The following week, Lucan Tower stopped pretending to be polite.
The glass walls stayed clear, but the smiles behind them turned sharp.
Everyone was watching — not because they admired Ava, but because they needed to know which way gravity was about to tilt.
And gravity, these days, answered to her.
The audit had detonated like a controlled explosion.
No casualties. Just rearrangement.
Four senior managers resigned within forty-eight hours.
Two divisions discovered "accounting inconsistencies."
A joint venture with the East District collapsed before sunrise.
Every headline called it The Purge.
Every analyst called it Necessary.
And every board member called Richard first.
He didn't answer any of them.
On Wednesday morning, Natalie stepped into Ava's office, tablet in hand.
"You're trending again," she said flatly. "Half the city thinks you're saving the company. The other half thinks you're dismantling it."
Ava didn't look up. "They're both right."
Natalie set the tablet down. "You haven't slept in three days."
"I'll rest when they forget how to whisper," Ava said.
Natalie hesitated. "Then you'll never sleep again."
Ava smiled faintly. "Then I'll never die."
At 9:00 a.m., Richard reappeared.
He didn't knock. He didn't sit. He simply closed the door behind him, quiet as a closing statement.
"You've humiliated the company," he said.
Ava looked up from her screen. "No. I humiliated the parts of it that deserved it."
He stepped closer. "You don't understand what you've done."
"I understand exactly," she said. "You built a system that punished truth when it was inconvenient. I made it public."
"You're destroying legacy."
"Legacy," Ava said softly, "is just ego that outlives the host."
His jaw clenched. "You sound like Ethan."
She held his gaze. "I sound like the person he taught me to be."
"You think that's a compliment?"
"I think that's inevitability."
Richard exhaled, slow, measured. "This company doesn't belong to one visionary. It belongs to order."
Ava stood, calm, every movement controlled. "Then maybe order needs new management."
She walked past him, leaving him standing in her office like a ghost trying to remember where the doors used to be.
That afternoon, the markets spiked again.
Every scandal she exposed made investors trust her more.
Every resignation looked like renewal.
Lucan's stock hadn't been this high in five years.
Yet somehow, the building felt heavier.
Success had a sound — the hum of something stretching under its own weight.
At sunset, the internal network flickered.
For twenty-three minutes, all secure systems went dark.
No data loss. No breach. Just blackout.
When the servers came back online, one new folder appeared on Ava's drive: /EchoVault/
Inside were files labeled with names she recognized — Gray, Leto, Grant, Lucan — and one file with her own.
She opened hers.
Prototype Protocol — Hart Integration / Expansion Model
And under it:
Source: E.L.
Her pulse skipped.
The document wasn't about her leadership.
It was about what came next.
Ethan's notes — years ahead of schedule.
Blueprints for converting Lucan Corp from a centralized corporate structure into an autonomous network — a living organism.
Departments communicating through adaptive algorithms, bypassing human bottlenecks entirely.
He had been building the replacement for the board before she even arrived.
And now, somehow, those files were in her hands.
She scrolled to the bottom. A single line of handwriting scanned into the file:
You can't fight wolves by becoming one.
Build a forest they can't survive in.
Ava sat there for a long time.
It wasn't an order.
It was a dare.
By midnight, the rain started again.
She stood in the glass hall overlooking the city — everything below blinking like circuitry.
The Tower reflected her face back at her, divided by the seams of glass.
Natalie appeared beside her, wordless for a while. Then:
"You found something."
Ava nodded once. "He left the next phase."
Natalie's breath caught. "You mean—"
"I mean the real project was never expansion," Ava said. "It was replacement."
"Replacement of what?"
"Of us," Ava said quietly. "Of every human choke point in this machine."
Natalie looked at her. "You think he wanted Lucan to run itself?"
"I think," Ava said, "he wanted it to evolve faster than its people could corrupt it."
"And you?" Natalie asked. "What do you want?"
Ava turned to the glass again. "To see if I'm brave enough to finish what he started."
At 2:14 a.m., a message appeared on her private terminal.
No header. No sender. Just text.
STOP.
You're opening doors that were never meant to stay open.
—R.G.*
Ava typed back.
TOO LATE.
You should've changed the locks when you had the chance.
She hit send.
By dawn, Lucan Tower glowed again — a column of light above a city that didn't know whether to fear her or follow her.
The wolves had bared their teeth.
But Ava had stopped running.
And somewhere in the static between the servers, she thought she could almost hear Ethan's voice again — not a warning this time, but an approval.
Keep going. Break the shape.
She smiled faintly, eyes on the horizon.
"I'm already rewriting it."
To be continued …