[Ethan’s POV]

The sirens sounded like a choir of screaming metal.

Every police car, fire engine, and ambulance in Vienna was converging on the Hofburg Palace. The flashing red and blue lights painted the snow-covered statues of the imperial gardens in frantic, strobing colors.

I leaned heavily against the cold stone of a garden wall, gasping for air. Every breath felt like inhaling hot ash. The chemical dust had seared the lining of my throat, and my left arm hung uselessly at my side, hot blood soaking through the torn sleeve of Julian Croft’s ruined tuxedo.

"Keep moving, Ethan," Claire urged, her voice tight with panic. She had her arm wrapped around my waist, taking most of my weight. The emerald silk gown was torn at the hem and stained with soot, but she didn’t care. "We can’t stay in the perimeter. The police are locking down the district."

"Varga," I coughed, spitting a wad of bloody saliva into the snow. "He’s still alive."

"He has a shattered arm and chemical burns," Claire said, pulling me forward into the shadows of a line of manicured hedges. "He’s not chasing us tonight. Come on."

We slipped through the outer gates of the palace gardens just as a convoy of armored police vans roared past. We melted into the panicked crowds of tourists and locals who had spilled out of the nearby cafes to watch the smoke billowing from the palace roof.

We walked for two miles, sticking to the darkest, narrowest alleys Claire could find on her offline map, until we finally reached our dingy hostel in Leopoldstadt.

I collapsed onto the small, lumpy bed the moment the deadbolt clicked shut.

"Don’t pass out on me," Claire ordered, dropping her briefcase and rushing to the tiny bathroom. She came back with a wet towel and the trauma kit. "Sit up. I have to clean the wound before I restitch it, or it’s going to get infected."

I gritted my teeth and forced myself into a sitting position. Claire peeled the ruined tuxedo shirt off my shoulders. She didn’t flinch at the sight of the deep, jagged laceration Varga’s knife had left, or the torn stitches from the blunt-force trauma. She just went to work.

Her hands were gentle but firm, washing away the blood and the lingering traces of the chemical dust.

"You saved my life back there," I rasped, looking at her face as she concentrated on the needle.

"You threw your gun away to stop Varga from shooting me," Claire countered softly, her eyes focused on my shoulder. "We’re even."

She tied off the final stitch, taped a heavy gauze pad over the wound, and sat back in the wooden chair, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. She looked exhausted, her blonde hair falling out of its elegant twist, her face smudged with soot.

I reached over with my good arm and grabbed the TV remote from the nightstand, flicking on the small, boxy television mounted in the corner.

Every local news channel was broadcasting live footage of the Hofburg Palace.

The anchors were speaking in rapid, panicked German. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read: TRAGIC GAS LEAK AT EXCLUSIVE GALA. DOZENS FEARED DEAD.

"A gas leak," I muttered, shaking my head. "Isabella’s PR machine is already spinning it. They’re covering up the attack."

"They have to," Claire said, pulling her knees up to her chest. "If the financial world finds out that the top investors of Isabella’s syndicate were intentionally targeted and burned alive, the markets will panic. Her shell companies will plummet and that will be bad for image and if her image is compromised then that means she will lose partners."

Claire stopped talking. Her eyes widened, reflecting the flickering light of the television screen.

"Claire?" I asked. "What is it?"

She didn’t answer. She scrambled out of the chair, grabbed her briefcase, and pulled out Jake’s notebooks. She flipped frantically through the pages, bypassing the chemical equations and the HVAC schematics, until she found a page filled entirely with complex financial algorithms.

"Ethan," she breathed, her fingers tracing the numbers. "I told you Jake was bankrupting her. I told you he was burning her liquidity."

"He did," I said. "He burned the bearer bonds in the vault."

"That was just the physical collateral," Claire said, looking up at me, her eyes wide with a mixture of absolute terror and profound awe. "Ethan, Jake has the Oracle in his head. He won’t just destroy wealth. He will be forced to move it."

She grabbed her encrypted tablet, booted it up, and bypassed the network lock to access the global stock tickers via a secure, read-only satellite ping.

"Look at this," she said, turning the screen toward me.

It was a list of Isabella Vane’s known shell companies—the ones she was using to aggressively short Vanguard Holdings back in DC. Every single one of them was in freefall. The stock prices were plummeting like stones.

"The market is reacting to the deaths of her investors," I guessed.

"No, the market doesn’t know they’re dead yet. The news is calling it a gas leak," Claire corrected, her voice trembling. "The market is reacting to a massive, coordinated short-sell. Someone dumped a huge sum of dollars in put options against Isabella’s companies exactly three minutes before the gas hit the ballroom."

I stared at the red numbers cascading down the screen. "Jake."

"He used the ghost-admin protocols," Claire whispered. "He knew the attack would cause Isabella’s empire to crash. So he bet against her. He shorted her entire syndicate."

"How much did he make?" I asked, my mouth going dry.

Claire ran the calculation on the tablet. When she looked up, she looked like she had seen a ghost.

"In the last forty minutes," Claire said softly, "Jake Hart just made four point two billion dollars."

The room went dead silent.

He wasn’t just a feral animal surviving in the dark. He was a god of the market. He had used a stolen canister of white phosphorus to murder his enemies, and he had used the Oracle to turn their deaths into the largest single-day financial profit in human history.

"He’s funding his own war," I realized. "He doesn’t need Vanguard’s money anymore. He has his own."

"And now he has the capital to strike at the heart of her empire," Claire said, closing the tablet. She looked at the map of Europe she had pinned to the wall. "Isabella’s corporate headquarters. The center of her web."

"Zurich," I said.

"The global capital of banking secrecy," Claire nodded. "Isabella operates out of a heavily fortified compound on Lake Zurich. If Jake has four billion dollars in liquid capital, he’s not going to sneak through the vents anymore, Ethan. He’s going to walk through the front door and buy the vault out from under her."

I looked at my stitched shoulder, then at the ruined tuxedo on the floor. We had survived Odesa. We had survived Vienna. But Zurich was going to be the final battleground.

"We need to get to Switzerland" I said, standing up slowly, my muscles screaming in protest. "Before Varga recovers. Before Isabella realizes she’s already lost the war."

"I’ll arrange the transport," Claire said, her voice steady, slipping back into her role as the logistical backbone of our team. "I know a private courier who flies out of a small airfield in Salzburg. We can be in Zurich by tomorrow night." 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

I looked at her. She was incredible. She had watched people burn, she had fought off an ex-FBI manhunter, and she was still calculating our next move with flawless precision.

"Get some sleep first," I told her, walking over and gently taking the notebook from her hands. "You’ve been running on adrenaline for three days, Claire. You’re going to crash. I strongly suggest you gest some rest."

She looked up at me, the tough exterior finally cracking just a fraction. Her shoulders slumped, and she let out a long, shaky breath.

"I’m scared, Ethan," she whispered, the vulnerability in her voice breaking my heart. "I’m scared of what we’re going to find in Zurich. I’m scared of what he’s become , Im scared to think of the possibilitythat he may no longer be the same man we once knew."

"I know," I said, pulling the blanket back on the small bed. "Me too. But we’re the only people he has left. We will not give up on him."

Claire nodded, kicking off her ruined heels and crawling into the bed. She curled up on her side, pulling the blanket tight around her shoulders.

I sat back down in the wooden chair by the door, resting my hand on my Glock. I watched the snow fall outside the window, the red and blue lights of the police sirens still reflecting off the clouds in the distance.

The Feral King had his crown back. And tomorrow, we were going to Zurich to see what he would do with it.