2025-01-20 14:20:17Dahlia’s hands tightened around her clutch, but she forced her face to remain calm, trying to ignore the fact that Raymond had moved on with someone who looked far more capable and connected than she had imagined.
But so what? He was still trying to rely on women to make a living.
Thinking of that, a hint of disappointment flashed in her eyes.
She snorted, forcing herself to look away, and entered the hall with Caleb.
As they entered the glittering hall, the atmosphere buzzed with excitement. Chandeliers cast a warm glow over the room, and the murmurs of influential voices filled the space.
They knew the kind of connection Caleb, and his family can control.
And they would do anything to be in his favor for any kind of collaboration from them.
Caleb, standing tall beside Dahlia, soaked it all in. His self-assured smirk widened as several guests approached them, eager to greet him.
“Mr. Caleb!” A middle-aged man in a tailored suit extended his hand with a wide smile.
“It’s an honor to see you here. Your family’s reputation precedes you.”
Others quickly followed suit, their voices overlapping as they offered their praise.
“Such a powerful couple you two make,” a woman gushed, glancing at Dahlia with admiration.
“It’s inspiring to see two people with such status together.”
“Yes, a perfect match,” another chimed in, nodding enthusiastically.
Hearing their praise towards her Dahlia managed a polite smile, but her thoughts were elsewhere.
The compliments felt hollow. She glanced again toward Raymond who was still standing quietly with the mysterious woman.
Though he wasn’t surrounded by fawning guests, there was an air of calm about him that seemed... different. For a moment, she wondered if she had really misunderstood him.
However she immediately deleted the thought off her head.
Caleb, meanwhile, basked in the attention.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice carrying a hint of arrogance. “We are indeed a great match. I’m lucky to have Dahlia by my side.”
Upon hearing what Caleb just said, the crowd murmured their agreement, and Caleb’s grin widened.
Just then, another guest, an older gentleman with sharp eyes, stepped forward.
“I heard there’s something special at tonight’s auction,” he said, his voice laced with intrigue. “A rare vintage ring—part of Mr. Drake’s private collection. You all know him, of course, the president of the city’s largest business association.”
The mention of the ring drew a ripple of interest from the crowd. Someone gasped softly.
“They say it’s one of a kind,” the man continued, glancing around. “I also heard the starting price alone is enough to make most people hesitate to even considering it, but for someone with Mr. Caleb’s standing…” He paused, smiling knowingly.
“Well, it might as well already be yours.”
Hearing what the man just said and his sweet words Caleb chuckled, his pride swelling even further. “Like you just said, the ring is as good as mine,” he declared, his voice loud enough to draw even more attention.
“No one else here has what it takes to outbid me.”
“Speaking as if you have everything under control,” Malisa scoffed, rolling her eyes with disdain. She’d had enough of his stupid arrogance, “ If Raymond wanted to, he could buy out this entire auction house without even trying.”
Her voice cut through the room like a blade, sharp and unwavering.
Immediately the room fell into a stunned silence, the boldness of her statement hanging heavy in the air. Then, as if on cue, a ripple of laughter spread among the guests, their disbelief quickly morphing into scornful amusement.
“Buy the auction house?” a woman snickered, covering her mouth as though the very idea was too absurd to say aloud.
“Does she know who she’s talking about?”
“He’s just a washed-up ex-husband,” another that knew Raymond as Dahlia ex chimed in, shaking his head.
“What kind of trick did he pull to get someone like her to back him up?”
“Maybe she feels sorry for him,” someone else added with a smirk.
The room buzzed with ridicule, the mocking voices blending into a chorus of false amusement.
Caleb leaned back, clearly enjoying the spectacle, his smirk widening as he met Raymond’s calm gaze.
Raymond, however, didn’t flinch. Their words were meaningless noise, background static he had no interest in acknowledging.
He took a slow step forward, his hands casually tucked into his pockets.
“I’m not interested in buying the whole auction house,” he said, his tone steady and unbothered. His gaze flicked toward the stage where the ring was displayed under bright lights. “But that ring?” He paused, letting his words sink in.
“That’s mine.”
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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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