WITH ETHAN MARTIN

Currently, Ethan Martin was sitting on his chair behind his desk in his study room while he had a deep frown on his face.

He had been following the news these past few days, and the more he witnessed how things progressed, the more serious and confused he got.

He thought with the direction he presented to the allied CEOs, they would be able to reverse the situation and deal a huge blow to the Virus industries with their own already prepared plans.

But instead, the result was completely the opposite, the Virus Industries was now even more famous and powerful, and the phone companies were all almost destroyed.

The baseless hypothesis he informed them with also seemed to be wrong, as the real culprit was even found inside the party of the CEOs themselves.

Now, the Virus industries were the highest and the sole ruler of the phone industry around the world with no one to rival them in the field.

The only thing that made him sigh in relief was that he didn't make any moves himself in all of this, as otherwise, things would have gone a lot more wrong and his company's name would have been probably mentioned at least along with the other phone companies and then, his company's image would have taken a blow.

He couldn't even imagine what kind of consequences he might be going through if he had interfered himself, even the thought of this terrified him honestly.

Now even though it seemed the Virus Industries was not behind the 'Ghost Theft' case, which made him feel relieved that they were not as scary as he had thought, but he still felt strange that oddly, everything seemed to go to a direction that would benefit the Virus Industries in the end.

He even subconsciously thought that there seemed to be an invisible hand that was leading everything in a particular direction, that, at the end of the road, would benefit the Virus Industries mainly.

But this notion which sent chills down his spine only pa.s.sed through his mind for a moment before he rejected it completely, realizing how ridiculous it sounded.

The only thing that made him happy in this situation was that he had not personally stepped forward to make a move with that wrong hypothesis John had provided him with.

Remembering the hypothesis matter, he couldn't stop himself from being a little disappointed with John. Though, even he thought that hypothesis sounded very logical at the time as he had accepted it willingly.

After pondering to himself about all these things, he decided to forget about it for the moment as his line of thinking s.h.i.+fted to somewhere else.

He wondered what her daughter had been up to these days, as he started checking the report of how she had been managing her job in the branch company of Aston Martin recently and after checking, he saw that the results were quite impeccable.

A while later his mind wondered to another subject related to his daughter as he contemplated to himself, 'That family keeps requesting to let Amara marry their eldest son who's going to inherit their company soon, but I can see clearly they only want to use my daughter as a way of making the two families closer...' After brooding over this for a while he finally picked up the phone above his study desk, 'I should call her and ask how she's doing these days.'

________________

WITH AMARA MARTIN

Amara was currently outside 4 Times Square as she was staring at its entry from inside her car.

In the past couple of days, she had been coming here whenever she had the time, hoping that she would be lucky enough to see Virus leaving or entering his building, but she was disappointed every time as she left in the end after hours of waiting pointlessly.

Other than the reason of wanting to see him, she wanted to use this as an excuse to get closer to him while acting like she was pa.s.sing by 4 Times Square by coincidence just to spot him among the crowds.

But this didn't happen as Virus seemed to never leave his building. Now, as she was wondering maybe she should just come up with another way to coincidentally meet him, her phone rang which brought her out of her reverie as she picked it up seeing it was his dad, "Hi dad, what is it? Is there anything wrong?"

"Hey daughter, am I only allowed to call my girl when there is something wrong? Can't this old man call you just because he misses you?" Ethan said with a sigh like he was wronged.

"No dad, I didn't mean it like that... It's just that you usually call when there's a matter related to the company, so I thought..." Amara stated.

"Sigh, to be truthful, my reason for calling you was really to ask how you've been doing these days, but other than that... I wanted to ask your opinion another matter too..." Ethan explained, with a tone of hesitation.

Listening to his father's words made Amara a little surprised inside but she replied nevertheless "I'm fine dad, thanks for asking... please tell me, I'll answer you to the best of my abilities."

Hearing her response, Ethan Martin continued, "So... that family asked me again to let you marry their son... what do you think ab..."

But as he was talking, he was interrupted by her daughter who seemed to have completely lost her calm as she exclaimed in a louder voice "DAD! I told you I don't want anything to do with them! And I told you I'm only gonna marry the man I truly come to love... and I... already have someone I really like and probably love!"

As Amara had completely lost her calm at the moment thinking about that family, she just blurted out that she liked someone currently, because hearing her father talk about marrying her off to another family just for business matters and profit made her feel sick.

After spilling the beans, she finally realized her mistake, but she knew it was already too late to try to conceal it from her father now, as he would naturally come to know by investigating it even if she didn't tell him the rest.

She hadn't wanted to let her father know about this before she made sure Aizen was truly hers. But now, she had spilled the beans unintentionally on the spur of the moment.

"... Oh... is that so? Who is this lucky person which has stolen my daughter's heart? Please do tell father about it." After some seconds of silence, her father inquired, but his voice was obviously different than before.

Amara felt frustrated inside listening to her father's words, she mainly didn't want to tell her father about this because she was sure he would probably do something that would make the situation even worse.