Chapter 2Beef And A Thirty-Year Grudge

"Teaching me?"

I leaned back in my leather chair, silently studying Tristan.

His eyes were swollen with self-important superiority. He genuinely believed he was some compassionate savior descending from the heavens.

Tristan ignored my sarcastic question.

He turned around, walked over to my desk, and picked up the intercom phone.

"Tell Lawson from Legal to come to my office immediately. Bring the corporate seals and draft a formal letter of forgiveness."

He hung up the receiver and looked back at me.

"Brian, the decision is made. Stop throwing a tantrum."

"Once Derek is released, I will make him apologize to you in person. Then we can finally put this behind us."

I didn't say a word. I simply opened my desk drawer and pulled out a sleek black lockbox.

I punched in the code and popped the lid. Resting quietly on the velvet lining were the official corporate seals and my personal signature stamp.

Tristan's face dropped.

"What are you doing?"

I snapped the box shut and rested my hand flat on top of it.

"I am making myself perfectly clear. Without my signature and my stamp, Legal cannot issue a single valid document."

"Derek's case will not be dropped. I am never signing a letter of forgiveness."

Tristan slammed his hand against my desk.

"Brian, you are being completely unreasonable!"

"Do you have any idea how pathologically cold-blooded you look right now?"

"I am starting to wonder if you even have a heart beating in your chest!"

He pointed a finger right at my nose, his chest heaving with dramatic rage.

"Let me make this clear. If you refuse to back down today, I will call a board meeting and have you removed from your position!"

"Be my guest."

I turned to my laptop and pulled up my schedule for the day.

"I have a meeting in ten minutes. The door is right behind you. Don't let it hit you on the way out."

Tristan stormed out in a blind fury, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the glass panes.

Silence finally returned to the room.

But I knew it was just the quiet before the storm.

Sure enough, less than two hours later, the situation spiraled completely out of control.

My secretary, Sarah, burst into the office in a total panic.

"Brian, it is bad! You need to look at this live stream right now!"

I took the tablet from her shaking hands.

On the screen, Gary was sitting cross-legged right in the middle of our company's ground-floor lobby.

He was wearing a massive cardboard sign around his neck. The black marker read: HEARTLESS FEMALE CEO DRIVES SICK OLD MAN TO DEATH.

Standing right next to him was a young woman holding up a phone on a tripod. It was his daughter, Hailey.

"Listen to me, guys! You need to expose this evil corporation!"

Hailey cried into the camera, tears streaming down her face.

"My dad has kidney failure. He needs dialysis every month. My brother was desperate to save our dad, so he made a stupid mistake and borrowed some money from work."

"We begged them! We promised to sell our house to pay it back! But the CEO, Brian, is demanding my brother be locked up in prison!"

"She is trying to destroy our entire family!"

Right on cue, Gary clutched his chest and broke into a violent, hacking cough, acting as if he were taking his dying breath.

The viewer count in the live stream had already broken one hundred thousand. The chat was moving at warp speed.

"What a bloodsucking vampire!"

"Fifty grand for a human life? Capitalists have zero conscience!"

"Dox her! Bankrupt her company!"

"Boycott all their products!"

My phone started vibrating violently against the desk. An endless stream of unknown numbers flooded the screen, hurling abusive messages. I just held down the power button and shut it off.

The office door was kicked open again. Tristan charged in, completely unhinged.

He snatched the tablet from Sarah's hands and smashed it down onto my desk. The screen shattered instantly.

"Look at what you have done!"

Tristan pointed at my face, screaming at the top of his lungs.

"Our stock just dropped three points in the last ten minutes! Millions of dollars in valuation just vanished into thin air!"

"My phone is blowing up with furious investors!"

"Is this what your precious principles get us?!"

I glanced at the spiderweb cracks on the screen.

"They are trespassing and causing a disturbance in our lobby. Why haven't the security guards thrown them out?"

"Throw them out?"

Tristan barked out a harsh, manic laugh.

"The lobby is swarming with clout-chasing vloggers and cameras right now! You touch them, and see what happens!"

"The second a guard lays a finger on that old man, the media will brand us as a violent crime syndicate by tomorrow morning!"

He leaned over the desk, glaring at me like a cornered animal.

"Brian, as the Vice President of this company, I am ordering you to come downstairs with me right now!"

"You are going to apologize to Gary in front of every single camera down there!"

"And you are going to sign that letter of forgiveness right on the spot!"

I looked up, meeting his frantic gaze head-on.

"I didn't do anything wrong. Why would I apologize?"

Tristan froze. He genuinely could not comprehend how I was still standing my ground.

"Are you insane?! Do you want to drag this entire company into the grave with you?!"

"Brian, I usually let you have your stubborn little moments, but this is a matter of life and death for our business!"

He took a massive breath. His tone dropped into a sinister, icy threat.

"If you do not go down there and apologize, I will use the board of directors to suspend your authority as CEO."

"And another thing."

He paused, his eyes narrowing into a vicious glare.

"If you don't go down there right now, the wedding is off."

Sarah was backed into the corner of the room, too terrified to even breathe.

I stared at the man I had been engaged to for two years. He was using our marriage as a bargaining chip to force me to bow down to a criminal.

I stood up and smoothed out the hem of my blazer.

"Fine. The wedding is off."