Chapter 71

PERRY'S POV

The boardroom smelled like fresh coffee and I liked it that way.

I sat at the head of the table because that was where I belonged. My lawyers were to my left, the finance team to my right, and directly across from me were three auditors from the reconstruction firm who had been talking for the past forty minutes without saying a single thing I did not already know.

I was tired of looking at them.

I reached for my coffee and told myself to get through the next hour without losing my temper.

"The reconstruction cost will be offset by the insurance settlement, provided the arson investigation closes in our favor," the lead auditor was saying, adjusting his glasses as he spoke. "We estimate full operational capacity within—"

"Six months," I said. "I know that already. Move on."

He looked at me for a moment then nodded and looked back down at his papers. "Yes, sir. Moving on to the matter of the investor restructuring—"

"Which we will table for next week," I said, reaching for my coffee.

"Actually," my head of finance said carefully, his voice carrying that particular tone people used when they were about to say something I had not asked to hear, "there has been a development this morning that may require your immediate attention."

I set the coffee down slowly and looked at him. "What kind of development?"

He opened his mouth but no words came out as the boardroom doors swung open.

Both of them at once, wide, like whoever was on the other side had already decided that knocking was for other people. No announcement. No warning. Nothing. The doors just opened and stayed open.

Every head at the table turned.

The men around me sat up straighter. The auditor stopped mid sentence. Even my lawyers went quiet and lawyers never went quiet without a reason.

Silas Moretti walked in.

Dressed in all black, his blond hair pulled back, his gray eyes moving slowly around the room taking everything in. He did not look like a man who had walked uninvited into someone else's boardroom. He looked like a man who had simply arrived somewhere he had already decided was his.

Behind him his bodyguard moved to the wall without a sound.

I was already sitting forward when I saw her.

Imogen walked in beside Silas and my stomach dropped all the way down.

Fitted ivory blazer I had never seen before. Hair pinned back. Posture straight in the way of someone who had made a decision they were not going back on. She did not look nervous. She did not check anyone's reaction. She just walked in and looked around the room the same way Silas did.

She did not look at me.

That was the thing that hit me before anything else. In all the years I had known Imogen, in every room we had ever entered together, her eyes always found me first. Not because she wanted them to but it was a force of habit or Instinct. She always looked.

Not this time.

She walked in beside that man and her eyes moved around the room like I was just another face at the table.

My jaw tightened.

Silas reached the center of the room and stopped. He reached into his jacket, produced a folded document, laid it flat on the table and slid it toward the middle with two fingers. He took his time with every part of it.

"Gentlemen," he said, his voice filling the room without effort. "I apologize for the interruption. This will not take very long."

Nobody said a word.

I kept my face still. I did not know what this was yet and I was not going to react before I had the full picture. I had always been good at that.

"As of this morning," Silas said, "I hold fifty three percent of the shares in Cullen Enterprises."

The room went dead quiet.

Someone at the far end of the table put their pen down. That small sound was the only thing in the room for a long moment.

Fifty three percent.

I sat with those words and tried to make sense of them and I could not. My own company. The one with my name on the building. The one I had built from absolutely nothing. Fifty three percent meant majority ownership. Fifty three percent meant every decision I had ever made in this room had been made inside a company that was no longer mine in any way that mattered.

My eyes went to the document. Then to Silas. Then to Imogen and this time she was already looking at me.

I knew her face better than she knew it herself. I had spent years reading and using it. But what I was looking at right now was nothing I recognised. She was not scared or even nervous. Not doing that careful blankness she put on when she was trying to get through something difficult. She was just looking at me. Calm and completely at ease, like she had been expecting this moment for a long time.

"The acquisition was completed through a series of transactions over the past eight weeks," Silas continued. "All entirely legal. Your legal team is welcome to verify."

Eight weeks.

Eight weeks ago this man had been buying his way into my company and not one person in my organisation had said a word to me about it. Not one.

"Effective immediately," Silas said, "I will be appointing a new operational director to oversee the day to day management of the company's European division."

He paused and turned to Imogen with an ease that made the back of my neck go hot.

"Imogen Cullen will assume that role."

The room came apart quietly. Heads turning, murmurs starting, my lawyers leaning into each other with expressions they would not have worn if they remembered I was still sitting at the head of the table.

I stood up.

My chair scraped back hard and I was on my feet before I decided to stand. Hands flat on the table, heat moving from my neck all the way into my face, and I was past the point of managing any of it carefully.

She had known. She had been inside this plan from the beginning and she had sat in my house and looked me in the face and said nothing. The whole time.

"You!" I spat out. "You did this."

She said nothing.

"You took my company and handed it to him like it belonged to you."

"Everything she built," Silas said quietly. A flat correction, nothing more.

"Don't open your mouth—"

"Sit down, Cullen."

"This is my company—"

"Was," he said.

I moved around the end of the table and I was not thinking. My body just carried me toward Imogen, my hand already coming up—

Silas stepped in front of her. He was just suddenly there between me and my wife. His body was completely still, his gray eyes on my face with no anger in them at all. Just the look of a man watching something do exactly what he expected it to do.

That look stopped me cold.

"Touch her," he said quietly, "and I will end everything you have left. Not just the company. Everything."

My hand hung in the air.

His bodyguard's grip closed around my arm from behind. "Time to go, Mr Cullen."

"Get your hands off me."

"Now." He steered me toward the door and my feet moved because my body had run out of options.

I looked back at Imogen over my shoulder. I needed one thing from her face. One small thing that told me I was not as finished as this felt.

She looked back at me. And the corner of her mouth moved. Just slightly. The expression of a woman who had been walking toward a particular moment for a very long time and had finally, completely arrived at it.

The doors closed in my face.

Through the wood I could hear Silas's voice picking back up, moving the meeting forward, like I had been a minor interruption that was already forgotten.

I stood in the corridor outside my own boardroom with the bodyguard's hand still on my arm.

I had nothing left.