Chapter 210
Mr. Zhao’s voice went lower, a poisonous whisper of strategy and fury. “Do not be naive. She still loves you in the way that wounded people can still remember what once was. She used this acquisition, this perfect surgical blow, to put herself where she needed to be, inside our walls. She’s not naive either. She knows how to make power present, comfortable, and then pull the floor from under you.”
Ethan’s eyes widened. “Sh.. used...”
“Used?” Mr. Zhao’s hand slammed on the table, rattling the empty glass beside it. “Yes. She used the only tool she had left and she used it well. And you, you’re standing there like a beggar picking at leftovers. Do you understand the kind of leverage that gives her? You stand between her and full ownership. You can be the man who gets it all back, Ethan, or you can be the man who loses everything.”
“You want me to... what? Beg her? Plead?” Ethan’s voice was raw, incredulous. “After everything I did, after what I...”
Mr. Zhao’s face hardened into lines Ethan knew too well, the look of a patriarch with ruthlessness in his bones. “Yes. Beg, bargain, strategise, whatever it takes. Go to her with the only currency that matters to a woman like that now, strategy. You’re a Zhao. Be a Zhao. Appeal to her pragmatism. Offer her a path to a restored legacy, one that’s clean, controlled, and profitable. Tell her you will hand back everything if she will allow the family to exit with dignity.”
Ethan’s mouth opened and closed. “You want me to con people into trusting us again?” he said, incredulity and a broken sort of hope mingling in his voice. “You want me to play the diplomat after I smashed the vase?”
Mr. Zhao’s eyes bored into him. “Yes. Clean it up. Be clever. Use the shame you’ve earned as leverage to make her pity you, or her vanity, or her desire for justice cheaper than the cost of fight. Tell her you’ll hand over operations, sign off on reforms, put a Zhao board under her oversight if you must. Promise her order and a clean slate. If you do it right, they will accept the transfer and you will keep a foothold.”
“And if I don’t?” Ethan’s voice was small as the future closed around him.
Mr. Zhao’s answer was merciless as a verdict. “If you don’t, we will be liquidated. Our name will be stripped and parceled out. Our legacy will die in press statements and legal filings while vultures divide the carcass. If you need someone to remind you what that looks like, look at Lila on that cot in ICU. She’s a casualty of your choices. Your family will be the next.”
Ethan’s knees threatened to give. He pressed both palms to the tabletop as if bracing himself. “I... I can try.”
“You don’t get to try,” Mr. Zhao snapped. “You do. Tonight. You go and meet her, you kneel if you must. You say whatever needs saying. You make me believe you’ve learned. You fix this. Or we bury you and everything you stand for.”
Mr. Zhao’s voice softened, not to tenderness, but to a terrible, paternal finality. “I will not have the Zhao name ended by the folly of a son who can’t control his appetites. You have one chance, Ethan. One.”
Ethan’s breath came out ragged. “What if she... what if she won’t listen? What if she wants us gone?”
“Then we resist another way,” Mr. Zhao said, voice coiled tight with strategy and spite. “We call in favors. We litigate. We make her life miserable until her patience breaks. But first, you go tonight. You make amends with any truth necessary, even if it kills you. If you don’t, I will.”
There was a trembling in his father’s hand as he pushed a printed page across the table, financials, contingency plans, legal talking points, the kind of cold, clinical instruments a man uses when he refuses to accept defeat.
Ethan looked at the paper as if it were an object from another life. He wanted to protest. To say he’d never been like this, that he’d loved Serena once and could prove he was worthy. But his father’s words settled in his chest with the weight of an ultimatum he’d never expected.
“I’ll go,” he said finally, the words brittle but resolved.
Mr. Zhao’s face softened just a hair, the shadow of a father who still demanded performance over sentiment. “You’d better. Because if you fail me, I will make sure the world forgets that there was ever an Ethan Zhao.”
Ethan nodded. He rose and moved to the window, looking down at the city that now seemed to spin with unfamiliar faces and colder fortunes.
He felt like a man unmoored, ashamed, raw, and suddenly, dangerously focused.
As he left the boardroom, Mr. Zhao called after him once, the voice tired but iron strong,“Reign in your bitch, son. Bring her to the table. Do whatever it takes.”
Ethan walked out into the corridor that smelled of expensive polish and fear.
His reflection in the glass looked smaller than it had that morning.
He clutched the papers in his hand the way sailors clutch a flaring rope, not because they want to, but because it was the only thing left to hold.
Meanwhile the hospital room was too quiet. Too clean. Too white.
Lila stared at the ceiling, fury simmering beneath her pale, bandaged exterior. The soft hum of the IV machine was the only sound accompanying her, steady, indifferent, almost mocking.
Her temples throbbed from the injury, and every breath reminded her of the pain radiating through her skull. But none of that compared to the sharp, twisting ache of humiliation sitting heavy in her chest.
He hadn’t come.
Not once.
Not a message, not a call. Nothing.
Her fingers curled around the edge of the blanket, nails digging in until her knuckles went white.
The moment she’d regained consciousness, she’d expected to see Ethan by her side, eyes red, guilt dripping from every word, begging for forgiveness. That’s how it was supposed to go. That’s how she imagined it would go.
But instead, the first person she saw was a nurse checking her vitals, calm, clinical, detached. The next was a doctor telling her about her mild concussion, the scans, the rest she needed. And the last was silence.
Not Ethan.
Not the man who once swore she was everything to him.
Not the man who promised her a future that no longer seemed to exist.
Not the man that almost killed her.