The Origin
The Boy Who Watched His Father Beg
Lucan Reyes does not talk about his father. This is a choice he made at sixteen years old, standing in the glass-walled boardroom of Reyes Dynamics, watching the men his father had built a company with vote to remove him from his own chair.
The takeover was legal. Perfectly structured. His father had trusted people he had known for twenty years, and those people had spent those twenty years building the mechanism that would destroy him. When the vote passed seven to two, his father said nothing. He signed the documents. He shook the hands of the men who had broken him. And three hours later, in that same boardroom, he made the last decision of his life.
Lucan was sixteen. He cleaned the boardroom himself. He did not tell anyone. He filed the maintenance report as a cleaning contractor and paid out of his own savings account. He kept the room exactly as it was. He decided that day that he would return to that room. He decided he would sit in that chair. He decided that he would never, under any circumstances, be the person who signed.
What followed was twenty-two years of meticulous, ruthless ascension through the Corporate hierarchy — not through talent alone, though his talent was considerable, but through a species of patient brutality that the Corporate recognized and rewarded. He did not make enemies. He made people owe him things. He did not climb over others. He made himself indispensable and then waited while others climbed over each other and fell.
He married Iria Solis in Year 2072. This was the one decision in his life that was not calculated. He had modeled seventeen corporate marriages for strategic benefit and rejected them all. Iria he simply loved — completely, stubbornly, in a way that surprised him every day. She knew exactly who he was. She loved him anyway. This was the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to him.
