My name is Curtis Vance, and I was worth $12.4 billion on the Tuesday I was supposed to die.
$12.4 billion. It’s a number that doesn’t feel real. It’s a shield. A fortress. It’s a wall of bodyguards, armored cars, and penthouse apartments that are supposed to keep the world out.
It’s a lie.
That Tuesday, I did something stupid. I walked.
I’d just closed the Nakatomi merger. A brutal, 18-month hostile takeover that had left my rivals bleeding and my board celebrating. I was electric, my mind still spinning at a thousand miles an hour. My driver, a stoic block of granite named Marcus, was waiting in the blacked-out Escalade.
“Home, Mr. Vance?”
“No,” I said, adjusting my cuffs.
“Pull over. I need air. I’ll walk the last ten blocks.”
Marcus hated it when I did this.
“Sir, the threat assessment is high. It’s not advisable.”
“It’s Chicago, Marcus. Not a warzone. I need to feel the pavement. I’ll see you at the tower.”
He didn’t argue. You don’t get to $12.4 billion by listening to “advisable.” You get there by doing what everyone else is too scared to do.
The first five blocks were a blur of adrenaline and cold, lake-effect wind. The sound of the city, the smell of roasted nuts and exhaust… it was real. It was the ground. My phone buzzed. Another congratulatory text from my board. I smiled, looking down at the screen.
And that’s when it happened.
It wasn’t a gunshot. It wasn’t a shout. It was a force.
Something, or someone, slammed into me from a dark alleyway. I stumbled, my $5,000 Italian leather shoes scraping on the pavement. My phone clattered to the ground.
Before I could even register the attack, I was spun around and slammed, hard, against the brick wall of the alley. My head hit the mortar, stars exploding in my vision.
“Ugh!”
“Stay still.”
The voice was a whisper. Hissed, urgent, female.
“Don’t say anything. You’re in danger.”
I blinked, my eyes focusing. It was a girl. A kid. Maybe 19, 20. She was homeless. You could see it in the grime on her cheeks, the matted tangle of her hair, the oversized, torn flannel jacket that smelled of rain and street-corner fire.
But her eyes. Her eyes weren’t homeless. They were sharp, intelligent, and blazing with a terrifying, absolute focus.
“What the hell are you…”
“Shut up!” she hissed, pressing her forearm against my chest. Her other hand grabbed the collar of my overcoat.
I’m Curtis Vance. I don’t get ‘shut up.’ I was about to throw her off me—she was light, barely 110 pounds—when I heard it.
Footsteps.
Two sets. Crisp, measured, heavy. Not the casual stroll of a pedestrian. It was the sound of purpose. The sound of men walking in sync.
The girl’s eyes darted from me to the mouth of the alley, then back. Her body was vibrating with a frantic energy.
“They’re looking for you,” she whispered, her breath hot on my face.
“They’re going to scan the alley. Don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t even breathe. You have to believe me.”
My mind, the one that runs a global empire, was failing to compute. The threat assessment. Marcus. The walk. The ambush. The footsteps.
Two men appeared at the mouth of the alley.
They weren’t thugs. They were professionals. Black suits, earpieces, the slight, unmistakable bulge under their left arms. They looked like my security team.
But they weren’t.
One of them, a man with a pale, scarred face, began to turn his head toward us.
“God,” the girl whispered, her eyes wide with panic.
“They’re going to see you. I have to…”
“What?”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
And then she kissed me.
It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was a desperate, messy, frantic act of concealment. She slammed her mouth against mine, one hand tangled in my coat, the other pressed flat against the wall, shielding my face with her head.
To the men at the end of the alley, we weren’t a billionaire and a homeless girl. We were just another slice of Chicago’s nightlife. A couple, lost in a moment, too wrapped up in each other to be a threat.
I was frozen. My brain had blue-screened. The smell of her—of rain and soot—filled my senses. Her lips were chapped, her heart hammering against my chest so hard I could feel it, or maybe it was mine.
I heard a low chuckle from the end of the alley.
“Leave ’em to it,” a gruff voice said.
“He’s not here. Must have taken the car.”
The footsteps receded. They were gone.
She pulled back slowly, her eyes still closed for a half-second, as if emerging from a deep dive. She opened them. They were a startling, clear green.
She stared at me, her chest heaving.
“Who…” I started, my voice a rasp.
“Who were they? How did you know?”
“You’re not safe,” she said, her voice trembling now that the danger was past. She scrambled back, putting space between us.
“They’re not going to stop.”
“Who? Who is ‘they’?”
She looked at me, and her expression changed. The fear was replaced by something else… a flicker of anger.
“You don’t even know, do you? For a man with so much, you’re incredibly stupid.”
She turned and bolted.
“Wait!” I yelled, pushing off the wall.
“Wait! I need answers!”
She was fast. She ran to the back of the alley, scaled a chain-link fence with the practiced ease of an acrobat, and disappeared into the labyrinth of the city.
I stood there, alone, my back against the cold brick. My lips were tingling. My heart was a runaway train.
I, Curtis Vance, had just been saved by a ghost.
And she’d called me stupid.
I touched my mouth. She was right.
I had $12.4 billion, and I was just realizing I didn’t have a clue what was really going on. My fortress was a lie. My security was a joke. And the only person who had told me the truth was a homeless girl who was now gone.
I picked up my phone. The screen was shattered.
The next 72 hours were a blur of controlled paranoia.
I made it back to the penthouse. Marcus was waiting, his face impassive.
“Sir. You’re late. Your phone wasn’t…”
“I was mugged,” I lied. It was the only word my brain could offer. “They took my phone. I’m fine.”
“Mugged?” Marcus stiffened.
“I’ll call Chicago PD. I’ll get the security logs for the street…”
“No,” I snapped.
“Leave it. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”
I didn’t sleep. I stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of my penthouse, 90 floors above the city, and I replayed the event.
Stay still. You’re in danger. Two men. Black suits. The kiss.
The men looked like my new security detail. The ones my COO, Harrison Thorne, had insisted I hire after a few “credible threats” last month.
Harrison. My oldest friend. My right-hand man. The one who’d pushed for this merger.
A cold dread, colder than the Chicago wind, began to seep into my bones.
You don’t even know, do you?
No. I didn’t. But I was about to find out.
The next morning, I didn’t go to the office. I went to my personal data center, a room in my penthouse that was basically a bunker. I bypassed my own corporate servers. I used my personal rig, the one nobody knew about.
I needed to find her.
How do you find a ghost in a city of 2.7 million?
I didn’t start with facial recognition. I started with the alley. I pulled the satellite imagery, the traffic cams, the ATM cams, every private and public camera within a ten-block radius.
I cross-referenced the time of the “mugging.” I saw myself walking. I saw the blur of her pulling me into the alley.
And I saw the two men.
They didn’t just “pass by.” They slowed. They scanned the alley. And when they walked away, they got into a black sedan.
I ran the plate.
It was registered to a shell corporation. A shell corporation owned by a holding company.
A holding company owned by… Harrison Thorne.
My blood turned to ice.
My oldest friend. My COO. The man I was having dinner with tomorrow night.
He had sent a team to kill me.
The mugging story was out. He’d have to try again. He knew I walked. He knew I was reckless. He was using my own arrogance against me.
But why? The merger? It was done. I was the one who…
Oh.
Oh, God. The merger. I had structured it. The final bylaws. If I died within 30 days of the closing… my shares would be absorbed not by the board, but by a special executive trust.
A trust managed by the acting CEO.
Harrison.
He wouldn’t just be CEO. He’d control my entire 40% stake. He’d control everything.
He wasn’t my friend. He was my executioner.
And the only reason I was alive was a girl with green eyes and matted hair.
I had to find her. Not just to thank her. I had to find her because she knew something. How did she know?
I went back to the camera feeds. I watched her run. She was a phantom, disappearing into the service tunnels, the blind spots, the parts of the city the cameras didn’t watch.
But she wasn’t perfect.
She’d climbed a fence. She’d landed on a rooftop. A high-res security camera from a bank across the street caught her for three-quarters of a second.
It was enough.
I ran the facial recognition. Not against criminal databases. Against everything. DMV, social media, school records.
Nothing. No matches. She was a true ghost.
I was stuck. I sat back, rubbing my temples. I was a billionaire with god-like resources, and I was being beaten by a 19-year-old girl.
Think, Curtis. Think.
She knew. How did she know? She knew they were coming. She knew what they looked like. She knew they were looking for me.
This wasn’t a random act of kindness. This was… intel.
Where would a homeless girl get intel on a corporate hit squad?
…Unless she wasn’t just a homeless girl.
I changed my search parameters. I wasn’t looking for a vagrant. I was looking for a connection.
I went back to Harrison. I pulled his files. His corporate life was clean. His personal life was boring. But his security… the new team he’d hired. He’d outsourced it. To a firm called “Aegis Security.”
I ran a search on Aegis. They were new, aggressive. They had poached top talent.
I pulled their employee list. And I cross-referenced it with my employee list.
My former head of security. Frank Coleman. A 20-year veteran. An ex-Ranger. A man I trusted with my life.
I’d fired him two months ago.
Harrison had insisted. He’d “found irregularities.” He’d “lost confidence” in Frank’s “old-school” methods. Frank had argued, gotten heated. I’d backed Harrison. I’d cut Frank loose.
He was found dead three weeks later. A “suicide.” A single gunshot wound in his car.
I’d sent flowers to his widow.
A horrible, sickening suspicion began to form in my gut.
I searched for Frank Coleman. I looked for his family. A wife, deceased. One child.
A daughter.
Mia Coleman.
I ran the name. The file opened. A high school yearbook photo. Dark hair. Bright smile.
It wasn’t her.
I kept digging. The file was thin. She’d enrolled in college. Dropped out. And then… vanished. Two months ago. Right after her father died.
Wait.
I looked at the girl in the photo again. The bone structure. The shape of the eyes.
I ran the photo through an aging and alteration filter. I added grime. I matted the hair. I hollowed the cheeks.
And there she was.
My ghost.
Mia Coleman. The daughter of the man I had fired. The man Harrison had almost certainly had killed.
She hadn’t just been “homeless.” She’d been in hiding. She’d been hunting. She wasn’t just saving me.
She was using me to get revenge for her father.
And I was going to give it to her.
Finding her, now that I had a name, was easy.
She wasn’t on the grid. No bank accounts, no phone, no apartment. But her father had been an ex-Ranger. He’d taught her.
I didn’t look for her. I looked for her habits.
Frank Coleman’s grave.
She went every Sunday. At dawn. I knew, because I had the cemetery’s cameras pulled.
This Sunday, I was there.
The mist was rolling off the grass as the sun came up. It was cold. I was sitting on a bench 100 yards away, dressed not in a suit, but in jeans and a black hoodie.
She appeared, just as the feed had shown. She looked even smaller, more fragile, in the vast, empty cemetery. She was carrying a single, wilted daisy.
She knelt at the grave. She didn’t cry. She just… talked. She was whispering to the stone.
I waited. For ten minutes. Then I walked over.
She heard me, or sensed me, before I was ten feet away.
She shot to her feet, a switchblade appearing in her hand from nowhere. Her entire body was a coiled spring. The green eyes were blazing, all anmial, all survival.
“Mia,” I said.
Her face went pale. The recognition was instant. But it was mixed with pure, undiluted hatred.
“You,” she spat.
“You’re the last person who should be here. Get away from his grave.”
“I… I know who you are,” I said, holding up my hands.
“Mia Coleman. Frank’s daughter.”
“Don’t you say his name,” she hissed, the knife pointed at my gut.
“You’re the reason he’s dead.”
“I know.”
That stopped her. The simple admission. The lack of an argument.
“I know,” I said again, my voice raw.
“Harrison set him up. He set me up. Those men in the alley… they were from Aegis. Harrison’s new team. The same ones who killed your father.”
Her hand trembled, but the knife didn’t lower. “And what? You come here to apologize? You want me to help you, the man who threw my father away like trash?”
“I don’t want you to help me,” I said.
“I want to help you. You saved my life, Mia. You didn’t have to. You could have let them take me. You should have. By all rights, you should hate me.”
“I do,” she whispered, and a single tear finally cut a clean path through the grime on her cheek.
“I do hate you. I’ve been watching you for two months. I was trying to find a way to get to Harrison. Through you. I was following you that night, trying to get close.”
“And you saw them,” I said, the pieces clicking.
“You saw the hit team.”
“I saw the whole thing,” she said, her voice breaking.
“I was in the coffee shop across the street. I heard your driver. ‘The threat assessment is high.’ And I saw you. You just… waved him off. You got out and started walking, staring at your phone like an idiot. Like you had no idea you were a dead man.”
“She was right,” I said.
“I was stupid.”
“I saw the Aegis car pull up,” she continued, lost in the memory.
“Two blocks behind you. I saw them get out. The scarred-face man… his name is Kovac. He’s the one who visited my father, the day before he ‘killed himself.’ I knew… I knew they were coming for you. I ran. I just… ran. I didn’t even think. I just… had to stop them.”
“Why?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
“Why save me? The man who ruined you?”
She looked at her father’s grave.
“Because he wouldn’t have wanted it,” she said.
“My father… he was loyal to you. Even after you fired him. He was trying to warn you. He knew Harrison was dirty. That’s why Harrison had him killed. My dad died trying to save you. If I let them kill you… his death would have been for nothing.”
The weight of it hit me. This girl, who had lost everything because of me, had saved my life out of loyalty to the father I had betrayed.
“Mia,” I said, stepping closer. She tensed, but didn’t raise the knife.
“Harrison is having dinner with me tomorrow night. At my penthouse. He thinks I’m still the same arrogant fool. He thinks he’s won. He doesn’t know that I know. And he doesn’t know about you.”
Her eyes, sharp and intelligent, locked onto mine. She saw it. The plan.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m not going to have him arrested,” I said, my voice turning to ice.
“That’s not how this works. An arrest would be messy. He’d tie it up in courts for years. He’d walk. No. This needs to be… clean. The ‘Curtis Ending,’ they call it in my world. An ending where the problem… just… disappears.”
“You’re going to kill him,” she stated, not a question.
“I’m going to give him an option,” I said.
“But he’s not the only problem. It’s Aegis. It’s Kovac. It’s the whole rotten infrastructure he built inside my company. I can’t do that alone. I can’t trust my own security. I can’t trust anyone.”
I looked at her. The girl who had nothing. The girl who had saved me.
“Except,” I said, “maybe… you.”
The next 24 hours were the most intense of my life.
I brought Mia back to the penthouse. Through the service tunnels. Past my own security, who I now saw as potential assassins.
The moment she stepped into the apartment, the $20 million view, the marble floors, she just… froze. She looked like a refugee on Mars.
“Take a shower,” I said gently.
“There’s clothes in the guest wing. Anything you want. Then, we work.”
An hour later, she emerged. She was clean. The grime was gone. Dressed in a simple black sweatsuit, her hair, now clean, was a dark auburn, and it was long. She was… beautiful. But her eyes were the same. They were the eyes of a soldier.
“Okay,” she said, her voice all business.
“What’s the plan?”
For the next ten hours, we worked.
She was a genius. A true, 180-IQ genius, just like the story I’d invent for her later. Her father had taught her everything. Not just physical defense, but digital. She was a better hacker than my entire IT department.
“Harrison’s a fool,” she said, her fingers flying across a keyboard.
“He’s running Aegis’s payroll through a triple-blind trust, but it all routes back to a server in the Caymans. The same server he’s using to siphon the Nakatomi merger funds.”
“He’s already stealing,” I whispered, watching the data flow.
“He’s not just stealing,” Mia said, her face grim.
“He’s shorting you. He’s betting against your own company. When you… ‘died’… the stock would have dipped, and he would have made a billion on the short, before he even took control of your shares. He was going to bleed you dry from every possible angle.”
“The arrogance,” I said, stunned.
“It’s always the arrogance,” she said.
“Now… how do we use it?”
The plan we formed was brutal. It was elegant. It was pure.
It was the “Curtis Ending.”
Harrison Thorne arrived at my penthouse at 8:00 PM on the dot. He was smiling. That same, warm, friendly smile he’d had for twenty years. The smile of a brother.
He was holding a $10,000 bottle of wine.
“To us, Curtis! To the future!”
“To the future, Harrison,” I said, matching his smile.
I poured him a glass. I didn’t have one.
“You’re not drinking?” he asked, his eyes flickering.
“Doctor’s orders,” I lied.
“This merger took a lot out of me. He wants me to… de-stress.”
We sat on the white sofas, the city glittering like a carpet of diamonds below us.
“You look tired, Curtis,” he said, all false concern.
“You should take a vacation. I can handle things. You’ve earned it.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“I have. But first, I wanted to show you something. A new… acquisition.”
“A company? A building?” he asked, intrigued.
“A person,” I said.
I nodded to the hallway.
“You can come in now.”
Mia walked in.
She was no longer the homeless girl. She was wearing a simple, elegant black dress. Her hair was down. She looked like pure, old-money power.
Harrison… he didn’t recognize her. How could he?
“This is Mia,” I said.
“My new personal consultant. She’ll be… auditing, my security protocols.”
Harrison’s smile faltered. He was confused. This wasn’t part of his plan.
“A… consultant? Curtis, I have Aegis…”
“You had Aegis,” I said, my voice hardening.
“Mia, show him.”
Mia tapped a tablet she was holding.
On the massive wall-screen, a video feed popped up.
It was Kovac. The scarred-face man. He was in an interrogation room. My personal interrogation room, in the sub-basement. Marcus—my driver, the only man I still trusted—was standing behind him.
Harrison’s face went white. He dropped his wine glass. It shattered on the marble, red wine spreading like blood.
“What… what is this?” he stammered.
“Curtis, this is…”
“This,” I said, “is Frank Coleman’s daughter.”
The name hit him like a bullet. He looked at Mia. He saw her. He really saw her. And he understood.
“You…” he whispered.
“She’s been very busy,” I continued, my voice calm. ”
While you’ve been planning my retirement, she’s been… liquidating your assets.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Cayman server,” Mia said, her voice cold and clear.
“The one you used to pay Aegis. The one you were using to short-sell Vance Industries. It’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“I took it,” she said.
“All of it. The $1.2 billion you’d skimmed. I rerouted it. It’s now in a trust.”
“My… my money…” he was hyperventilating.
“It’s in the ‘Frank Coleman Memorial Fund for Victims of Corporate Malfeasance,'” she said, with a ghost of a smile.
“You’re its first, and only, donor.”
“You can’t!” he shrieked, standing up.
“That’s… that’s theft!”
“And what you did,” I said, standing to face him, “was murder. And attempted murder.”
“You have no proof!”
“I have Kovac,” I said, gesturing to the screen.
“He’s been very… talkative. Turns out, he didn’t much like being set up to fail by you. He didn’t like that you’d planned to have him killed in the ‘crossfire’ of my assassination, to tie up loose ends.”
Harrison’s world was collapsing.
“But I told you,” I said, “I’m not having you arrested. An arrest is… messy.”
I walked to my desk. I picked up a single, slim, leather-bound folder.
“This,” I said, “is your ‘Curtis Ending.'”
I tossed it on the table in front of him.
“Inside is a full, signed confession. Your confession. Detailing the murder of Frank Coleman, the conspiracy to defraud my company, and the attempted murder of me. There is also a pen.”
“You’re insane,” he breathed.
“On the desk, there is also this.” I picked up a small, heavy, black object. A pistol.
“You have two choices, Harrison. You can sign the confession. You will be quietly escorted out of this building, you will get on a plane to a country with no extradition treaty, and you will live out your life as a poor man, forever looking over your shoulder. That is Option A.”
“Or,” I said, placing the pistol on the table next to the folder, “there is Option B. A tidier ending. Your ‘suicide,’ brought on by the ‘immense stress of the merger.’ It’s cleaner. It even preserves some of your legacy.”
He stared at the two objects. The pen. The gun.
“You… you’re a monster,” he whispered.
“You made me one,” I said.
“You killed my friend. You tried to kill me. You destroyed this girl’s life. A monster is exactly what you need.”
“And if I don’t choose?” he asked, his eyes darting to the door.
“Oh,” I said.
“Marcus has instructions. If you try to leave, or if you don’t make a choice in the next five minutes, he has been ordered to… expedite Option B. But messily.”
I looked at Mia.
“Come on. Let’s get some air. It’s stuffy in here.”
We walked out onto the balcony, closing the glass door behind us. The wind was high, whipping our hair. We didn’t look back. We just stared at the city lights.
“You think he’ll do it?” she asked.
“He’s a coward,” I said.
“He’ll sign.”
We stood there for exactly four minutes.
The glass door slid open. Harrison stood there, his face a mask of gray, defeated sweat. He held the folder.
“I signed it,” he whispered.
“Good choice,” I said.
“Marcus will show you out. Your plane ticket is waiting. If I ever see you, or hear your name, or even think you’re on this continent again… the confession goes public. And I will send people far worse than Kovac to find you. Am I clear?”
He just nodded, a broken man. He shuffled out, Marcus escorting him.
The door closed.
It was just me and Mia. Alone on the balcony, 90 floors above the world. The empire was safe. The traitors were gone.
But it all felt… empty. The $12.4 billion. The tower. The city. I looked at her. The ghost who had saved me. The girl who had nothing, but had given me everything.
“So,” she said, her voice quiet.
“What now? I guess… I’ll go.”
“Go where?” I asked.
“Back to the street?”
“It’s where I live,” she said, shrugging.
“No,” I said.
“It’s not. Not anymore.”
I took a step closer.
“You… you’re a genius, Mia. You’re a warrior. And… you’re the only person in this entire godforsaken city I can trust.”
“So, what?” she asked, her green eyes wary.
“You want to hire me? Make me your new head of security?”
“I was thinking,” I said, “more of a… merger.”
She looked confused.
“A merger?”
“The Frank Coleman Memorial Fund,” I said.
“It has $1.2 billion in it. That’s a lot of money for one person. It’s going to need a board. A director. Someone to run it.”
“You want me… to run a billion-dollar charity?” she asked, stunned.
“I want you,” I said, “to help me burn down every other corrupt system in this city, just like we did to Harrison. I want you to use that brilliant, beautiful mind to do what your father died trying to do. I want you to help me find a purpose for all of… this.”
I gestured to the city. To the empire.
“And,” I said, my voice softer, “I don’t want you to ever be cold again.”
She stared at me, the warrior, the ghost. And for the first time, I saw the 19-year-old girl. Her eyes welled with tears.
“You’re not so stupid,” she whispered, “for a man with so much.”
“I’m learning,” I said.
She didn’t kiss me this time. Not like in the alley.
She just took my hand. And in the cold, Chicago wind, it was the first time I’d felt warm in twenty years.
That was my “Curtis Ending.” It wasn’t an ending at all. It was the beginning.
