. Every movement was psychology written in numbers.
He wasn't just studying trades.
He was studying human behavior through wealth.
The phone pinged.
He glanced.
Leona Joey:
You'll need something sharp for Marco's party.
I've got an invite to an exclusive designer showroom—clothes, accessories, everything.
If you're not busy being mysterious, come with me tomorrow.
Also… I don't trust your taste in ties.
He exhaled once through his nose, amused.
Leona Joey. Honey-blonde, sharper with her words than her stilettos, and nestled high in one of the glass towers of Manhattan's financial district. Her flat overlooked Central Park—Ethan knew that. It matched her: elegant but always looking down at the world, processing it from a height.
She hadn't messaged out of flirtation tonight. This was something else.
Curiosity, maybe. Maybe something strategic.
He typed nothing in response. Just locked the phone and leaned back.
The city pulsed outside—somewhere between temptation and test.
And Ethan? He remained where he was. Between the folds of silence, with a mind that was already twenty moves ahead of whatever wardrobe war the others were preparing for.