“That Car Is Junk!” — CEO Laughs at a Single Dad Janitor’s Mustang, Then He Starts a $2B Engine

The company was now run by Vivian Carmichael.

Vivian was thirty-two, notoriously ruthless, and the heiress to the Carmichael fortune.

She had taken over Apex Innovations after her father’s passing and immediately transformed the culture from one of engineering curiosity to cutthroat corporate vanity.

Vivian was obsessed with image.

She wore five-thousand-dollar designer suits, exclusively drank imported bottled water, and drove a pristine, custom-ordered electric hypercar that cost more than most people would earn in a lifetime.

To Vivian, everything was about aesthetics and market valuation.

She didn’t care about the science; she cared about the stock price.

And currently, Apex Innovations was promising its shareholders a revolutionary leap in electric vehicle technology—a solid-state battery propulsion system that was supposedly going to make lithium-ion obsolete.

The only problem was, Vivian’s engineering team was secretly failing.

Their prototypes kept overheating, and the company was quietly hemorrhaging billions in R&D trying to fix a fundamental physics problem they couldn’t crack.

Dean knew this.

Because Dean emptied their trash cans.

He saw the crumpled schematics, the angry red marker corrections on the whiteboards, the failed thermal degradation reports left carelessly on desks.

He saw the exact thermodynamic wall the Apex engineers were hitting.

And more importantly, Dean knew how to fix it.

In fact, he already had.

Every night, after finishing his cleaning route at 4:00 AM, Dean would retreat to Sub-Level 4.

He would lock the chain-link fence behind him, pull out a battered set of tools, and work on his rusted Mustang.

But he wasn’t restoring a classic V8 engine.

Beneath the peeling hood of that 1969 relic was something that didn’t belong in this decade, let alone this century.

He was using the heavy, steel chassis of the Mustang as a camouflaged testbed for his own propulsion system.

It was his sanctuary, his secret laboratory, and his ticket to saving his daughter’s future.

All he needed was a few more weeks to finalize the patent filing and complete the safety simulations.

He just needed to stay invisible.

But invisibility, Dean was about to learn, is a fragile thing when you share a building with a billionaire who despises anything less than perfection.