The Wrath Of Adrian Morgan

Chapter 10: You Offended The Wrong People

For a moment Brenna genuinely believed she'd misheard him. She let out a short laugh, brittle at the edges, and glanced toward the cameras like she needed to confirm they hadn't caught whatever strange joke had just been made at her expense.

"Very funny," she said, voice pitched for the room, still smiling the way she'd smiled all night. "You almost had me there. Let's not do that in front of the press, though — save it for after the signing."

The manager didn't smile back. If anything, his expression hardened further, the last traces of the warm, flattering man from twenty minutes ago completely gone, replaced by something closer to contempt. "I'm not joking, Ms. Whitmore. The Ramirez family has decided to withdraw from the cooperation. Effective immediately."

The room's temperature seemed to drop by degrees. Somewhere near the back, a photographer lowered his camera slightly, sensing that whatever story he'd walked in expecting to cover had just quietly become a different one.

Brenna's knees buckled, just slightly, just enough that Cole's hand shot out to catch her elbow, steadying her before she folded completely. She could feel her pulse pounding somewhere behind her eyes, could feel every single guest in the room watching her unravel in real time.

"Why," she managed, voice thinner now, stripped of all its earlier polish. "We had a verbal agreement. Everything was settled. All that was left was the signature—"

"You offended the wrong people. Miss Whitmore" The manager said it flatly, without any satisfaction in it, which somehow made it worse — like he wasn't even enjoying delivering the blow, just reporting a fact he found faintly distasteful to be associated with at all. "You had something precious handed to you, and you treated it like garbage. Meanwhile the actual treasure, you threw out with the trash yourself, this morning, in writing."

Brenna stared at him, uncomprehending, the words refusing to assemble into anything that made sense. She turned instead to Cole, grabbing at his sleeve, some part of her still convinced this was a problem he could simply fix, the way he'd apparently fixed everything else.

"Cole. What is he talking about. What happened."

Cole's face had gone slack in a way she'd never seen on him before, all his easy swagger draining out at once. Because the truth was simple and ugly and entirely his own fault: he'd never actually done anything to secure this cooperation. He'd met Brenna three months ago at a fundraiser, recognized a woman flush with confidence and a company about to go public, and decided the smartest thing he could do was attach himself to her rising star and let her believe whatever she wanted to believe about how she got there. It had cost him nothing to nod along. It had cost him nothing to let her think his name opened doors it had never once touched.

"I don't — I don't know," he said, and for the first time all night his voice didn't have any polish left in it either.

The guests around them had gone very quiet, the earlier warmth curdling fast into the particular hush of people watching someone's fortune collapse and trying to figure out how much distance to put between themselves and the wreckage. A few had already started drifting toward the exits, phones coming out, ready to make calls the second they were out of earshot.

The manager was already turning, already walking, done with the conversation entirely. Brenna didn't think — she simply followed, half running in heels never designed for it, pushing past a startled server and through a set of double doors into the corridor beyond.

She caught up to him just as he reached another hall, smaller, quieter, and shoved through the door on her heels without waiting to be invited.

What she found stopped her cold for exactly one second before fury flooded back in to fill the space where shock had been.

Marcus sat at the head of a long table, and beside him — calm, unbothered, a small girl beside him eating something off a plate — sat Adrian. And beside Adrian, unmistakably, sat the woman from the lobby. Aurelia

"You," Brenna said, and the word came out venomous, all her unraveling composure funneling straight into rage because rage was so much easier to hold onto than confusion. She stormed further into the room, finger already jabbing toward Adrian. "This is you. This is your doing. You and her—" she flung a hand toward Aurelia "—impersonated the Ramirez family, didn't you? Some pathetic scheme to sabotage me because you couldn't stand watching me succeed without you."

Nobody at the table moved.

"Please," Brenna said, whirling toward the manager, voice climbing into something close to pleading now. "Please don't trust them. Whatever they've told you, it's a lie, they're con artists, they probably do this to companies all over the—"

The slap came so fast that even Brenna didn't fully register it until the sting had already bloomed across her cheek.

The manager's hand was still raised, his whole body trembling — not with anger at Brenna, but with something closer to pure terror, the reaction of a man who'd suddenly understood exactly how badly he'd blundered by letting this woman follow him into a room she had no business standing in. He didn't wait for her to recover. He dropped straight to his knees in front of Marcus, forehead nearly touching the floor, words spilling out fast and frantic.

"Sir, please, I swear I had no idea she'd followed me, I would never have brought her anywhere near you, I turned my back for one moment and—"

Brenna stood frozen, one hand pressed to her burning cheek, staring at the man who'd struck her without a flicker of hesitation and was now groveling on the floor like she was the one who didn't matter at all. The room had gone entirely silent except for Riley's small, contented humming as she picked at her plate, utterly unbothered by any of it, and somewhere underneath the ringing in her own ears, Brenna became distantly, horribly aware that whatever had just happened to her, it was only the beginning of it.