He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.
There was a firmness in his tone that cut through the room like a blade.
The silence lasted only a second—the same second it took Richard Alden to scan the boy from head to toe and decide it had to be a joke.
They were on the 43rd floor of the Continental Tower, inside a boardroom that smelled of expensive leather, fresh coffee, and the effortless confidence of men who were used to winning. A massive whiteboard covered one wall, filled with equations—integrals, matrices, variables stacked like someone had tried to trap a hurricane using numbers.
Ethan Reed, wearing a worn T-shirt and messy hair, looked like a mistake in that room.
A kid who had pressed the wrong elevator button.
Richard burst out laughing—a deep, exaggerated laugh, the kind that didn’t just mock, but crushed. The executives followed instantly, forming a cruel chorus.
“Do you even know what a derivative is?” one of them asked sarcastically.
“Or a triple integral?” another added, enjoying himself.
Ethan didn’t flinch. His brown eyes locked onto them—not with teenage defiance, but with a strange calm, like someone who had endured worse humiliations and didn’t have time for this.