2025-01-20 14:18:55His breath caught in his throat as he stared at the screen.
He instinctively took a step back. “This… this has to be a mistake.”
Malisa, standing beside him, leaned in slightly to confirm the balance for herself.
Immediately her eyes widened, but she quickly masked her surprise with a composed smile.
“There won't be any mistakes, Mr. Raymond."
Raymond leaned back, his mind racing.
That woman hadn't lied. He was indeed wealthy, so it meant that what she said about his past might be true…
But why did he lose his memory? What happened to him? Was there any conspiracy behind this?
His eyes narrowed. He would find these things out and take back everything that belonged to him!
Then Raymond glanced at Malisa, gave her a brief nod. “Thanks for stepping in back there. I wasn’t expecting things to get that out of hand.”
Malisa offered a polite smile, her tone light yet professional. “It was no big deal, Mr. Raymond. They were completely out of line, and the situation needed to be handled.” Her eyes glinted with a mix of respect and curiosity. “Besides, ensuring our most important clients are treated with the dignity they deserve is part of my job.”
At that moment Malisa glanced at him, her voice becoming more conversational.
“Actually, there’s something I wanted to mention. This evening, the bank is hosting a charity dinner and auction. It’s a relatively relaxed event, and I thought it might be a good opportunity for us to talk further in a less formal setting.”
Raymond raised an eyebrow, intrigued by her casual tone. “A charity dinner?”
Malisa nodded. “Yes. And while the dinner itself is more about networking, the auction does feature a few rare items. Who knows? You might find something interesting.”
Raymond’s interest in social events was minimal at best. He wanted to reject it when his eyes caught a glimpse of the open tablet in her hand.
A list of auction items was displayed on the screen. Though he wasn’t particularly curious, his eyes instinctively scanned the images.
Then he saw it.
A simple ring appeared among the images, its intricate patterns catching his attention immediately.
Something about it tugged at him—a vague, indescribable pull that made his chest tighten. Immediately he froze, his gaze lingering on the image.
Without being told he could tell it wasn’t just a piece of jewelry.
He couldn’t explain it, but something about it felt familiar, significant. He was sure that it must have something to do with his past life.
Without any hesitation, he straightened, his decision made. “Alright,” he said finally, his voice steady. “I’ll attend.”
Twenty minutes later.
A sleek car came to a halt in front of the entrance of the grand banquet hall, Raymond stepped out, straightening his clothes.
Behind Raymond, Malisa remained in the car, her phone pressed to her ear as she handled an urgent call.
However Raymond barely had a chance to take in the elegant crowd milling about when a familiar voice called out, sharp and laced with disbelief.
“Raymond?”
Hearing his name he turned, his expression calm but cold as Dahlia stood a few steps away, her eyes wide with shock.
Beside her, was Caleb.
“What are you doing here?”
Dahlia asked, her voice cutting through the gentle hum of chatter around them. “Are you… following me?”
Immediately Raymond raised an eyebrow, “Why would I?”
Dahlia’s shock quickly turned to anger.
“Don’t lie. You have no reason to be here.”
Immediately Caleb stepped forward, his grin widening.
“Ah, the infamous Raymond,” he said, his voice dripping with mockery.
“Dahlia told me all about your little stunt with the black card. Fraud, wasn’t it? Trying to pass yourself off as someone important?”
Raymond met his gaze with an impassive stare, refusing to rise to the bait.
Dahlia’s expression hardened. “Raymond, how could you do something so reckless? All because of the divorce? Have you really fallen this far?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Raymond said flatly, not wanting to waste any more time on explaining himself to someone who wouldn’t want to trust him.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about!” Dahlia shot back, her voice rising.
“That black card. You stole it , didn’t you? Or got involved in some scam to make a false one! And you even got the information that I would be attending this event so you came here too, just to impress me and make me regret divorcing you, right? Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? You could ruin yourself—if you haven’t already!”
“Dahlia,” Raymond said, frowning, his tone icy, “don’t flatter yourself. It has nothing to do with you.”
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227
Raymond shook his head, and the way he did it was not the shake of someone who is considering or weighing or leaving any door open for negotiation. It was the shake of someone who has already closed every door and is simply communicating that fact.“No,” he said, and he said it the way a person says a word when the word is the complete and entire sentence. “That is not going to happen.”He looked at Damian Brooks with the kind of steadiness that does not require raising a voice or tightening a jaw because the weight behind it is real enough to carry itself.“You were the one that started all of this,” Raymond said. “Not Megan. Not me. You. You walked into this room this morning like nobody in here had the right to breathe without your permission. You stood in front of these people and you made noise and you threw your weight around and you acted like your connection to this school was something that nobody could touch. You did all of that yourself. Nobody forced you.”His eyes did no
Chapter 226
Something shifted in the room.Not dramatically. Not with the sudden and collective quality of a crowd that has received a clear signal. But with the gradual and settling quality of people who are listening to something that has the ring of a position that is not going to move, and are adjusting their understanding of the morning accordingly.“Your daughter,” Raymond continued, and his voice remained level throughout with the specific and controlled evenness of someone who has thought about what they are about to say and has decided it needs to be said completely and without qualification, “will answer for every documented incident. The bullying. The assault. The fifteen cases that this institution chose to bury rather than address because addressing them was inconvenient for the relationships that mattered to the people making the decisions.”He looked at Damian Brooks with the direct and final quality of someone arriving at the thing they most need to say.“And the blackmail,” he sa
Chapter 225
The room watched Damian Brooks begin to clap with the collective and stunned disbelief of people witnessing something they have assigned to the category of things that do not happen, and the dropping of jaws was not metaphorical this time but the actual and involuntary physical response of people whose faces have received information that their expectations had no category for.This man.This man who had stood at the center of the morning like a weather system, generating pressure and heat and the kind of atmospheric force that bends everything in its vicinity toward its own priorities, this man who had deployed his standing and his connections and the full considerable weight of his accumulated influence with the confident and practiced ease of someone who has never had genuine reason to doubt that the deployment would produce the desired result, was standing in front of Raymond and clapping.Slowly.Deliberately.With the visible and almost painful effort of someone doing something
Chapter 224
The Chancellor stood with his hand still supporting Damian Brooks' arm and shook his head with the slow and genuine quality of someone who is not performing surprise because they have moved past the point where performance is available to them.“I am as shocked as you are,” he said, and the words came out with the flat and unvarnished honesty of someone who has nothing left to construct around the truth. “I don't know him. Not really. Not in the way that would have told me this was possible.”He looked toward Raymond with the expression of someone revising an entire history of assessment in real time.“I knew something was different about him,” he said quietly, more to himself than to the man beside him, with the retrospective and slightly helpless quality of someone connecting dots that were always there but whose pattern only becomes visible from the perspective of having arrived at its conclusion. “Something in the way he carried himself. Something in the way he was never afraid
Chapter 223
Madam Veronica now standing at the edge of the gathering with the expression of someone experiencing a very specific kind of cognitive disruption, the kind that comes not from confusion about what is happening but from the inability to reconcile what is happening with everything you believed you knew about the person at the center of it.She knew Raymond.She had known Raymond across the length of his time with her, had formed her assessments of him through the ordinary accumulation of observation and interaction and the thousand small and unremarkable moments that constitute knowing a person in an academic context. And in all of that knowing, across all of that accumulated time and observation, nothing had suggested this.Nothing had pointed toward this.The money alone was staggering to contemplate. The acquisition of an institution of this scale and this standing was not a transaction that happened at the level of even significant personal wealth. It was a transaction that happened
Chapter 222
He paused for a fraction of a second that had the weight of something much longer."What you have just said," he continued with the quiet and precise force of someone delivering a verdict, "about this student, about the integrity of her achievements, about the nature of her relationship with this institution, is false. It is comprehensively, deliberately, and I believe knowingly false. And you have said it in front of a room full of people in order to damage something that you have no right to touch."His voice remained level throughout with the specific and controlled evenness of someone who has decided that the most powerful thing available to them in this moment is restraint."But since you want to know," he said, and something shifted almost imperceptibly in his tone, moving from the corrective into something that had the quality of an arrival, a moment that has been moving toward this point since before anyone in the room was aware it was moving, "since you have asked directly an
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