Harrison, darling, what is it? Why do you look like you've just seen a ghost? It's just the cleaning woman. Harrison was speechless. He could only stare at the metal card in his hand, reading it over and over as if sheer willpower could change the words.
Eleanor, annoyed by his bizarre behavior, snatched the card from his fingers. What on earth is this nonsense? As she read the platinum etched text, her own face underwent a horrific transformation. The hotty condescension dissolved, replaced by a wave of nauseating disbelief. The blood drained from her face.
Her perfectly painted mouth fell open. Her hand began to shake uncontrollably. This can't be real. She breathed, the words barely audible. Harrison finally found his voice, but it was a ragged, strangled whisper.
She's She's the Washington, our merger. She's Apex Stratos. The words hung in the supernaturally quiet air, like a death sentence. The realization spread through the room like a virus, passed from person to person through wide eyes and gaping mouths. The laughter died.
The phones stopped recording. The entire glittering assembly of Chicago's elite finally catastrophically understood. Alani looked around at the gallery of faces that had been mocking her just moments before. Faces that were now frozen in masks of pure unadulterated horror. Yes, she said, her voice carrying effortlessly across the tomblike silence of the room.
The merger that was going to save your secretly bankrupt company. The merger that was going to inject $2.5 billion into Vancroft Enterprises and keep you from losing every single thing your family has built over the last century. She paused, letting the full weight of it land. That Washington. The silence that followed was absolute.
You could have heard a snowflake land on the terrace. Every single person in that penthouse suddenly grasped the same horrifying truth. They hadn't just been rude to a stranger. They had witnessed and actively participated in the complete financial suicide of the Vancroft dynasty. Eleanor's champagne glass followed her husband's to the floor, shattering into a spray of crystal shards.
Blair stopped posing for photos, her face a frozen mask of shock. Carter slowly lowered his phone. The cruel video he had filmed now feeling less like a funny clip and more like a suicide note. Harrison tried to speak, but the words wouldn't come. His mouth opened and closed, a fish gasping for air in a world that had suddenly lost all its oxygen.