Free Web NovelChapter 266: Now get out of my company
"What... who... how did you..." He stopped. Tried again. "How will I take care of our daughter? How will I give Seren a life?" He looked at her with something raw and unguarded that she had not seen on his face in years.
"Creed Tech is all I have left. It’s all I have left to give her anything worth giving. This is.... Amara." He spread his hands slightly. ƒгeewebnovёl.com
"We always worked things out. You know that. Whatever has happened between us, we always..."
"Mr. Creed." Her voice was even. Not unkind. Simply final. "What Seren needs is not a luxury mansion or a company name or whatever else you’ve been telling yourself you’re providing." She looked at him steadily.
"What she needs is love. Consistency. Someone who is actually present." She paused. "That is entirely your business. That has nothing to do with Creed Tech."
Seb stared at her.
Something was cracking behind his eyes. Not anger, he was past anger. This was the particular expression of a man who has spent a long time running from something and has finally run out of road.
"After everything," Amara continued, her voice dropping just slightly. Not softer. More precise. "After every single thing you did to me." She looked at him directly.
"You helped Amira. You helped her deliberately to change our father’s will, mess my life up, you even...." She stops herself and leans back slightly in her chair. The chair that was now hers. "That was the last straw, Seb. Not the first. Not even the second." She tilted her head just slightly. "The last one."
Seb’s mouth moved. "Now get out of my company."
He stood there for one more second. Just one. And in that second, something moved across his face that was beyond embarrassment and beyond anger and beyond the reach of any performance he had ever put on in any room.
Regret. The deep, airless, arriving-too-late kind.
He had nothing left.
Not the company. Not Amara. Not the standing, not the power, not the version of himself he had spent years building and maintaining. He had lost it in layers over months, and he had told himself each time that he could recover, that there was still something to come back to, that Amara would eventually...
But she was sitting in his chair. And she was not looking at him the way a person looks at someone they might forgive. The security stepped slightly closer.
Seb turned. Slowly. And walked toward the door. He didn’t look back.
He was almost through it when his shoulders dropped, just slightly, just an inch, the physical punctuation of a man setting down something he had been carrying for a very long time and would not be picking back up.
The door closed behind him.
Amara sat at the head of the table in the quiet boardroom and looked at the folder in front of her.
She did not feel triumphant.
She had expected to. She had waited for this long enough that she had imagined it many times, and in those imaginations, there had always been something that felt like satisfaction, like completion, like a door finally shutting cleanly.
Instead, there was just the quiet. And somewhere across the city, in the Vale building, her husband was walking into a room of his own.
She closed the folder, stood up, and reached for her phone.
On my way, she typed.
She picked up her bag and walked out.
The Vale building was different from Creed Tech.
Creed Tech had glass and modern lines and the architecture of a man who wanted to be seen as forward-facing.
The Vale building was older. Stone and weight and the particular gravity of a place that had stood long enough to watch several generations of the same family make the same mistakes inside it.
Kalian and Claire arrived together.
They always arrived together when they were planning something, there was a comfort in numbers that people who were uncertain of their ground tended to seek out without realising it.
They walked into the main conference floor with the energy of people who believed they were about to receive something, moving through the prepared space with barely a glance at the details.
Which was their first mistake.
The room had been prepared carefully. Julian’s people had been in since before dawn. Every document, every position, every procedural element arranged with the precision of someone who understood that the difference between a ceremony and a coronation was not sentiment, it was choreography.
But Kalian and Claire didn’t notice any of that. They looked around, found the room acceptably familiar, and settled into the quiet confidence of people who believed today was going to go the way they had decided it would go.
Julian greeted them at the door.
"Uncle Kalian. Aunt Claire." He shook his uncle’s hand. Warm. Easy. The smile of a man with nothing on his mind. "Glad you’re both here. We’re just about ready to begin."
Kalian looked at him.
Something shifted behind his uncle’s eyes, the first flicker of a man whose read on a situation has just come back slightly wrong.
He had expected something. Tension, perhaps. Uncertainty. A nephew who was managing too many things at once and showing the strain of it.
Instead, there was Julian. Composed. Well rested. Moving through the room as he owned it. Which, in approximately seven minutes, he formally would.
"Let’s not keep everyone waiting," Julian said pleasantly, and led them in.
His mother was already seated.
She sat at the long table with the particular stillness of a woman who had been ready for this for a long time and had simply been waiting for the calendar to agree with her. She looked at Kalian when he entered. He looked at her. Neither of them said anything. They didn’t need to.
The room is filled. Family members, board representatives, and the necessary witnesses. Documents appeared to have been brought in by Julian’s two assistants with the quiet efficiency of people who had rehearsed this.
Julian sat.
Opened the first document.
Read it without performance, without theatre, without the self-congratulatory pause that lesser men used in moments like this. Just a pen moving across paper. His signature, clean and complete.
Head of the Vale Empire. His mother signed as a witness. Her pen didn’t tremble.
