Wait... this is the morning I sign the merger papers. I remember this day. Last time, the person I trust the most signs it away behind my back. Not this time — I already know what's in the fine print.

The silence in the boardroom was so absolute I could hear the hum of the HVAC vents forty feet above us.

Victoria leaped to her feet, her chair screeching violently against the hardwood perimeter of the floor. The camel-hair blazer slipped off her shoulder, her manicured fingers splaying flat on the table.

"Harper!" she gasped, her voice shrill, cracking with panic. "What the hell are you doing?! That’s the master execution copy!"

Julian didn't gasp. His reaction was far more telling.

The lover’s mask melted from his face in less than half a second. The warmth vanished from his hazel eyes, replaced by an ugly, venomous fury that made his sculpted features look hideous. His hand snapped down onto my wrist, his fingers digging into the bone with bruising force.

"What do you think you’re doing, Harper?" he snarled, his voice dropping into a vicious, subterranean whisper. He didn't sound like a doting fiance anymore. He sounded like the man who had watched me bleed out on Lake Shore Drive. "Let go of that paper."

I didn't flinch. I didn't scream.

In my past life, his sudden physical aggression would have reduced me to tears, apologizing frantically for upsetting him.

Instead, I tilted my head, looking straight into his dilated pupils, and smiled.

"You're hurting my wrist, Julian," I said, my voice dead, flat, and chillingly calm. "And unless you want the building security team to escort you out in zip-ties before your father steps off the elevator, I suggest you remove your hand from my body."

Julian froze.

He wasn't stupid. He knew the building belonged to Vane Robotics. He knew the armed security detail on the fifty-fourth floor was loyal to my father’s old head of security, Mateo Cruz, who was currently stationed outside the frosted glass double doors.

Slowly, his jaw twitching violently, Julian released his grip. His chest heaved beneath his tailored vest, his gaze darting between the torn sheet in my hand and Victoria’s panicked face.

"Harper, listen to me," Victoria stepped around the table, her voice trembling as she attempted to reassemble her polished facade. "You’re exhausted. You’ve been working eighty-hour weeks. That clause—it’s just standard protective indemnification—"

"Save it, Victoria," I said, rising smoothly from my chair.

I didn't look like a sleep-deprived founder anymore. I stood tall, smoothing down the front of my tailored navy silk blouse. I picked up the torn Annex D, holding it between two fingers like a soiled tissue.

"Subsection 14, Paragraph C," I read aloud, my voice ringing off the glass walls with razor-sharp clarity. "'Irrevocable assignment of power of attorney regarding derivative architecture ARES-7 to Julian Sterling.' Do you take me for an illiterate idiot, Vic?"

Victoria went utterly pale. The blood drained from her lips until they looked blue. "Harper, that’s... that’s an administrative error! The paralegal must have swapped the templates from the preliminary leverage buyout drafts—"

"A paralegal who managed to forge David Miller’s private routing stamp on your tablet?" I took a step toward her, watching her physically shrink back against the mahogany table. "A paralegal who happened to draft an unratified unilateral voting transfer that strips seventy percent of my company’s equity and hands it to a shell corporation registered in the Cayman Islands under the name Vance-Sterling Holdings?"

Julian’s head snapped toward me, his face turning an ashen shade of gray.

He had thought that shell company was a ghost. He had registered it three weeks ago through an offshore agent in Grand Cayman, using encrypted satellite phones and dummy directors. In the previous timeline, I hadn't discovered Vance-Sterling Holdings until two years after the ink was dry, when their joint bank accounts started draining my dividend pools.

"How do you know that name?" Julian breathed, his voice stripped of every shred of arrogance.

"I know a great deal of things, Julian," I replied, my voice sweet and lethal as arsenic. "I know you owe seventy-two million dollars to the Petrov Syndicate in Macau after your hedge fund collapsed in Singapore last spring. I know your father threatened to cut you out of the Sterling family trust unless you brought him the ARES-7 neural source code to save his defense contracts. And I know you promised Victoria thirty percent of my company if she helped you slip this through before the nine o'clock press conference."

Victoria let out a strangled, breathless sob, her hand flying to her mouth.

Julian took two steps back, his chest heaving, looking at me as if I were a specter risen from an open grave. "You've been tapping my phone. You went through my personal files—"

"I don't need to tap your phone to recognize a parasite, Julian," I interrupted, walking slowly toward the credenza where the Dom Pérignon sat chilling on ice.

I picked up the heavy crystal bottle. The condensation dripped cold against my skin.

"The merger is dead," I said, turning back to face them.

"You can't kill it!" Julian roared, taking a threatening step forward, desperation finally driving him into open rage. "The press is downstairs! The Sterling board has already announced the acquisition on Bloomberg! If you walk away now, our stock tanks forty percent by the opening bell! You’ll bankrupt Vane Robotics before lunchtime!"

"Will I?" I smiled.

I walked over to the trash can beside the desk, dropped the torn Annex D inside, and uncorked the vintage champagne with a loud, violent POP.

White foam cascaded over my knuckles. Without breaking eye contact with Julian, I tilted the heavy glass bottle and poured four hundred dollars' worth of vintage champagne straight onto the torn contract in the trash, drowning the paper in soaked, bubbling ruin.

"Call your father, Julian," I said softly, setting the empty bottle down on the desk with a sharp thud. "Tell him the deal is off. And then pack your things and get the hell out of my building."

Before Julian could scream, the heavy double doors of the boardroom swung open with an authoritative crash.

Standing in the doorway, leaning on a polished ebony cane with a silver wolf’s head handle, was a man with steel-gray hair, piercing slate eyes, and an expression of absolute, terrifying command.