Revenge Wears My Ring novel Chapter 86

Madeline was still daydreaming, her mind drifting toward the end of the workday and the Hermes bag Winston had promised to buy her. The sudden smack of a flying file jolted her back to reality.

“Ow! What the hell was that for?” Her voice pitched high, all pretense of professionalism forgotten as she glared across the open-plan office.

“Go and tell every manager and above in the Finance Center to gather in the top-floor boardroom in thirty minutes. Anyone who’s late can consider themselves out of a job.” Gwyneth’s tone was cold, mechanical—like she was reading instructions from a manual, not speaking to another human being.

Then Gwyneth slowly turned her head and gave Madeline a thin, wintry smile. “That includes you.”

A chill ran down Madeline’s spine, her heels screeching against the tile as she scrambled to her feet.

What now?

She’s impossible!

“I’ll go right now,” Madeline stammered, gathering her things and sashaying out of the office as quickly as her nerves would allow.

——

The air in the boardroom on the top floor felt as heavy as lead.

The digital clock on the wall ticked silently, each second punctuating the oppressive silence. Nearly twenty minutes had dragged by since Gwyneth’s one-hour deadline had expired.

At last, the door creaked open at an agonizingly slow pace.

The first to enter was a man with a bloated belly, his suit jacket straining at the buttons.

Yohan, the Director of Finance—and Madeline’s uncle.

He wore a cocky, dismissive grin, one that announced he didn’t take any of this seriously. Trailing behind him were a handful of supervisors, all with the same lazy, evasive look in their eyes.

Yohan swaggered over to the table, didn’t wait for Gwyneth to say a word, and yanked out a chair with a screech. He plopped into it, shifting his bulk uncomfortably as if his belly made it impossible to sit any other way.

He glanced up at Gwyneth, who sat at the head of the table in impenetrable silence, and spoke in a deliberately casual drawl that grated on the nerves.

“Ms. Fletcher, what’s the big emergency? You had to pull us all up here? You know, it’s the end of the quarter—Finance is swamped, we’re knee-deep in closing reports. It’s almost quitting time…” His words trailed off with unmistakable annoyance.

You’re making us stay late.

The other supervisors nodded in agreement, stealing glances at Gwyneth but never quite meeting her eyes.

Madeline clutched her folder tighter, her knuckles white.

Flinching under Yohan’s glare, Quinlan pressed on, voice trembling as he spun his story: “Yes! A technical issue. Just yesterday afternoon, the finance system was hit by a sophisticated cyberattack! The servers went down, the data was completely compromised. Our IT team worked all night, but everything’s still a mess. The financial report Winston signed off on—it wasn’t even fully backed up to the secure server, and the raw data’s been so badly damaged, it’s unreadable.” He was practically breathless, his eyes darting everywhere but Gwyneth’s face, like a student reciting a flimsy excuse for not turning in homework.

“A cyberattack? Compromised data? Unreadable reports?” For the first time, Gwyneth lifted her gaze.

Her eyes were calm, cold—like the surface of a frozen lake. She stared straight at Quinlan, who looked ready to collapse, then let her gaze drift to Yohan, whose expression had begun to sour, and finally to the thin stack of folders clutched to Madeline’s chest.

A faint, glacial smile tugged at the corners of Gwyneth’s lips.

“Is that so?” Her voice was soft, but it sliced through the room with chilling clarity. Quinlan paled as if he’d been doused in ice water.

She turned her attention from him to Yohan, her tone almost playful in its composure.

“Yohan.”

“Your deputy here says the finance system was hacked, the core data maliciously altered, and now the critical quarterly report is ‘unreadable.’”

“What a coincidence.”