Chapter 247
I stared at the name. Liam Kensington. He had watched it. He knew the tide had turned.
I answered. “What do you want?”
“Skye,” Liam’s voice was frantic. “I saw the stream. My God, I didn’t know they were that bad. Are you okay? I can come over. I can protect you from the… whoever those men were.”
“Protect me?” I laughed. “Liam, who do you think sent the syndicate the GPS location of where to find them?”
There was a long silence on the other end.
“You… you did that?”
“I’m cleaning house, Liam,” I said. “And you’re next.”
I hung up.
“Ms. Sterling,” a lawyer in a gray suit entered the room. He looked pale. “We’ve finished the preliminary audit of the company accounts.”
“How bad is it?” I asked.
“It’s… terminal,” he said. “Arthur didn’t just steal the profits. He leveraged the company to the hilt. The debt-to-equity ratio is four hundred percent. Sterling Corp is technically insolvent.”
Harper gasped. “So we won? We won a sinking ship?”
I walked to the window. The rain had stopped. The sun was trying to break through the clouds.
“A sinking ship is just a submarine if you know how to operate it,” I said.
I turned back to the room.
“File for bankruptcy immediately,” I ordered. “We restructure. We shed the debt. We spin off the bad assets into a shell company and let it die.”
“But the brand…” the lawyer stammered. “The Sterling name will be mud.”
“Then we don’t use the Sterling name,” I said. “We merge the viable assets into Oracle Holdings.”
“Oracle is a shadow company,” Gabriel pointed out. “It has no face.”
I walked to the mirror in the hallway. I looked at myself—the black suit, the sharp eyes, the woman who had died and come back to life.
“It has a face now,” I said.
I picked up the tube of red lipstick from the console table—Victory Red—and applied it slowly.
аl𝗹 𝗒𝗈𝗎r 𝖿а𝘃𝗼𝗋it𝗲 g𝘦ոr𝗲𝗌 𝗈ո 𝖻𝖾𝗅n𝗼vеls.𝘤𝗈𝗆
“Draft a press release,” I told Ms. Davies. “Skye Sterling is stepping down as the heiress and rising as an artist.”
“Artist?” Harper asked, confused. “What are you talking about?”
I pulled a folded document from my pocket. It was the contract Julian Vance had given me weeks ago—the one I had laughed at.
Vance Entertainment Talent Agreement.
I signed it on the spot.
“I’m going to be a star,” I said. “Because the best place to hide a secret… is in the spotlight.”
The boardroom of Sterling Corp smelled of stale coffee and fear.
Twelve men sat around the long mahogany table. These were the minority shareholders—the vultures who had feasted on the scraps Arthur threw them. Now, they were looking at me like I was the waiter bringing the check.
“This is preposterous!” Mr. Zhang slammed his hand on the table. “Bankruptcy? You’ll wipe out our equity!”
“Your equity is already zero,” I said, sitting at the head of the table. I didn’t open a folder. I didn’t need notes. I knew the numbers by heart. “Arthur leveraged this company to the hilt. If we liquidate today, you owe the banks money.”
“You did this!” another shareholder shouted. “You and your vendetta! You should have just married Liam back! He offered a merger!”
“A merger with a man who is currently under investigation for manslaughter?” I raised an eyebrow. “Brilliant strategy, gentlemen.”
.