8. Strict Boundary
Chapter eight
Strict Boundary
The overhead LED panels bathed the executive boardroom in an unforgiving white glare.
I paced the length of the glass wall, dragging my shoes against the carpet.
Every pass brought me closer to the massive projection screen dominating the far end of the room.
A dozen junior analysts and senior vice presidents sat frozen around the table, tracking my movements.
The industrial air conditioning hummed, yet a suffocating heat radiated beneath my suit jacket.
I hooked a finger under my tie. It felt like a vise around my neck, so I yanked the knot down an inch, needing the space.
My eyes burned from lack of sleep. John Vance’s security team had sent their final update two weeks ago. Eighteen hundred dollars in pawnshop cash. A single Greyhound bus ticket.
I had been so certain she was running up a luxury tab at a five-star spa, intending to stick me with the bill as a petty protest. Instead, she had dumped her designer phone, abandoned the black Amex on the kitchen island, and vanished into a bus terminal with nothing but the clothes on her back.
I told Vance to call off the search teams. A pregnant woman accustomed to the Kensington standard of living wouldn’t last more than seventy-two hours in a cheap motel.
Eighteen hundred dollars evaporated fast on the road.
Her stubborn pride would eventually break, and she would call me the second she ran out of money.
But weeks had passed, and my phone remained dead. The uninterrupted quiet in the penthouse was driving me out of my mind.
“Move to the next slide, Julian,” I said, my voice hoarse.
The junior analyst sitting near the projector jumped. He tapped the spacebar on his laptop. The digital chart shifted, displaying the quarterly projections for the Sterling Group buyout.
I stopped pacing. My gaze locked on the third column of the financial ledger.
The numbers blurred together for a second before my vision cleared. A misplaced decimal point hovered in the operating cost margins. It was a minuscule error, buried deep in a slide deck spanning a hundred pages, but it threw off the bottom line of a multibillion-dollar acquisition.
Julian noticed me staring. He swallowed hard, shifting his weight in the expensive leather chair. It let out a sharp squeak.
“Is there an issue with the layout, sir?” Julian asked, his voice wavering.
I didn’t answer. I stepped away from the glass wall and approached the edge of the table. The executives beside Julian leaned away from him. The only sound left in the room was the low whine of the projector fan.
I curled my hand into a fist and slammed it down against the table. The impact made everyone at the far end jolt.
Julian flinched, knocking a stack of manila folders off the edge, scattering white paper across the carpet.
“Mr. Kensington,” Julian stammered, his eyes darting between my face and the projection screen. “The Sterling projections on page twelve are off by a fraction of a percent. I can rerun the model immediately and have it updated.”
The rounding error was just an excuse. The real problem was the agonizing stretch of empty hours spent trapped in a silent penthouse, waiting for my wife to come home.
I had billions of dollars at my disposal, yet I was incapable of forcing a single phone to ring.
I took all of that frustration out on the terrified kid sitting in front of me.
“Are these projections a joke to you, Julian?” I demanded.
“No, sir. It was a keystroke mistake—”
“Redo the entire model before I fire you for gross incompetence and blacklist you from the industry.”
Julian scrambled to his feet, ignoring the scattered papers near his shoes. He clutched his laptop against his chest like a shield.
“Yes, sir, immediately. I’ll have the corrected data on your desk in less than an hour.”
I watched him hurry toward the double doors, needing him out of my sight so I could get back to finding my wife.
The doors clicked shut behind Julian. The remaining executives fell into a tense, suffocating quiet. I stood near the head of the table, staring at Julian’s scattered files. My knuckles throbbed from striking the wood.
The scrape of a chair pushing back broke the silence.
“Well, that was certainly a display,” Vanessa said.
She stood up from her seat a few feet away. She stepped around the spilled folders, her heels sinking into the carpet as she closed the distance between us. The executives watched her, shifting nervously as they looked from her to me.
She moved into my personal space, crowding me against the edge of the table. Her expensive vanilla perfume smothered the air in front of my face.
Wrong.
The scent hit the back of my throat, harsh and chemical. I didn’t want vanilla. I wanted the soft, familiar scent of Wren’s floral shampoo. With Wren gone, the boardroom felt completely empty, and Vanessa’s presence made the air feel stifling.
Vanessa reached out. She flattened her hand over my bicep, her fingers digging into my sleeve.
“Cassian, you’re wound far too tight today,” she murmured, lowering her voice to a patronizing whisper. “Let me take you down to lunch, and we can recenter before the next proxy vote.”
The unwelcome heat of her palm burned through the fabric.
For months, Wren had begged me to draw a line.
She had tried to tell me that Vanessa used the corporate alliance as a skeleton key to invade our marriage, touching my arm in meetings and claiming my time.
I had dismissed the complaints as hormonal paranoia.
I stared down at Vanessa’s hand resting on my arm. The realization of just how blindly arrogant I had been made my skin crawl.
I jerked free of her grip. I took a hard step backward.
“Do not touch me, Vanessa,” I said.
My voice echoed off the glass walls, leaving absolutely no room for debate. The murmurs from the far end of the table died. Vanessa’s hand hovered between us for a second before she lowered it to her side.
“We are in a professional environment,” I continued, making sure my voice carried down the table. “I expect you to maintain a strict boundary.”
Color flooded Vanessa’s face. She crossed her arms, her posture turning defensive under the silence of the room.
“I was only trying to help you manage your stress levels,” Vanessa retorted, the sweetness entirely gone from her voice. “There is absolutely no need to snap at me over a simple, friendly gesture.”
I held my ground, refusing to soften the rejection as the room went dead quiet.
The double doors of the boardroom slammed open, hitting the adjacent walls with a thud.
My father stood in the doorway. His face flushed a furious, mottled shade of red, the veins standing out against his collar. He didn’t even look at me first. He glared at the analysts and junior executives still cowering in their seats.
“Out,” my father barked. “Every single one of you, out of this room right now.”
The junior executives scrambled. Chairs scraped against the carpet. The analysts gathered their laptops and briefcases, stepping awkwardly around Julian’s spilled folders. They kept their heads ducked, refusing to make eye contact with me or my father blocking the doorway.
I held my ground. I refused to move.
The last analyst scurried through the doorway, disappearing down the executive corridor.
My father stepped into the room and let the doors shut behind him. He looked at Vanessa, who was still standing a few feet away with her arms folded. He looked back at me, his expression tight.
“What the hell is going on with you, Cassian?” my father demanded. “You’re bleeding profit margins and snapping at the Addison heir in front of the board.”
A fresh spike of pain shot through my temples. The overhead LED lights were suddenly too bright, the hum of the industrial air conditioning too loud.
I worked twenty-hour days to orchestrate the Sterling deal. I mapped every proxy vote and secured the hostile takeover strategy while he sat in his private office sipping scotch. I refused to let him march onto my floor and interrogate me like a failing intern.
I turned my back on him. I stepped toward the expansive window overlooking the city skyline, needing to get away from him before I lost my temper entirely.
The chill of the glass seeped through my sleeve as I brushed against it.
The city below was a sprawling grid of traffic and pedestrians, moving entirely oblivious to the chaos behind me.
I stared down at the distant streets, knowing somewhere out there Wren was sitting on a Greyhound bus or shivering in a cheap motel room.
She hadn’t reached out. I had no new number to trace.
The absolute silence from her left me bracing my weight against the glass.
“Cassian, turn around and look at me when I am speaking to you,” my father snapped, stepping closer.
I pivoted. I abandoned the window and walked back to the edge of the table.
I dug my fingers underneath the edge of the table. I pressed hard, grinding the pads into the underside until the deep strain made my joints ache. I focused on the pain, fighting the impulse to throw him out of my boardroom.
“My margins are fine, Dad,” I said, keeping my voice dead level. “I expect basic competence from a lazy acquisitions team.”
“Do not lie to me about the margins,” he shot back, slamming his palm flat on the table near my grip. “I read the morning reports. You are distracted, you are erratic, and you just humiliated our primary joint-venture partner in front of junior staff.”
Vanessa shifted her weight near the projector.
“I can handle myself, Arthur,” she said, her voice tight. “Cassian is just exhausted from the closing schedule.”
“I don’t need you to make excuses for him, Vanessa,” my father retorted, keeping his furious gaze locked on me.