The unseasonal December rain lashed against the floor-to-ceiling windows of the sixty-second floor did not sound like a storm; behind the three-inch-thick acoustic glass of the Goenka Enterprises boardroom, it sounded like a distant, polite whisper.

Reyansh Goenka stood at the head of the long mahogany table, his silhouette cutting a sharp, unforgiving line against the bruised purple skyline of Mumbai. The CEO of Goenka Enterprises possessed a reputation that preceded him in every financial capital across the globe. He was a man carved from absolute ambition—ruthless, fiercely intelligent, and possessed of a cold, terrifying calm that could dismantle a multi-billion-dollar merger with a single, softly spoken sentence.