The year is 1998. In the merciless world of the stock exchange, Alexandre, a brilliant young trader, finds himself caught in the middle of a game of scheming and manipulation. An employee of the BGCI, he is duped into covering up several risky transactions by his colleague and so-called friend. The losses begin to snowball, becoming ever harder to hide. Facing an audit and with a journalist hovering around, Alexandre's fall from grace takes a deadly turn. This first volume brings us forward 12 years in the future, when Christopher Dantes, a businessman as rich as he is mysterious, makes his first public appearance at the Millennium Financial Ball, coming face to face with the people involved in the plot of that sordid drama of the past.

Several years after the scandal that rocked the Parisian financial and political world, Alexandre, continuing to live as the mysterious businessman Dantes, has been cleared and is running his company Pharaoh. But he will soon discover that one of his subsidiaries, specializing in waste processing and energy recovery, requires his immediate attention. Could another scandal be on the horizon? Determined to find out the truth, Dantes will have to travel to the Ebony Coast, where he will meet up with an old friend... but the corruption awaiting him will be beyond anything he could imagine.

As Christopher Dantes recovers in hospital following his brutal attack in the Ebony Coast, Marion Tagher is left to run his company, Pharaoh, in his absence. With the life of its founder in peril, the multinational's value plummets... leaving it wide open to a hostile takeover. Meanwhile, Isaac Doucouré and Lucie Mondran are still in Africa, determined to find the young man who has the murdered journalist Jean-Paul Beauchamp's notebook, convinced it will be the key to exposing the corrupt government and bringing Dantes's attacker to justice...

After resolving the ecological disaster in Africa and recovering from his injuries, Alexandre wants nothing more than to get his business and his life back on track. The last thing he expects is the sudden reappearance of his lowlife father, Maquet, who abandoned the family shortly after his daughter was born. But this is no happy reunion: Maquet's latest con—selling counterfeit works of art—has caught up with him, and he needs his son's help, threatening to reveal his past if he refuses.

Having been dragged reluctantly into the shady world of counterfeit art trafficking, Dantes agrees to protect his crooked father, Maquet. But it turns out that it's not just angry art collectors who are looking for him; his father has also incurred the wrath of a powerful Chinese triad. To make matters worse, Dantes's vineyard has also been implicated in Maquet's schemes, and he now finds himself faced with something no father should ever have to go through: his daughter's been kidnapped...