My phone buzzed again, this time with a voice message from Harrison.
I hit play on speaker.
“Iris, enough with the games.” His voice was tight, each word clipped with panic he was trying and failing to hide. “Call your lawyers off. Right now. You’ve made your point.”
Julian barked out a laugh.
Then a second message came through before the first had even finished downloading.
“Iris, answer me.” Louder now. “The board is asking questions. What exactly did you do?”
I muted the phone.
Nina looked up. “The board meeting starts in twenty-three minutes.”
“Good,” I said. “Patch me in the second they realize they’re drowning.”
She nodded.
Another text flashed on my screen. Mia.
You psycho. Harrison says the stock thing is your fault. Fix it.
A moment later, another one.
Mom says if you ruin this family, you’ll regret it.
Family.
That word almost made me laugh.
Families didn’t auction off daughters for business alliances. Families didn’t sit back while one sister climbed into another woman’s bed and called it destiny. Families didn’t watch a woman rebuild a failing empire with her bare hands and still call her temporary.
I typed back exactly three words.
Watch me work.
Julian leaned over to read it and grinned. “Beautiful.”
I stood and walked to the window.
Below me, the city stretched out in steel and glass, sharp and glittering under the afternoon sun. Somewhere across town, Harrison was probably in one of his custom suits, jaw tight, trying to bully numbers into obedience.
He’d always mistaken loudness for control.
The truth was simpler than that. Men like Harrison only felt powerful when women made themselves smaller around them.
I had spent three years shrinking for him.
Never again.
Nina’s phone chimed. “Boardroom feed is live.”
She turned the screen toward me.
There he was.
Harrison sat at the head of the long table in Oasis Group’s executive conference room, looking polished and furious. Mia wasn’t there, of course. She was never interested in boardrooms unless there was jewelry involved. But two senior directors sat to his right, one to his left, and every face on that screen carried the same expression: concern shading rapidly into alarm.
“We are not in freefall,” Harrison snapped. “This is a temporary fluctuation caused by market manipulation and investor gossip.”
One of the directors cleared his throat. “With respect, the sell-off was triggered by the withdrawal of our forty-percent silent investor.”
Harrison’s face hardened. “Then we replace them.”
Richard unmuted himself from our side of the call just long enough to murmur, “He still doesn’t get it.”