Ritual

While Claire scrubbed floors and pieced her life together one exhausting day at a time, in a world far removed from hers lived Ryan Pierce.

Young, brilliant and untouchable. Ryan had a mind built for numbers, sharp, calculating, and terrifyingly precise. Every contract he signed turned into gold. Every investment he touched doubled. He was the kind of billionaire people whispered about but rarely saw.

His face appeared only in exclusive magazines, the kind read by old money families, high-ranking executives, and people who cared too much about the upper elite. To the rest of the country, Ryan Pierce was almost a myth, a ghost draped in wealth, unreachable and uninterested in the world below him.

He was the most feared negotiator in the business world. The most desired bachelor in the nation. And also the most isolated man alive.

***

Ryan entered the boardroom with the quiet force of a storm. He didn’t raise his voice. The air shifted when he walked in, heavy with unspoken rules and the fear of disappointing the man who tolerated nothing but perfection.

The executives rose as he passed, their greetings respectful, and rehearsed.

“Good morning, Mr. Pierce.”

He nodded once and took his seat at the head of the long glass table.

“Let’s begin.”

The screens lit up with charts and projections as Gideon, one of the mid-level analysts, stepped forward. His hands trembled slightly, not enough for most people to notice, but enough for Ryan to see.

Gideon cleared his throat. “A-as you can see, sir, the quarterly profit margin...”

Ryan’s voice sliced through the room. “Stop.” The man froze.

Ryan tapped the screen with the tip of his pen. “You mislabeled the revenue columns. These are last quarter’s numbers, not the current quarter. Correct?”

Gideon’s face drained of color. “I—I must have pulled the wrong file...”

“Must have?” Ryan leaned back in his chair, expression unreadable. “You’ve had three days to prepare this presentation.”

“Yes, sir, but the team...”

“The team isn’t standing in front of me.” Ryan closed the folder in front of him with a soft, decisive snap. “You are.”

Silence stretched across the boardroom, sharp as wire.

“Mr. Pierce, if I may...” another executive began nervously.

“No.” Ryan didn’t look at him. His eyes remained fixed on Gideon, cold and precise. “I have no use for people who make careless mistakes. Have HR process his termination immediately.”

Gideon’s mouth fell open. “Sir, please, I’ve been with the company for seven years...”

“And yet you can’t label a document correctly.” Ryan looked him straight in the eyes. “Efficiency is the only thing that matters here. If you can’t provide it, you don’t belong in this building.”

The room held its breath as security approached the trembling analyst.

Ryan didn’t watch him leave. He simply opened the next file, indifferent.

“Continue the meeting,” he said, voice smooth and emotionless. “Someone competent will redo the presentation.”

The executives exchanged strained glances but obeyed instantly. No one dared question him. In Ryan Pierce’s world, mistakes were unforgivable and mercy didn’t exist.

Behind his calm expression, however, sat a storm of grief and anger he’d never learned how to silence. No one in the room saw it.

To them, he was only the brilliant, ruthless billionaire who never blinked. To himself, he was a man who lost everything and punished the world for it.

Ryan dismissed the board with a flick of his hand, the sound of chairs scraping back echoing across the glass-walled conference room. His expression never softened, not even when the projector finally sputtered to a stop and the team hurried to gather their papers.

He was already standing when he spoke again.

“Ellis.”

The young analyst jerked to attention, paling as Ryan’s cold gaze pinned him.

“Y-yes, sir?”

Ryan crossed the room in slow, controlled steps with the sort of calm that made everyone else stop breathing.

“You misreported the Q3 retention figures,” he said, voice flat. “Seven percent is not seventeen. That is not a rounding error. That is incompetence.”

Ellis swallowed hard. “I—I corrected the slide, sir. It was just...”

“There are no ‘justs’ in this company.” Ryan didn’t raise his voice. “I’ve said it before. I don’t keep people who guess. Or panic. Or fumble.” He glanced toward the HR director. “Terminate his contract before the end of the day.”

Gasps filled the room, quickly stifled. Ellis sagged in place.

Ryan unbuttoned his jacket.

“We run a world-class company,” he said, letting his gaze sweep over the team. “We do not tolerate mediocrity.”

No one dared to speak. He walked out without looking back. His personal assistant running after him with the electronic tablet.

Ruthless in the boardroom. Ruthless outside it. Ryan wasn't always this cold monolith of efficiency. Seven years ago, he had been human. He lived freely, hosted parties, went camping, all the reckless trappings of a young billionaire's life. Everything changed in a single, ruinous night. ​He still vividly remembered the moment he’d left home: just a casual weekend getaway with his friends, one impulsive break from his rigid schedule. He hadn't known it would be the last time he’d see his mother alive, the final moment the world made any discernible sense.

​His mother, Madam Anette Pierce, had always been the anchor of their family and the true genius behind the company's success. More bewildering than the death itself was the fact that she hadn't even been driving. They had an army of chauffeurs, yet she was somehow behind the wheel. The eyewitness accounts only compounded Ryan's agony, spinning a dizzying web of ambiguity: one claimed she lost control; another insisted she veered to avoid oncoming traffic; a third swore the collision was entirely the fault of the other vehicle.

​To this day, the truth remains a painful mystery. And because he doesn't know what really happened, Ryan holds himself responsible for all of it.

Since then, he’d shut out the world completely, burying himself in work, in calculations, in profit. He spoke to no one unless absolutely necessary. He chased money not out of greed, but because numbers were clean, predictable, and incapable of dying.

Every year, on the anniversary of his mother’s death, Ryan honored a ritual no one knew about.

He would leave his mansion, its cold luxury suffocating on that day, and take the cheapest car in his collection. Dressed in simple clothes that made him unrecognizable, and drive beyond the edges of the city, far away from bright lights and endless noise.

Out where the streets grew cracked and forgotten. Out where nothing glamorous existed.

There, he’d find an empty road, silent, lifeless and lay flat on the asphalt, staring up at the night sky. The stars were too distant, too quiet, too much like the mother he’d lost.

He would wonder: What did her last moments feel like? Was she scared? Was she alone? Did she know he would’ve given up everything to save her?

Sometimes he lay there for minutes. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes he wished a passing car would simply… end the ache.

Other times he wished he could disappear the same way she did, quietly, and without warning.

This was his ritual: A ritual of grief and punishment. A ritual of trying to feel something, anything, other than the cold emptiness money could never fill.

Today was the anniversary. ​Ryan sat on his imposing leather chair in the penthouse office, watching the late sun burn gold and violent against the glass of the city skyline. From twenty floors up, the traffic below hummed not like a restless hive, but like a distant, irrelevant ocean.

​He rose, tie already loosened, his expression carved from stone. When he finally stepped out of the skyscraper’s revolving doors, he moved with a quiet, lethal inertia. People on the sidewalk hurried out of his way without quite realizing why; something in his presence, a palpable warning, instinctively told them to clear the path.

​As his driver silently steered past the familiar corner café, Ryan didn't spare the place a glance. There was a time when he entertained such meaningless relationships, only to realize the bitter truth after tragedy struck: they were only his friends because he always financed their bills, always bailed them out of trouble, and always showed up for them.

​“It takes true trouble to recognize a true friend.” It was a maxim his mother had always tried to warn him about, but Ryan hadn't understood until it was too late. He had still clung to a belief in their loyalty, but when he desperately needed compassion, even the smallest whisper of sympathy, they proved utterly lacking. Not once did they genuinely inquire about his well-being.

​Barely two weeks after his mother’s death, the parasitic nature of those relationships was brutally exposed. One "friend" called, demanding a colossal loan. Another immediately demanded access to his private vacation house. When Ryan refused both opportunistic requests, their feigned concern instantly soured into blinding hostility.

​They had labeled him selfish and stingy, accusing him of forgetting how to live "just because of a simple tragedy." Simple? The word hit him like a deliberate, cruel wound. The death of his mother, his only living relative, was the single axis of his life breaking. If that level of disaster was simple, he thought bitterly, what calamity could possibly qualify as complex? Their casual cruelty didn't just hurt; it forged him anew.

​When Ryan finally emerged from his mourning, the lesson was brutally clear and non-negotiable: He was alone, and sentiment was a weakness he could no longer afford to carry.

He funneled all his energy into the company, becoming even more ruthless, efficient, and entirely focused on profit. He cut off every friend he ever had, leaving his life as clean, cold, and calculated as his balance sheet.

Once he got home, his penthouse greeted him with quiet, sharp lines and cold marble floors. The butler appeared immediately, bowing slightly.

“Welcome home, sir. Dinner will be...”

“Later,” Ryan murmured, already undoing his cuffs. “I’m heading out.”

Jared, his driver, stepped forward too. “Sir, it’s dark. Let me accompany you. Or at least take the car.”

“No.” Ryan pulled a soft, simple black shirt over his head, the transition from billionaire executive to understated civilian happening almost seamlessly. “I’m not a child.”

“It’s not that, sir,” Jared tried again. “There have been incidents in this district—”

Ryan shot him a look.

Jared fell instantly silent.

“I can handle it,” Ryan said, slipping on plain sneakers. He grabbed his keys, expression unreadable. “Nothing out there scares me.”

The butler bowed again. “Be safe, sir.”

Ryan paused at the door, not long enough to reassure them, just long enough to make sure he had everything he needed.

Then he stepped into the evening, the door closing softly behind him.