CHAPTER 43: Three Days

POV: Selene Castellano

The words hung in the air like a threat.

She has the numbers to force you out completely.

Selene watched Avalon’s jaw tighten saw him processing it the way he processed everything difficult — going very still, very quiet, while something worked behind his eyes.

“What vote exactly?” he asked. His voice was too controlled.

“A vote of no confidence in your leadership.” The distorted voice had no texture, no emotion you could read. Just mechanically flattened words coming through a phone speaker. “She’s been working the board all week. Calling members individually. Having private lunches. Very discreet.”

“What is she telling them?”

“That you’re unstable. The shooting affected your judgment and Selene’s trauma is bleeding into your decision-making.” A pause. “She’s also using your own interview against you, the one where you said you were questioning whether the company was worth the cost.”

Selene closed her eyes briefly….of course she was.

They’d planted that story to bait Patricia. And Patricia — smart, calculated in fifteen years of boardroom warfare behind her, she had picked it up and turned it into a weapon.

“The board wouldn’t vote against us,” Avalon said, but Selene heard the uncertainty underneath. “Not after everything.”

“Wouldn’t they? Your stock price dropped six per cent in one day after that interview. Investors are calling board members directly, the market hates uncertainty and Patricia is very good at selling certainty.” The voice almost sounded sympathetic. “She’s framing it as responsible governance, protecting shareholder value and ensuring stable leadership during a difficult transition period. It doesn’t sound like a coup when she says it. It sounds completely reasonable.”

Selene’s hand tightened on Avalon’s arm.

Three days.

“How do you know all this?” she asked. “Her private lunches, calls to board members. How are you accessing this?”

“I told you already. I track her.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only answer I’m giving you right now.”

Avalon leaned toward the phone. “Then give us something else, anything, because right now we have files we can’t officially verify and a voice we can’t identify telling us we have three days before we lose everything. Do you now understand why that’s hard to act on?”

Silence.

Long enough that Selene thought he’d misjudged it. That whoever this was would hang up and they’d never hear from them again.

Then: “The lead forensic accountant at Davidson and Park. Her name is Carol Sung. Tell her you need emergency verification on offshore accounts registered under Hartwell Capital Management Ltd. She’ll know what that means. She’ll move fast.”

Avalon grabbed a pen from the coffee table. He wrote the name on his palm. “Why will she know?”

“Because she’s been building a case on those accounts for eight months. She didn’t know who they connected to yet.” Another pause. “Now she will.”

“Who does she work for?”

“Someone who’s been watching Patricia Wong for a very long time. Someone who wants justice. Use that name and you’ll have verification by morning.”

“And then what?”

“And then you call an emergency board meeting before Patricia calls hers. You present the evidence, force her hand in front of everyone.” The mechanical voice was firm now. Finally, “don't wait, deliberately. Every hour you spend thinking about it is another hour Patricia spends cementing her support, move fast or don’t move at all.”

The line went dead.

The silence that followed felt enormous.

Avalon stared at the name on his palm. Carol Sung. Davidson and Park.

“Do you believe them?” Selene asked.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not an answer.”

He looked at her. “I know. I’m working on it.”

She took his hand, turned it over and looked at the name written in hasty pen strokes across his palm.

“We only have one way to find out,” she said.

Avalon called Diana back at eleven PM.

She answered on the second ring like she'd been waiting or she never actually slept.

“Carol Sung at Davidson and Park,” he said without preamble. “Emergency verification. Offshore accounts under Hartwell Capital Management Ltd. How fast can you make that happen?”

Brief silence. “Where did you get that name?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters quite a lot actually. Davidson and Park are corporate forensic specialists and they don’t take calls at eleven PM from strangers.”

“Then call her first thing tomorrow morning…………tell her we need emergency verification and that the accounts connect to Patricia Wong.”

“Avalon—”

“Diana.” He rubbed his face. “I know how this sounds but we have three days before Patricia calls a no-confidence vote and I’m not sitting here waiting to be removed from my own company. So please just—make the call.”

Another silence.

Then she said, “I’ll call her at seven AM, she kinda owes me a favour.” A pause. “Get some sleep, you sound terrible.”

“I’ll sleep when Patricia’s off the board.”

Diana hung up.

He set down the phone and turned to find Selene watching him from the couch. She pulled a blanket around herself at some point, she looked fragile in a way she’d hate for him to notice.

“Go to bed,” he said.

“In a minute.”

“Selene—”

“In a minute.” She patted the cushion beside her. “Sit beside me just for a minute.”

He sat.

She leaned her head gently against his shoulder, careful of her side. For a while neither of them said anything.

Outside the city was doing what the city always did — moving, humming, completely indifferent to the fact that their lives were unravelling and re-ravelling and unravelling again.

“Whoever this person is, they’ve been watching Patricia for months. They knew everything, even  about the vote an hour after she scheduled it.” selene paused. “That’s not someone doing us a favour, Avalon. That’s someone running an operation.”

“I know.”

“Which means they have an agenda.”

“I know that too.”

“And we just agreed to do exactly what they told us to do.”

He didn’t answer because she was right and they both knew it.

“One step at a time,” he said finally. “We verify the accounts and if the evidence is real, we use it then deal with whoever sent it later.”

Selene was quiet.

“And if the evidence leads us into something worse?” she asked. “If this person — whatever they are — if helping us is just a way of setting up the next trap?”

“Then we fall into it with our eyes open.” He pressed his lips against her hair. “Better than being pushed in blinded.”

She let out a long slow breath.

“I hate this.”

“I know you do.”

He just held her, carefully, and let her feel whatever she needed to feel without rushing her past it.

After a while, she straightened up, wiped her eyes quickly hoping he hadn’t noticed.

He always did.

“Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow Diana will call Carol Sung, we will get verification and call the emergency board meeting.”

“And tonight?”

“Tonight we sleep.” She stood, slowly, holding her side. “Or at least try.”

Carol Sung called Diana back at seven forty-two AM.

Diana called Avalon at seven forty-three.

“The accounts are real,” she said. Her voice had a different quality — tighter, faster. The sound of someone recalibrating quickly. “Carol’s been building a financial fraud case for eight months on those exact offshore accounts. She had them traced to a shell network but hit a wall on the beneficial owners.” Diana paused. “Until now.”

“What does she have?”

“Three point two million dollars transferred to accounts Patricia Wong controls, this spreads across eighteen months in amounts designed to avoid automatic reporting thresholds. Whoever set this up knew exactly what they were doing.”

“Can Carol testify? Provide formal documentation?”

“She can provide a forensic report, certified and legally admissible.” Another pause. “Avalon, whoever your anonymous source is — Carol’s been trying to break this case for eight months and couldn’t. They just handed it to her in one night.”

“I know.”

“That should scare you.”

“It does. Call the board for an emergency session for 2PM.”

The next few hours moved in a blur.

Selene helped draft the agenda from the couch, laptop balanced on a pillow across her knees because sitting at a desk still hurt too much. She was sharp despite the pain, catching things Avalon missed, rewording sentences that were too aggressive into language that was firm but legally clean.

Maya called at noon.

“I heard rumours. Something about an emergency board meeting?”

“Where did you hear that?” Selene asked.

“I have my sources, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re always fine. It’s your default setting but are you actually okay?”

Selene looked across the room at Avalon, who was on a call with Margaret. He caught her eye and mouthed something she couldn’t read.

“Not entirely,” she admitted into the phone. “But I will be.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“You’re already doing it.”

“Lena, I’m sitting at home watching terrible daytime television—”

“I know and it's keeping you safe. That’s all I need right now.”

Maya was quiet for a moment. “I feel useless.”

“You’re not useless. You’re my reason.” Selene’s voice softened. “You’re the reason I’m fighting this hard. Don’t you forget that.”

At 1:45pm, they walked into the boardroom together.

Selene had dressed carefully. A navy suit, low heels and her hair was pulled back simply. She looked composed but professional. Nobody would know she’d taken three pain pills that morning and nearly sat back down twice getting dressed.

Avalon walked beside her. His hand briefly touched the small of her back as they entered — there and gone, their private language.

   The board was already assembled.

Robert Chen, Daniel Frost, Thomas Reeves, and three others were arranged around the long table and Patricia had sat two chairs from the head of the table. Impeccably dressed and completely at ease.

Selene studied her face as they walked in. She was looking for guilt, fear or any crack in the composure but she saw nothing.

It's either that she was innocent or she was extraordinarily good at this.

**“Thank you all for coming on short notice,” Avalon said, standing at the head of the table. His voice was steady and controlled. The CEO voice Selene had watched him develop over months. “We’ve called this meeting because we’ve discovered evidence of corporate sabotage. A systematic, deliberate and financially documented.”**

Patricia’s expression didn’t flicker, not slightly.

“That’s quite a serious accusation.” Her voice was measured and reasonable. “I assume the evidence is substantial?”

“It is.” Diana clicked her laptop. The projector lit up. “These are certified forensic financial records documenting transfers of three point two million dollars from offshore accounts controlled by Richard Castellanos to accounts controlled by a board member in this room.”

The room erupted.

Everyone is talking at once. Chairs scraping. Hands on the table.

Everyone except Patricia.

She sat very still.

“Patricia.” Robert Chen’s voice cut through the noise. He was looking at her with an expression Selene recognised — the look of someone hoping very hard to be wrong about something. “Tell me this isn’t what it looks like.”

“It’s not what it looks like,” she said calmly.

“Then what is it?”

“It’s an attempt by Avalon and Selene to remove a board member who’s been critical of their leadership. They’re using fabricated evidence to—”

“The evidence is certified by Davidson and Park,” Diana said. “Carol Sung signed the forensic report this morning. Eighteen months of transactions structured specifically to avoid automatic reporting thresholds.” She clicked again. “And these are emails from Patricia’s verified IP address to Richard Castellanos, coordinating attack points, discussion board votes and thanking him for the last payment.”

Patricia’s composure cracked.

The slightest tightening around her eyes. A single breath that came out fractionally faster than the one before it.

“Those emails are fabricated—”

“They’re metadata-verified,” Diana said. “IP addresses match devices registered to your home network and your office. Timestamps match your known location data on those dates.”

“I want independent verification—”

“You’ll have it. Davidson and Park are available for cross-examination.” Diana’s voice was almost gentle now. “Patricia, the evidence is real and we all know it’s real.”

The room had gone very quiet as Patricia looked around the table.

Selene watched her do it — watched her assess each face, look for allies, calculate odds. Fifteen years of boardroom warfare condensed into a few seconds of rapid blinking.

Finding nothing.

“Patricia.” Robert Chen again, quietly now. “Did you take money from Richard Castellanos?”

The silence lasted so long that Selene counted her own heartbeats.

Seven.

Eight.

Nine.

“Yes,” Patricia said finally.

The word fell like something irretrievable.

Everyone made a sound in his throat that wasn’t quite a sigh.

“But I didn’t know people would die,” Patricia continued. “I want that on record. I didn’t know about Marcus, Victoria or Jennifer. Richard said it was clean, just some legal pressure, simply business—”

“Three people are dead,” Avalon said. His voice was flat. “And my wife took a bullet.”

Patricia looked at Selene and  for a moment — one unguarded moment — something that looked like genuine remorse passed across her face.

“I know,” she said quietly. “I know.”

“Why?” Selene asked.

Not confrontational or in anger. She just genuinely wanted to understand.

Patricia seemed to recognise the difference.

***“Fifteen years,” she said. “Fifteen years I gave to this company. To Nene. To build something I believed in. And when she died—” She stopped. Started again. “She left everything to you. No discussion, no transition plan. Just—here, take what I helped build, give it to someone who’s still figuring out who he is.”***

“So you tried to take it back,” Selene said.

“I tried to correct it. I thought—I genuinely thought I was doing what was right for the company.”

“And the money? The three million dollars?”

Patricia looked at her hands. “That was—” She stopped. “That was where I lost myself. I knew it then and still  know that now.”

The room was very quiet.

Avalon looked at Diana. She nodded once.

“You’ll resign today,” Avalon said. “Your shares will be sold and you will have no further involvement with Pierce Holdings in any capacity.” He paused. “And we won’t press criminal charges, provided you cooperate fully with any ongoing investigations.”

Patricia nodded.

“I’ll have my attorney send the paperwork.”

She gathered her things, and at the door, she paused.

“For what it’s worth—” She turned back to look directly at both of them. “I think Nene would be proud of what you’ve built and who you’re becoming.” A long pause. “I was too angry to see it clearly before.”

Then she left.

The boardroom sat in silence.

Robert Chen exhaled heavily. “Well.”

“Well,” Thomas agreed.

“What happens now?” Daniel asked.

“Now we rebuild,” Avalon said. “New board member, new direction but same foundation.” He looked around the table. “Pierce Holdings isn’t going anywhere.”

That evening, Selene stood at the window.

The pain medication had worn off an hour ago and she hadn’t taken more. She wanted to feel this clearly. To stand in the quiet of what they’d done today and feel the full weight of it.

Avalon found her there and stood beside her.

His phone buzzed on the windowsill.

They looked at it together.

Unknown number.

One message.

*Well done. Patricia Wong has been removed although she was only one piece of a much larger puzzle. There are others still. People who are closer than you think. I’ll be in touch.*

Then, after a pause, a second message.

And Selene — the person who really sent those files to TechCrunch about Elena? It wasn’t Richard, nor was it Marcus….you will have to dig deeper.

Selene’s blood went cold.

“What does that mean?” she whispered. “If it wasn’t Richard or Marcus who leaked my medical records then—”