With that, Felix crossed the pavement in three quick strides and planted himself directly in Stan’s path.

"Sophie Youngs is the woman I’ve set my sights on." No preamble. No greeting. His voice was flat and cold. "Stop trying to get close to her."

Stan looked at him.

"I don’t know what your angle is," Felix continued, "and frankly, I don’t care. I just need you to stay away from her. Whatever you’re planning, don’t."

"I invited her to go shopping," Stan said evenly. "That’s it. I don’t have any other intentions."

Felix let out a short, incredulous laugh.

"No intentions? Sophie Youngs is the most beautiful women in this city, and you’re telling me you have no intentions?" He shook his head slowly. "Do I look like a three-year-old to you?"

He reached into his jacket, pulled out a thick envelope of cash, and held it out.

"Thirty thousand dollars. Take it and walk away. Stop bothering Sophie."

Stan glanced at the envelope without reaching for it.

Thirty thousand dollars. Felix was standing there offering him thirty thousand dollars to back off from a woman Stan had recently spent a hundred and thirty million dollars on. The ratio was so absurd it was almost poetic.

If Stan spent money on Sophie today, which he fully intended to, the six-times rebate alone would net him returns that made thirty thousand look like pocket lint.

"I don’t need money," Stan said. "I just want to go shopping with Sophie."

Felix’s expression tightened.

"Stop playing coy. You think I don’t know what you’re doing? Fine, I’ll raise it. Fifty thousand." 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Stan said nothing.

"Sixty thousand. That’s my final offer."

"No."

Felix’s jaw clenched. His extended hand dropped slowly to his side, the rejected cash crumpling slightly in his grip. He had absolutely no framework for dealing with a man who couldn’t be bought with sixty thousand dollars in cash. In Felix’s world, everyone had a price. Finding Stan’s was supposed to be the easy part.

And yet here was this nobody, calmly refusing him, looking entirely unbothered, as if Felix’s money and his Ferrari and his white hair were all equally irrelevant to whatever was actually going on.

A few minutes later, Sophie arrived.

She’d dressed carefully for the occasion, a fitted red coat over dark jeans, black heels that added three inches to her already considerable presence, her hair falling in a loose wave over one shoulder. The effect was immediate and devastating. Pedestrians on the far side of the street actually slowed down. The head-turning rate in her immediate vicinity was somewhere in the high nineties.

"Sorry I’m late," she said, offering Stan a small, slightly breathless smile.

"It’s fine," Stan said.

Felix materialized at her elbow almost instantly.

"Sophie, do you mind if I tag along today? I was in the area anyway, and I thought it might be nice to have some company." His voice had transformed completely, warm, solicitous, dripping with casual charm. A different man entirely from the one who’d been trying to buy Stan off thirty seconds ago.

Sophie looked at him for a moment.

The forum post was still fresh in her mind. She’d read it. She’d considered it. And she’d already made her decision about it, the same decision she’d told Claire last night.

She knew what she knew. She’d held the property deeds in her own hands. She’d felt the weight of a hundred-million-dollar gesture delivered in a plain manila envelope without so much as a signature. Whatever anonymous strangers on the internet thought they understood about Stan Harrison, Sophie had her own data, and her data was considerably more expensive than theirs.

"That’s kind of you, Felix," she said, her voice polite but definitive, "but I’ll be fine. Stan and I already have plans. I don’t want to impose on your day."

The refusal was wrapped in enough courtesy to preserve Felix’s dignity, but the firmness beneath it left no room for negotiation.

Felix’s smile held for a beat too long before it began to crack at the edges.

"Are you sure? I really wouldn’t mind,"

"I’m sure." Sophie gave him a small, final nod. "Thank you, though."

She turned away from the Ferrari and walked toward Stan, her heels clicking against the pavement with quiet purpose. Felix stood beside his open car door, one hand still resting on the frame, watching her go with the particular stillness of a man who had just been publicly declined in front of a crowd that had been expecting a very different outcome.

Stan flagged down a passing taxi. It pulled to the curb with a soft squeak of brakes, and he opened the rear door, stepping aside to let Sophie in first.

She slid across the back seat, and he settled in beside her. The door closed. The noise of the campus entrance, the whispers, the stares, the low hum of judgment, cut off abruptly, replaced by the muffled quiet of the cab’s interior.

"Steel Street Shopping Center," Stan told the driver.

The taxi pulled away from the curb and merged into the morning traffic. The city scrolled past the windows in a slow-moving blur of storefronts and pedestrians and dappled sunlight.

For a few moments, neither of them spoke. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable, it was the kind of quiet that settles naturally between two people who don’t feel the need to fill every gap with noise. Sophie was looking out the window, her profile softened by the warm light coming through the glass. Stan was watching the road ahead, his arm resting along the top of the seat behind her.

Then Sophie turned to him.

"I saw the post," she said quietly.

Stan glanced at her. Her expression wasn’t accusatory, wasn’t suspicious, wasn’t testing him. If anything, it looked like concern.

"It’s not true," he said simply. "None of it, just a jealous man ranting bullshit."

"I know."

Two words. Said without hesitation, without qualification, without the careful hedging of a woman who was still making up her mind. She said it the way someone states a fact they’ve already verified.