18. Keep the Bricks
Chapter eighteen
Keep the Bricks
Ipushed the doors open. The climate-controlled air of the executive floor hit my face, smelling of warm servers and expensive cologne. Arthur paced the far end of the long table, his face a mottled, furious red. He slammed a fist against the wood. The impact echoed across the quiet room.
“You are paid to mitigate these exact losses, not stare at me!” Arthur shouted at a row of terrified junior analysts.
I stopped just past the threshold. I kept my boots planted on the carpet. The manila envelope in my left hand held the signed contract. I gripped the paper edge, refusing the instinctive pull to walk forward and take my designated chair at the side of the oval.
“The Sterling board is blocking every single counteroffer, sir,” a senior executive muttered from his seat. “They know we lack the liquidity to force the closure.”
“Then restructure the shell companies!” Arthur yelled, throwing a quarterly binder onto the floor. “Liquidate the secondary hospitality assets and force a buyout. I will not lose this acquisition to them over a temporary cash flow issue.”
“We don’t have the legal authorization to dump those assets without the CEO’s signature,” the executive replied, pressing back into his seat to avoid eye contact.
“Stop making excuses and fix the goddamn margins!” Arthur roared.
The doors swung shut behind me. The latch clicked into place, abruptly sealing me inside the tense silence of the boardroom.
I stood motionless. The urge to submit to this room had vanished on a freezing wooden floor in Oakhaven.
I looked at the people who had dictated my existence for thirty years, and I felt completely clear-headed.
Octavia sat with her back straight in a side chair. Her perfume suffocated the recycled air of the room. She tapped her nail against her phone screen, ignoring the corporate crisis to scroll through her emails, trying to look untouched by the chaos while the men around her scrambled.
Vanessa hovered over a glowing laptop near the head of the table. She clicked through financial spreadsheets, desperately trying to feign authority. She leaned forward, eager to look like his most valuable asset.
I gripped the envelope tighter. My knuckles stung from the raw, split skin I earned scrubbing Gemma’s grease traps.
The physical pain grounded me—a sharp reminder of exactly why I walked away from this towering, sterile cage.
The grime of the coastal bakery carried more dignity than the billions bleeding out of these accounts.
Arthur spun around to berate the senior executive again, but his gaze snagged on my coat. He stopped talking. The independent board members fell silent.
Every head in the room turned toward the doorway, and the analysts stopped typing. They expected the prodigal heir to step up to the screen, take control of the meeting, and salvage the money.
Arthur straightened his tie and pointed a finger at my chest. “It’s about damn time you showed up, Cassian,” he snapped, his voice ringing off the floor-to-ceiling windows. “The margins are bleeding out because of your little two-month domestic tantrum, and the board is panicking.”
A two-month domestic tantrum. My wife walked out into the winter night with a battered suitcase, and he reduced her survival to a tantrum. The toxic rot in this room was undeniable. I held my ground near the doorway, letting the insult hang in the air without offering a defense.
Octavia sighed, placing her phone face down on the table. She adjusted her lapels, looking profoundly bored by the financial panic surrounding her.
“Please sit down and fix this immediately, darling,” Octavia said. “The press rumors about this financial dip are becoming incredibly inconvenient for my gala schedule.”
Her gala schedule. Wren had been shivering in a drafty tenement with a broken radiator, terrified of how she would afford her grocery budget.
My mother worried about losing her seat at a charity dinner.
My last shred of hesitation vanished as I looked down at the envelope in my hand.
I did not belong to these people anymore.
Vanessa stood up from her laptop and stepped into the space Arthur left vacant, offering a tight, conspiratorial smile. She assumed we were still an alliance.
“I have the Addison capital projections ready, Cassian.” Vanessa tapped her stylus against the screen. “If we pivot right now, we can still stabilize the stock.”
Ready to completely dismantle their company, I looked at the three people who had poisoned my marriage.
I ignored Vanessa and walked away from the threshold, moving toward the center of the oval table and refusing to acknowledge her desperate attempts to take control. The junior analysts parted, pulling their chairs in to let me pass.
“Look at the screen, Cassian. We can fix this today,” Vanessa urged, her voice trailing behind me.
I maintained my stride until I reached the exact center of the room. I tossed the envelope onto the wood. The paper hit the surface with a loud smack, sliding across the table before coming to a dead stop right in front of Arthur’s empty leather chair.
With my hands finally empty, I let my arms hang at my sides, refusing to brace myself against the furniture. The oppressive tension in the room snapped the moment the envelope stopped sliding.
Arthur stared down at the cover. His face flushed a deeper, more dangerous shade of red. He refused to reach out and touch it.
“What the hell is this?” Arthur jabbed at the envelope. “You don’t get to just walk in here and throw paperwork at me!”
“You wanted to know how I was going to fix the Sterling deal I ruined?” I asked, keeping my voice low and level. “I just fixed it.”
Arthur’s face hardened. The arrogant expectation faded from his expression, giving way to genuine confusion. He looked from my face to the envelope, slowly realizing I hadn’t come back to beg for my job.
“An hour ago, I legally sold my entire forty percent founding-heir stake directly to the Sterling Group,” I said.
The silence that followed was absolute. The independent executives sitting around the table froze. A few of them leaned forward in their chairs, their eyes locked onto the white edges of the legal document peeking out from the folder.
“Is it a real contract?” a junior analyst whispered to the man beside him.
The senior board member seated nearest to Arthur finally reached out and flipped the manila cover open, scanning the bold black text on the first page. His face went pale as he dropped the page back onto the table.
“You sold to Sterling?” the senior board member stammered. “Cassian, my god. They have enough leverage to gut this entire board.”
Selling that equity meant handing our most vicious rival the keys to the front door. The Sterling executives had spent the last decade trying to dismantle my father’s legacy, and I just let them inside. Watching them realize I wasn’t here to negotiate was intoxicating.
“That’s exactly the point,” I said, looking straight into Arthur’s eyes. “Sterling is executing a hostile takeover tomorrow morning.”
Staring at the signed document, Arthur gripped the edge of the table and tried to speak, but no sound came out. The company he had built over forty years was being torn apart right in front of him, doomed by my signature.
“This company is dead, and I just sold the corpse for parts.”
The harsh scrape of a chair being shoved back broke the stunned quiet that followed. Vanessa lunged out of her seat near the head of the oval table. Her heels cracked against the floor as she closed the distance between us.
She stopped just short of the table’s center, staring toward the far end of the room. The composed, untouchable corporate front she had maintained for years collapsed. Gasping for air, she pointed at the distant manila cover.
“Pick that paper up,” Vanessa hissed, her voice wavering. “Pick it up and tear it in half right now.”
“The ink is dry, Vanessa. Step back from the table.”
“You can’t do this, Cassian! My family is tied to this firm! You are ruining my career!”
Her shrill voice echoed off the glass walls.
The independent board members sitting around the edges of the room flinched at the volume.
Papers rustled as a few junior analysts shifted in their seats, desperate to melt into the background.
Staying still while she unraveled, I kept my arms down and my thigh pressed against the table.
She waved her hand over the contract. The overhead lights caught the gold rings on her fingers. I stared at her red nails.
That was the exact same hand she had rested on my bicep while mocking Wren.
She used to lean into my personal space, whispering fake-concerned advice just to humiliate my pregnant wife.
I tolerated her poison for years because her father’s capital funded my ambitions.
With the Sterling merger gone, there was nothing left to excuse her behavior.
“You need to call the Addison proxy lawyers,” Vanessa insisted, her voice cracking. “Tell them this is a mistake before the market opens.”
“The filings are already locked,” I replied. “There is no mistake to fix.”
Vanessa planted her palms flat on the wood. Crowding the table, she tried to use our past against me, clearly expecting me to step back into my old role, soothe her panic, and protect her career. I did not offer an ounce of sympathy.
“You ruined your own career, Vanessa,” I said. “You thought you were untouchable because you whispered in my ear and disrespected my wife. You are nothing but an incompetent nepotism hire.”