Chapter 5 - The Queen’s Gambit
While the Mercers were being detained in London, I was sitting in the grand conference room of Vance & Sterling on the fiftieth floor of a Boston skyscraper.
The table was covered in asset portfolios. Gerald sat to my right, a smug, satisfied grin on his face. Across from us sat the remaining board members of Mercer Medical Consulting—men who had ignored me for years at charity galas, treating me like Nathan's pretty administrative assistant.
"We didn't know, Cassandra," the vice chairman stammered, his hands shaking as he looked at the evidence of Nathan's embezzlement. "If the public finds out about the clinical data fabrication, the company’s stock will plummet to zero by the opening bell tomorrow. We're ruined."
"You're only ruined if you keep trying to protect a ghost," I said, leaning forward, resting my intertwined fingers on the mahogany table. "Nathan is done. His medical license will be stripped by noon. But the intellectual property for the actual thoracic imaging software? That doesn't belong to Nathan. It belongs to the primary investor who funded the initial patent."
I slid a document across the table. It was the original incorporation charter from ten years ago. Nathan had signed it, but the capital had come from a trust fund left to me by my late grandfather—a trust fund Nathan never bothered to ask about because he assumed I came from nothing.
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"I own fifty-one percent of this firm," I said, my voice cutting through their panic like a diamond through glass. "Tomorrow morning, you will announce Nathan’s termination, full cooperation with the federal investigation, and my appointment as Executive Chairperson. We clear the bad blood, or I let the ship sink with all of you on it."
The board members looked at each other, terrified and broken. One by one, they reached for their pens.
