Chapter 367: Feud

CASSIAN

The meeting dragged on, but the air in the room had shifted completely the moment I sat down.

I took the chair right at the middle of the table, the one Preston had been using to anchor his performance, and let the silence stretch until the board members started shifting uncomfortably in their expensive suits.

I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t have to. When you know every single flaw in a plan, you don’t need to yell to tear it apart.

"Who approved the donor wing’s budget revision?" I asked. My voice was level, casual even, as I kept my eyes fixed on the thick packet of charts on the table. "I’m looking at the final sign-off pages here, and I don’t see my signature anywhere on them."

One of the senior consultants cleared his throat, his eyes darting nervously down the table toward my brother.

"Mr. Wolfe, that particular adjustment was fast-tracked during the secondary planning phase. We needed to secure the primary investors before the quarter ended."

"I asked who signed it," I repeated, finally looking up. I didn’t look at the consultant; I kept my gaze locked straight on Preston, who was now leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed, his face a tight, frozen mask.

Preston took a slow breath, his chin lifting. "It was approved through interim authority, Cassian. The project couldn’t simply grind to a halt while you were unavailable. We had deadlines to meet, and Father wanted progress."

"Interim authority," I said, letting the words hang in the air for a long, heavy moment. I leaned back, tapping a thumb against the dark wood of the table. "An authority that expired the exact second I woke up. Which, if my memory serves me right, was about two weeks ago. Has anyone bothered to rerun the numbers or reverse these unauthorized additions since then?"

Nobody answered. The silence in the room grew thick enough to choke on.

I didn’t stop there. For the next forty minutes, I went through the documents page by page, asking question after question, turning over every stone Preston had tried to hide his track marks under.

I asked about the new consulting firms he had hired, forcing the project managers to admit they hadn’t been vetted through our usual security channels.

I pointed out the exact line items where those already appointed oversight had been stripped away, replacing the security protocols with third-party vendors who answered directly to Preston’s office.

I didn’t yell. I didn’t call him a thief in front of the investors. I just made it completely obvious to every single person sitting at that table that I knew exactly what he had done.

By the time I closed the final folder, the message was unmistakable. The room belonged to me again, and everything Preston had spent the last month building had just been reduced to a pile of worthless paper.

The investors began gathering their things before I even formally dismissed them.

There was a sudden, frantic rush to leave, the kind of quiet panic that happens when people realize they’ve been caught standing in the middle of a family feud.

They muttered their goodbyes, eyes glued to the floor as they hurried toward the double doors.

Noah also walked out. He didn’t look at me as he packed his tablet into his bag, his movements smooth, methodical, and completely detached.

He moved with the crowd, slipping out into the hallway alongside the consultants without a single backward glance. I watched the door swing shut behind the last assistant, leaving only the two of us in the massive, empty room.

Preston didn’t move for a long time.

He stood by the window, his back to me, his fingers digging into the leather folders he was holding.

He was shaking with a rage he couldn’t quite hide, his shoulders tense beneath his perfectly tailored jacket. He wasn’t angry because he had lost the argument; he was angry because I hadn’t given him the satisfaction of a fight.

I had simply reached out and taken my property back, leaving him with nothing to swing at.

He finally turned, his shoes clicking sharply against the floor as he headed toward the exit, acting as if the conversation was completely over.

"I spent three weeks flat on my back in a hospital bed," I said to his retreating back, my voice cutting through the quiet space. "And you still couldn’t make a single person in this building believe this project belonged to you."

Preston stopped dead in his tracks.

"It’s funny, really," I continued, leaning my head back against the leather chair. "I disappear for a month, and your greatest achievement is still just borrowing my work because you don’t have the brains to build anything of your own."

He turned around slowly. The polite, dignified expression he usually wore for the public was completely gone, replaced by a raw, unadulterated disgust that made his features look sharp and ugly.

He looked at me as if I were something he had accidentally stepped on in the street.

"What did you just say to me?" he asked, his voice dropping into a low hiss.

"You heard me," I said, meeting his gaze without a single hint of hesitation. "You’ve been crawling all over my files like an invasive weed since the day I got shot. Adding your name to things you had nothing to do with, convincing yourself you actually matter in these rooms. But the second I walk back through the door, you shrink right back down to what you’ve always been."

Instead of slamming his folders down or screaming, Preston let out a short, dry laugh. It was a single, sharp burst of genuine amusement that didn’t reach his eyes.

"It’s good to see prison didn’t completely ruin your manners," he said lightly, taking a few steps back toward the table. "Actually, no. That’s a lie. You never had any manners to begin with, did you?"

He closed the distance between us, stopping right beside my chair. Before I could move, he reached down and placed a heavy hand on my shoulder.

The gesture wasn’t warm; it was dripping with the kind of forced, patronizing superiority he had been using against me since we were children.

"It really is wonderful to see my little brother alive and kicking," he murmured, his fingers tightening slightly against my suit jacket. He paused, letting his eyes trail down to the front of my shirt, where the scars from the bullets were hidden beneath the fabric. "Though I’ll admit, I fully expected those thugs in the park to finish what the state couldn’t."

I didn’t flinch. I sat perfectly still under his hand, absorbing the blow without giving him the satisfaction of seeing me blink.

Preston smiled, his hand dropping away as he leaned over the table, putting his face level with mine.

"And here I was, keeping your little vanity project from falling apart while you lay there looking like roadkill. You’d think a normal brother would show a little gratitude. But I always forget that gratitude requires a certain kind of upbringing. A certain kind of bloodline. Something your mother obviously never had the capacity to pass down to you."

He straightened up, brushing a piece of invisible lint from his sleeve. "A gutter child always behaves exactly how the gutter raised him. Honestly, Cassian, you should have just died in that hospital. It would have saved Father and the rest of us an immense amount of trouble."

"I protected the future of this company," Preston said, his voice rising just enough to fill the empty corners of the room. "Someone had to keep the wheels turning while you were playing dead."

"You contaminated it," I shot back, my voice cold, matching his volume note for note.

"There is a massive difference between keeping a project alive and trying to rebuild it in your own pathetic Image so you can feel important."

"I made it more than a charity case. I made it profitable."

"You tried to make it yours," I said. "And you failed."

We stood there, less than two feet apart, sizing each other up in the quiet room.

There was barely any height difference between us... I had maybe two or three inches on him... but the space between us felt miles wide.

We were two men who had spent our entire lives being weighed against each other by a father who only valued what he could use, and neither of us was willing to take a step back.

I let my eyes wander down to his pristine cuffs, a small, dark thought bubbling up to the surface. It was time to stop playing defense.

"How is Victoria doing, by the way?" I asked, my tone shifting into something completely casual, like we were discussing the weekend weather.

Preston’s entire body went rigid. "Don’t."