Chapter 10
The high-definition display flickered, illuminating the faces of the board members in a harsh, cold light. On the screen, the grainy black-and-white footage played out in agonizing detail: David Thorne sliding the brown leather handbag beneath the service cart, the precise timing of Victoria’s arrival, the manufactured hysteria, and the calculated humiliation of an innocent young worker named Elena Vance.
Arthur Pendelton, the senior managing director whose family had served on the board since the firm's inception, dropped his pen. It clattered against the mahogany table like a gunshot. He stared at the screen, then slowly turned his gaze toward Victoria, whose professional composure was finally beginning to shatter under the weight of undeniable proof. Her knuckles turned white as she gripped the armrests of her leather chair, her breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches.
"Is this true, Victoria?" Arthur asked, his voice trembling with a mixture of profound disappointment and cold fury. "Did you orchestrate a public stunt using the hotel staff as a scapegoat to cover up a financial audit?"
"Arthur, listen to me, the board doesn't understand the pressures we were under," Victoria stammered, her voice losing its aristocratic polish, cracking under the sudden, crushing reality of exposure. "If the foundation failed, the entire company would have collapsed within a quarter. We were buying time—just a few weeks to restructure the assets!"
"You weren't buying time, Victoria; you were buying silence," Julian said quietly, walking around the table until he stood directly beside her chair. He didn't look at her with anger anymore, only a profound, hollow sadness. "And you were willing to destroy an innocent person’s life to do it. That’s not corporate strategy. That’s just cruelty."
David Thorne stood up abruptly, knocking his leather chair backward onto the carpet with a dull thud. He adjusted his cuffs, his mask of calm finally slipping to reveal the desperate pragmatist underneath. "This is a mutiny," David snarled, glaring at the board members who were now pulling their chairs away from him as if he were contagious. "You think arresting me or cutting off Victoria solves your structural deficits? The whole system is rotten, and you all knew it. Every single person in this room approved high-risk allocations hoping for a windfall."
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"The difference, David," Marcus Vance said from the doorway, stepping forward with his hands tucked into his jacket pockets, "is that the people in this room didn't frame a working-class kid to take the fall for your white-collar crimes. That’s the part the district attorney’s office tends to care about."
At the mention of the district attorney, the remaining color drained from David’s face. He looked toward the floor-to-ceiling windows, as if calculating the distance to the street below, before realizing there was nowhere left to run. The corporate fortress had finally become a cage, locked from the inside by their own greed.
