Chapter 57
Emily Windsor's POV
"She's mine. Victor Group's future Chief Legal Counsel. And she's Miss Windsor—someone you'll all treat with respect from now on."
With one sentence, he laid out my position and status in the most uncompromising terms imaginable.
Hank's chest heaved violently. He wanted to lash out—but the moment his eyes met Luke's cold, merciless gaze, it was like a hand had closed around his throat.
He stared at his son's file on the screen, then at the mixture of sympathy and schadenfreude painted across the faces around him. Finally, through gritted teeth, he managed to squeeze out three words.
"Fine. Well done."
Like a lion with its fangs pulled, he slumped back into his seat, radiating impotent fury but not daring to say another word.
A bloodless war, and it had been won before the meeting even officially began.
I turned to look at the man beside me. He'd already retracted all his edges, as if the person who'd just wielded ruthless tactics to expose someone's deepest shame wasn't him at all.
But I'd seen it clearly.
He'd raised the strongest shield for me. And unsheathed the sharpest blade.
That frozen layer of doubt inside me—the ice born from suspicion—cracked open again in that moment, melted by the scorching heat of his possessive, unyielding protection.
This man was poison. And he was the antidote.
And I no longer had a choice. I could only stand with him on the same side.
Luke's thunderous strike wasn't just about putting Hank in his place. It was a silent warning to everyone in the room.
The meeting continued in an eerie, tense calm.
The agenda quickly moved to quarterly financial reports across the Group's divisions.
I sat beside Luke without speaking, listening quietly.
But those dry numbers and business reports assembled themselves into a different picture in my mind—one that confirmed everything I'd concluded last night.
The director in charge of traditional entertainment operations was using convoluted jargon to explain declining profits, blaming market deterioration and disruption from emerging industries.
The old man overseeing maritime shipping complained about increasingly stringent international maritime regulations, lamenting the shrinking room for their flexibility.
Every single one of them was making excuses. But none dared touch the core issue: business models built on illegal and gray-market foundations simply couldn't keep up with the times anymore. They were like rusted old ships—slow, prohibitively expensive to maintain, and at constant risk of sinking.
And Luke let them make their excuses, listening expressionlessly, his fingertips tapping the table in an idle rhythm, as if waiting for the right moment.
I watched their carefully composed faces, and the murky waters of doubt and betrayal inside me settled into something clearer.
My enemies were these parasites—bloodsuckers clinging to the hull of the Victor family ship, draining it without ever thinking to repair the damage.
Whatever Luke's ultimate goals were, until this rotting vessel was scuttled, our course was aligned.
I lowered my gaze and typed a line on the tablet in front of me, then turned the screen toward Luke.
It held the core of the strategy I'd compiled through the night.
[Instead of boiling the frog slowly, cut off the heat entirely. Use high-profit legitimate ventures to drain cash flow from illegal operations—turn them from assets into liabilities.]
Luke's tapping fingers stilled. He glanced down. In those unfathomable eyes, a flicker of surprise.
He understood.
He didn't just understand my proposal—he understood that my ambition was even more ruthless than his.
He spoke again, cutting through the drowsy debate filling the conference room. "Gentlemen, I've heard all your difficulties."
His voice instantly silenced everyone. "Since the old roads are blocked, perhaps we should consider new approaches."
He turned, his gaze landing on me, eyes bright with unmistakable encouragement.
"Miss Windsor." In front of everyone, he handed me the stage. "Your thoughts."
Every eye in the room snapped to me again.
I stood, projecting the files I'd prepared onto the giant screen.
"Gentlemen." My voice was calm and clear, without a trace of hesitation. "The challenges raised by the directors all stem from one fundamental issue: the business models we're clinging to now have a severely imbalanced risk-to-return ratio."
The moment I finished speaking, Hank seized the opportunity to attack, letting out a cold laugh. "Miss Windsor, are you trying to teach us how to run our businesses? A little girl who only knows how to shuffle legal paperwork—do you have any idea how many connections and interests are tied up in these operations? You think this is a game?"
His words dripped with contempt and condescension.
I ignored his provocation, simply clicking the remote. A sharp data comparison chart appeared on screen.
"Mr. Harris, you're right about one thing—I don't understand your connections. I only understand data." I stared directly at him, my gaze cutting like a blade. "Take the west-side casino operations you oversee, for example. This chart shows that over the past three years, operational costs for that division—including what you call relationship maintenance fees—have risen seventy percent. Meanwhile, net profit has declined forty percent. It's no longer a cash cow. It's a hemorrhaging wound."
I didn't give him a chance to counter. "More importantly, with the federal anti-money-laundering legislation passed last year, the legal risk profile for that entire supply chain has escalated from high to critical. If we're investigated, we're not looking at fines—we're looking at the entire Group being blacklisted by every major bank. All our financing channels frozen. Tell me, Mr. Harris—can you bear that consequence?"
My words landed like a punch straight to his face.
He opened his mouth but couldn't produce a single syllable. His face turned an ugly shade of iron.
The conference room fell deathly silent.
Those who'd been ready to back Hank up instinctively shut their mouths.
"Destroying things is easy. Anyone can talk about that." A younger director spoke up, frowning but keeping his tone polite. "But what about the people who depend on these operations for their livelihoods? Miss Windsor, do you have a solution?"
"Of course." I advanced to the next slide. "My proposal is transformation."
The screen displayed a detailed business plan.
"I recommend immediately shutting down seven high-risk sunset operations, including the west-side casinos, and redirecting the released capital and real estate into a newly integrated subsidiary focused on luxury wellness and premium private healthcare."
"Gentlemen, please look at this market assessment—prepared overnight by my firm's commercial analysis team. Over the next decade, the high-end wellness market in North America is projected to grow at no less than fifteen percent annually. We already have prime real estate. We have experience serving elite clientele. Even those so-called connections can be converted into legitimate client networks. We're perfectly positioned to build a closed-loop ecosystem—from genetic screening and preventive health management to private recovery facilities and concierge medical services."