Desmond Hale adjusted his gold cufflinks with the elegance of a man born to power, his kingdom was built on buried knives ratherthough than birthright. The boardroom stretched out before him like a polished battlefield—mahogany table gleaming beneath crystal lighting, seats still empty but for one. His.
He leaned back in the leather chair, a predator at rest, eyes scanning the quarterly report in front of him. The numbers were clean. Too clean. Exactly as he'd planned.
There it was—the projected downturn in East Asia, the red ink of the Japan division just starting to drip like a wound. It would look like operational instability. A missed shipment here. A miscommunication there. But Desmond had curated every failing like a connoisseur of corporate collapse.
There was no room for failur
