His crowning achievement was to be The Zenith, a sixty-story monolith. There was only one obstacle: a crumbling, ivy-covered clock tower owned by Sarah Vance, a retired librarian. The tower sat exactly where Elias’s grand lobby was meant to be.
Elias watched in horror as the ground beneath his own feet began to shift. The tremors rippled outward, specifically targeting the structural supports of his finished corporate headquarters next door. Within minutes, his flagship building was declared condemned—the very "structural instability" he had fabricated for Sarah’s tower had become a literal reality for his own.
Elias Thorne was a man who built a fortune on the fine print. As a high-powered developer, he specialized in "urban renewal," which was really just a polite term for bulldozing historic neighborhoods to make room for glass-and-steel luxury condos.
