Chapter 2 - The Viral Ghost
I spent the evening in my penthouse overlooking the Puget Sound, nursing a glass of Macallan and enjoying the rain lashing against the floor-to-ceiling windows. I assumed the altercation was over. I was wrong.
My encrypted phone buzzed at 6:00 AM. It was Sarah, my Chief Operating Officer.
"Tell me you didn't assault Julian Vance," she said, skipping the greeting entirely.
"I defended an old man from a brat," I replied, rubbing my eyes. "Who is Julian Vance?"
"The son of Richard Vance. CEO of Apex Capital. Our primary rival for the Seattle port acquisition." Sarah sighed heavily, the sound crackling over the line. "Elias, you’re trending on Twitter. Number one. The hashtag is #SweaterHero, but Vance’s PR team is already mobilizing to spin it as an unprovoked attack by a deranged vagrant."
I opened my laptop. There it was. A shaky, high-definition video of me dropping the kid on his Ferrari. With over twenty million views on TikTok and spreading like wildfire across Facebook. The internet was divided. Half were praising the "mysterious working-class hero," while the other half were trying to identify me.
"They don't know who I am yet," I noted.
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"Give it an hour," Sarah warned. "The internet is undefeated. When they realize the 'deranged vagrant' is Elias Thorne, the invisible billionaire who just engineered the biggest tech merger of the decade, the media will lose its mind. Get to the office. Use the underground tunnels."
I hung up. The sanctuary I had built—the carefully curated anonymity, the gray sweaters, the side doors—was crumbling. For the first time in ten years, I felt a cold spike of adrenaline. The ghost was about to be dragged into the light.
