The boardroom of Sterling Holdings was a monument to ambition. Carved from Italian marble and floor-to-ceiling glass, it perched forty stories above the city, a transparent throne room where fortunes were made and unmade with the stroke of a pen. Lucas Harrington had sat at the head of this table for a decade, his presence as fixed and immutable as the steel bones of the building itself.
Today, he was a guest.
The vote had been swift. Clinical. The board members, men he had dined with, men whose children he had sponsored into elite schools, refused to meet his eyes. Their gazes fixed on the polished mahogany, on the sheen of their own reflections, anywhere but on him. Hale presided over the meeting from the opposite end of the table, his expression a mask of corporate solemnity, his dark eyes glittering with the cold fire of victory.
