Chapter 5

Suzan’s POV

"S-Suzan?"

The sound of my name on his lips was raw, fractured, and heavy with a disbelief that vibrated off the high glass walls of the boardroom. Draven took a sudden, unstable step forward, his knuckles white as his large hands gripped the edge of the mahogany table.

His dark grey eyes, the exact, terrifyingly familiar shade of my daughter’s, searched my face with a frantic, wild intensity, as if trying to tear through reality itself to prove I was a phantom constructed by his own crumbling mind.

"No... that's... that's impossible," he rasped out, his chest heaving under the crisp white linen of his dress shirt. "Where have you, where were you? I searched... God, Suzan, I searched for months. The police, the private investigators, the car service..."

I didn't flinch. I didn't step back. I didn't let a single flicker of emotion breach the calm, impenetrable surface of my eyes.

Five years ago, a whisper like that from Draven Sterling would have brought me to my knees. It would have sent my heart fluttering into my throat, begging for a scrap of his warmth, desperate to prove that I was worthy of being his wife.

But the woman who had cried herself to sleep in his cold master suite was dead. She had been buried under five years of ocean fog, midnight laboratory shifts, and the fierce, protective devotion of motherhood.

I slowly pulled out the executive leather chair at the head of the boardroom table and sat down, crossing my legs with practiced, elegant grace.

I smoothed the lapel of my tailored charcoal jacket, set my leather portfolio onto the polished wood, and unzipped it with a crisp, slow slide.

Only then did I lift my head to meet his desperate, trembling gaze.

"Good morning, Mr. Sterling," I said, my voice smooth, level, and entirely devoid of heat. "My name is Dr. Suzan Wells. I believe you requested this emergency summit to discuss the global acquisition rights for the Wells Targeted Delivery Protocol."

Draven flinched as if I had physically struck him across the jaw. He swallowed hard, his throat working tightly as he stared at me, his breathing ragged.

"Suzan, stop this," he choked out, his voice dropping into a desperate, hushed whisper as he took another step toward the head of the table. "Look at me. Please. You walk out of my house in the middle of the night, you vanish off the face of the earth for five years, leave a stack of divorce papers and your wedding ring on my nightstand, and now you sit there pretending you don't know who I am?"

Sounds like he had cared…

I unclipped my heavy, black Montblanc pen from my jacket pocket, the identical sibling to the pen I had left on his table five years ago, and laid it horizontally across my portfolio.

"Mr. Sterling," I interrupted, my voice dropping an octave, razor-sharp and commanding. "Are we here to conduct a multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical negotiation to save your enterprise from bankruptcy, or are you going to waste my afternoon indulging in personal hallucinations?"

Draven froze in his tracks. The sheer, icy professionalism in my tone hit him like a bucket of freezing water. For two years, he had known me only as a quiet, compliant shadow who spoke in hushed tones, avoided his eyes, and apologized for taking up space in his mansion. Seeing me sit at the head of his own boardroom, commanding the space with absolute, untouchable authority, completely shattered his internal reality.

"Hallucinations?" he repeated, a bitter, pained laugh escaping his throat as he dragged a hand through his dark hair, leaving it thoroughly disheveled. "You think I'm hallucinating? You put on a bespoke suit and walked into my headquarters like a stranger, and you expect me to sit here and discuss business?"

"I expect the Chief Executive Officer of the Sterling Group to act with basic corporate decorum," I replied calmly, resting my forearms lightly on the table. "If your current mental state renders you emotionally unfit to review contract terms, I am more than happy to end this meeting right now. My team at Roland-Vance Biopharma has outstanding funding offers from N and R. I only granted Sterling Pharmaceuticals a preliminary seat at the table out of professional courtesy."

That was a lie, of course. I had granted him this meeting because I wanted to watch him bleed.

But he didn't need to know that.

Draven stared at me, his chest rising and falling violently. I could see the furious war raging behind his grey eyes, the proud, arrogant billionaire fighting against the broken man.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to round the table, grab my shoulders, and demand to know why I had abandoned him, why I had stripped my life bare and vanished without a trace. Not because he cared but he wanted control, he didn't like that I was the one that left, he wanted to take the credit for serving me the papers. I saw through that.

But he was also a businessman. And he knew, with terrifying clarity, that if I walked out of those double doors right now, the Sterling empire would be auctioned off in pieces by the end of the week.

Slowly, agonizingly, Draven pulled back the chair opposite mine. He sank into it, his broad shoulders hunched forward, his hands trembling slightly as he rested his elbows on the table and interlaced his long fingers. He looked exhausted. Dark, bruised shadows hung under his eyes, and the sharp, arrogant lines of his jaw were tight with a tension that seemed permanent.

"Fine," he rasped, his voice hollow, stripped of all its corporate bravado. "Dr. Wells. Let's talk business."

"Wonderful," I said smoothly, pulling a thick, wire-bound dossier from my portfolio and sliding it across the polished mahogany wood until it rested directly in front of his shaking hands. "Then let us begin with a post-mortem of your failure."

Draven blinked, looking down at the red-stamped document. "My failure?"

"The failure of Sterling Pharmaceuticals' flagship oncology candidate," I said, leaning back in my chair, tapping the cap of my Montblanc pen against my index finger. "Three months ago, the FDA issued a complete response letter, halting your Phase III clinical trials due to severe, off-target cellular toxicity. Your stock plummeted thirty-four percent in a single trading session. Your primary institutional investors pulled sixty million dollars in venture capital, and your debt-to-equity ratio is currently sitting at a catastrophic level."

I paused, letting the cold, brutal facts hang in the heavy air between us.

"You brought in three different independent auditing firms to diagnose the failure," I continued, my voice steady, analytical, and sharp. "They told you it was a delivery mechanism flaw. They told you the nanoparticles were rupturing prematurely in the bloodstream before reaching the tumor site. Am I correct?"

Draven’s jaw tightened. "Yes. Our research and development team spent fourteen months trying to stabilize the lipid membrane. They failed."

"Of course they failed," I said, a faint, mocking smile touching the corner of my lips. "Because your R&D team was treating the symptom rather than the disease. They were attempting to reinforce the outer shell with synthetic polymers, which only increased systemic toxicity in pediatric subjects. It was a lazy, uninspired, and fundamentally flawed approach."

Draven stared at me, his mouth slightly open.

Some years ago while I was still married, I had attempted to explain my research on lipid nanoparticle stabilization to him over dinner that grandma Eleanor had insisted I go with him. He had cut me off in front of three chief investors, calling my work "clumsy," "uneducated," and a "waste of family resources," telling me to leave the real science to men who understood the market.

Now, he was forced to sit in silence as the woman he had dismissed as an idiot dissected his multi-billion-dollar failure with surgical, intellectual superiority.

"Your team failed," I said softly, driving the knife in deeper, "because the person overseeing your clinical research division did not have a single degree in molecular biology. She was appointed based on personal nepotism rather than scientific competence."

Maybe I was petty, but then what do I care? I'm the gem now.