Chapter 4 - Blood in the Water
The emergency board meeting was a bloodbath. Twelve men and women in tailored suits stared at me across the mahogany table. I didn't wear a suit. I wore a black turtleneck—a slight upgrade, but still a refusal to play their game.
"Elias, you're a liability," barked Thomas Sterling, our largest independent shareholder. "Our stock dropped four percent this morning. You assaulted the son of a major competitor. The optics are disastrous. We need you to step down. Temporarily, of course. A leave of absence."
"A leave of absence means surrendering control of the Seattle port acquisition to Richard Vance," I replied, my voice dangerously soft. The room went quiet. They knew I rarely spoke in meetings, preferring to let the numbers talk. "You know exactly what he's doing."
"What we know is that you're a PR nightmare!" Sterling shot back. "You refuse to do interviews, you dress like a janitor, and now you're brawling in parking lots!"
I looked at Sterling. His pulse was beating rapidly in his neck. He was sweating. It wasn't just anger; it was anxiety.
"Thomas," I said slowly. "How much did Richard Vance offer you for your voting shares?"
The room gasped. Sterling's face lost its color. "That is an outrageous accusation!"
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"Is it?" I stood up, placing my palms on the cool mahogany. "I built this company from a laptop in a basement to a fifty-billion-dollar empire. I did it by seeing the patterns everyone else missed. And the pattern here is obvious. Vance didn't just capitalize on his son's idiocy. He had advance knowledge of our internal panic. Someone in this room leaked our defensive strategy to him."
I didn't wait for a response. I walked out of the boardroom. The war had officially started.
