My Billionaire Ex Regrets Throwing Me to the Mafia Don novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Fourteen Days

Brent names Haley acting COO and fires Giulia in front of the whole floor, and she tells him his trucks have fourteen days left.

"He's wanted Red Hook for two years," I said. "He never told me he'd found a way in."

"He didn't find it. I let him in." Dario turned from the window. "I wanted to see the man you'd chosen over coming home."

"And?"

"I'll tell you Friday."

In the morning I went to Hudson Yards to clear out my office.

Dario's driver waited at the curb.

I rode the elevator to the forty-first floor the way I had a thousand times.

My badge didn't work.

The receptionist wouldn't look at me.

She buzzed me through herself, staring at her keyboard.

The whole floor was standing.

Two hundred people were packed into the open space by the kitchen, holding coffee cups.

Brent stood on the low step by the windows where we did all-hands meetings.

Haley stood beside him.

She was wearing my black suit.

Not one like it. Mine. I knew the button she'd sewn back on crooked when she borrowed it in the fall.

The ruby was on her finger.

"And that's why," Brent was saying, "effective today, Haley Hollister is our acting chief operating officer."

People clapped.

Some of them clapped because he was looking at them.

Then someone saw me by the door, and the clapping thinned out and stopped.

Two hundred heads turned.

Brent found me and smiled.

"Speak of the devil."

I walked past the kitchen to the hall.

My office door was open.

My desk was bare.

Everything on it had been swept into a cardboard box on the floor.

My plants. My mug. The printout of the first route Lodestar ever solved, which I'd had framed.

"We packed for you," Haley said behind me. "To save time."

She had followed me, and so had everyone else.

They stood in the hall and in the doorways of the other offices.

"Thank you," I said.

I bent to pick up the box.

"Oh, wait. Not that."

Haley reached past me and took something off the top.

It was the photo from the day we signed our first lease.

Brent and me on a folding chair, twenty-one years old, both laughing, a pizza box on my lap.

"That's company history," she said. "It belongs to the company."

She looked at it for a moment.

Then she dropped it into the trash can by my door.

The glass cracked on the bottom of the can.

Somebody in the hall sucked in a breath.

I looked at Brent.

He was leaning in the doorway with his arms folded.

"Aren't you going to say anything?" I said.

"Sure." He raised his voice so the hall could hear. "Giulia Greco no longer works here. As of this morning she's terminated for cause."

"For what cause?"

"For putting her hands on a coworker. For abandoning her post. Take your pick."

"I resigned last night."

"Nobody got it in writing." He shrugged. "So you're fired."

A few people laughed, uneasy.

"Security will walk you down," Haley said. "And the laptop stays. It's company property."

A guard I had hired stepped into the doorway.

He looked sick.

I set the laptop on the desk.

I picked up the box.

"One more thing," Brent said. "Don't bother calling our clients. Everybody in this industry knows who built this company."

"Yes," I said. "They do."

I walked toward the elevator.

The crowd parted for me without a word.

At the door I stopped and turned around.

"Brent."

He raised his eyebrows. Haley slid her hand into the crook of his arm.

"Who holds the patent on Lodestar?" I said.

The hall went quiet.

Brent laughed, but it was slower this time.

"The company does."

"No. The company licenses it. For a dollar a year."

"Our lawyers wrote that license."

"No," I said. "I did. You were in Aspen that week. You told me to handle it."

Haley's hand tightened on his sleeve.

I saw one of the engineers in the back, a man who had worked under me for five years, go very pale.

He knew the clause.

"The license ends fourteen days after I leave the company," I said. "You just fired me in front of two hundred witnesses."

I shifted the box onto my hip.

"You have fourteen days. After that, every truck you own stops."

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