Chapter 16 - The Threats in the Shadows
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“Do you have any idea what the hell you’re doing?” Adrian hissed, his voice trembling with suppressed fury, keeping his volume low to avoid echoing out into the hallway.
“I am not the person who opened that bank record,” I replied, my voice steady as I held his furious gaze without flinching.
“You brought cutthroat lawyers into our marriage!”
“And you brought our marriage into fraudulent corporate documents!” I fired back, feeling a surge of long-repressed anger finally breaking free.
A muscle in his jaw twitched violently.
“That transfer memorandum was purely preliminary. The final, legal ownership structure was changed.”
“Then show me the valid transfer document. Show me the original.”
“We don’t have time for this ridiculous performance!”
“You invited twelve members of your board here today to watch me sign away a company you swore I never helped build. You wanted a performance, Adrian. You simply expected a different ending.”
Sloane stood a few feet away, desperately pretending to scroll through emails on her phone. Without the board present to maintain her polished executive persona, she looked utterly terrified.
Adrian took a step closer, lowering his voice to a dangerous, threatening whisper.
“Helixora employs over eight hundred people, Claire. If you turn this into a massive public scandal, you could destroy this entire company and put all of them on the street.”
It was the ultimate coward's argument. Powerful men always use the livelihoods of innocent employees as human shields after their own gross misconduct puts everyone at risk.
“I am not asking for the company to be destroyed,” I said calmly. “I am simply asking it to stop lying.”
“Those can easily become the exact same thing!”
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He then tried his final, most desperate tactic: weaponizing our children. He warned me that a prolonged legal war would drag Sophie and Noah through a vicious media circus. I looked at him with pure disgust, asking if he had considered their well-being before he started sleeping with his strategy officer or forging their mother's signature on legal documents.
Unable to form a coherent response, he spun on his heel and walked away.
