Victoria Sterling did not compete. She acquired.
The Sterling family had built their fortune on the principle that everything was a transaction and every transaction had a winner. Victoria had been raised to never show weakness, never back down from a bluff, and never enter a game she couldn't rig. She'd been the CEO of Vanguard Holdings — forty-two billion in assets under management — and she'd run it the way her grandfather had run Sterling & Cross: coldly, precisely, and without mercy.
She'd been the Ice Queen. That was what they'd called her. The woman who could sit across a boardroom table and freeze the air with a look. Jake had shattered that ice — not with warmth, but with a threat. He'd stood at the Vanguard Gala and used the Emperor's Presence to make the room go silent, then told Nia to dump ghost-shares into dark pools. Victoria had tried to bluff him down. He'd answered that he'd grown up with nothing and knew how to survive in the rubble. Did she?
