The Blackwood family believed Adrian wasted his nights in drunken stupors, surrounded by neon lights and cheap liquor. To them, he was a shameful blemish they could point to whenever they needed a laugh: "Look at him—our bastard son, rotting away in that club."
And Adrian let them believe it.
Every evening, he followed the same ritual. At dinner, he played the part of the silent outcast, enduring the sneers and barbed remarks. When his siblings drove off to their penthouses or private parties, and the villa settled into decadent slumber, Adrian slipped away.
To the guards, he was the useless young master off to waste the night at his club. To his siblings, he was a pathetic addict of nightlife. And so, nobody questioned why his old car rattled out of the driveway at midnight, or why he returned at dawn with red eyes.
But the truth was far from their fantasy.
Once inside the dimly lit east wing study, Adrian's double life began. The desk lamp cast a pale glow over scattered notebooks, highlighted passages in finance texts, and rows of sticky notes filled with equations and diagrams. A world map hung on the wall, punctured with pins and scribbled margins tracking currencies, political shifts, and oil routes.
His nights followed a discipline sharper than any military drill:
9 PM – 11 PM: Review global news across time zones. Politics, wars, trade policies—he learned to see how one event rippled into markets thousands of miles away.
11 PM – 2 AM: Deep dives into case studies. He read about corporate takeovers, bankruptcies, fraud schemes. Each failure was a lesson, each success a blueprint.
2 AM – 4 AM: Trading window. When New York and London overlapped, he executed trades under a proxy account—quick, precise, ruthless.
4 AM – 6 AM: Analysis and journaling. He kept meticulous ledgers, recording every thought, mistake, and instinct. He studied not only numbers but himself.
6 AM: Return to the villa before dawn, hiding the exhaustion under a mask of indifference.
The façade was perfected. He kept a drawer in the club stocked with unopened bottles, their labels turned outward to suggest indulgence. Occasionally, he left receipts from bars in his car for his siblings to "discover." Sometimes, he even staggered back home deliberately, hair mussed and clothes wrinkled, letting the servants whisper about his supposed debauchery.
In truth, Adrian had never once touched a drink.His intoxication was power, his addiction the numbers that climbed higher with each trade.
At sixteen, he used his "nightclub allowance" to buy textbooks instead of champagne. At seventeen, he spent his birthday money not on gifts but on an algorithm program he coded himself to track market anomalies. At eighteen, when Sebastian mocked him for looking "half-dead," Adrian silently smiled—because that same night, his biotech shares had doubled in value, pushing his hidden fortune past ten million.
He remembered one night in particular. The rain battered the villa windows much like the night of his birth. While his siblings slept soundly in silk sheets, Adrian sat awake, red pen in hand, circling a single phrase in an economic journal: emerging markets in Southeast Asia.
The next morning, Damian mocked him at breakfast, sneering at his wrinkled shirt. "Out all night again, Adrian? Tell me, did the strippers teach you anything useful?"
Adrian lowered his gaze, letting the insult sink in, and gave the same hollow chuckle he always did. Inside, he thought: Yes, Damian. They taught me that you'll be bankrupt within five years, and I'll be the one to take everything you've ever called yours.
Ethan Ward was the only one who knew. Sometimes he would quietly bring tea to the study at midnight, saying nothing as he watched the young man hunched over papers, eyes burning with quiet fire. To Ethan, it was like watching the boy forge himself into iron, stroke by stroke.
"Your brothers think you drown in liquor," Ethan murmured one night as Adrian scribbled down notes on derivatives. "But all I see is a man carving out his future."
Adrian didn't look up. He only whispered, "Let them believe it. The deeper they underestimate me, the harder they'll fall."
The old man smiled faintly. "That's exactly how shadows work, lad. They stay hidden… until the light can no longer escape."
And so the nights went on, year after year. To the Blackwoods, Adrian was the family disgrace.To the world unseen, he was a predator sharpening his claws in silence.
They think I'm nothing. Let them.When the day comes, they will learn that shadows grow darkest before the dawn.