"You think you can just push me out of my own company?!" Adrian roared, slamming his heavy fist onto the glass table again, making the water glasses rattle violently against the wood. "You think some cowardly anonymous buyer can just walk in here and take what's mine?!"
His voice echoed violently through the massive glass boardroom, bouncing off the acoustic panels, raw, ugly, and desperate. It was the sound of a man who had never once, in his entire life, been told noa, nd was now discovering, in real time, exactly what that felt like. Every syllable seemed to claw at the walls, searching for purchase, finding none.
Around the table, the board members didn't even flinch. They simply sat in icy, unbothered silence, packing up their leather folders, closing their laptops, and ignoring his frantic breathing, their faces schooled into the practiced blankness of people who had survived a dozen boardroom executions before this one and intended to survive this one too.
