Chapter 5
Xi finally turned her chair around, the leather creaking softly in the quiet office. She looked at Mu with a detached curiosity, as if observing a specimen under a microscope rather than a man she had shared a bed with for seven years.
"Mistake, Mu?" Xi’s voice was dangerously quiet. "A mistake is forgetting to attach a file to an email. Booking an executive suite in Singapore under a corporate alias while billing it as client acquisition is a calculated crime."
Mu took a step forward, his hands resting on the edge of her desk. He leaned in, trying to reclaim some semblance of dominance through sheer physical presence. "If I go down, the family goes down with me. My father will spend every cent of the holding company's reserves to bury your lawsuits. You think you can crush me without getting your own hands dirty?"
"Your father’s holding company is currently leveraged to the limit," Xi countered, not flinching an inch. She tapped the edge of the monitor. "Do you honestly believe Chairman Chu is going to sacrifice the entire conglomerate's liquidity to bail out an ungrateful son who embezzled from his own wife? Check your corporate terminal, Mu. The board has already called an emergency quorum for 9:00 AM."
Mu froze. The color drained entirely from his face, leaving a sickly, grayish pallor under the emergency lighting. "You... you already notified the board?"
"I notified the independent directors," Xi corrected calmly. "Fiduciary duty requires me to report financial irregularities once verified. I simply handed them the forensic audit. What they choose to do with the evidence of your embezzlement is entirely a matter of corporate governance."
Mu stared at her, the mask of the charming, successful executive completely shattering. For the first time, he saw the terrifying scope of her intellect and preparation. She hadn't reacted with tears in the courtyard because she had already won the war before the first battle was formally declared. She had orchestrated every move down to the second, turning his own secret betrayals into the very noose that would hang his corporate career.
"Xi... please," Mu whispered, his voice cracking with genuine desperation as he dropped his hands from the desk. He took a half-step back, his knees nearly buckling. "We can settle this privately. Name your terms. Whatever you want from the estate—"
"I want you bankrupt, disgraced, and entirely irrelevant," Xi said, her voice dropping into a tone of absolute, chilling finality. She turned back to her monitor, dismissing him as easily as one would close an unwanted browser tab. "Security is waiting on the ground floor to escort you off the premises. Don't make them use physical force."
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Mu stood rooted to the spot for three agonizing seconds, his chest heaving with shallow, ragged breaths. Then, broken and defeated, he turned and walked out of the office, the heavy door clicking shut behind him.
***
