Chapter 3 - The Gathering at the PlazaBy 10:00 AM the following morning, the financial and corporate sectors of Manhattan were thrown into an unprecedented state of chaotic panic.
Harrison Hollis—Claire Hollis’s billionaire father and the Chief Executive Officer of Hollis Global Energy—was furious over the public cancellation of the sixty-million-dollar alliance.
Hollis called an emergency press conference and board session in the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, intending to publicly denounce Damian Rourke and force a corporate boycott of Rourke Logistics.
At 2:00 PM, six midnight-black armored Maybachs glided onto the red carpet outside the Plaza Hotel.
When the heavy mahogany doors of the grand ballroom were thrown open, forty news photographers and two hundred elite corporate guests went dead, breathlessly silent.
Walking down the central carpeted aisle, flanked by Leo and twenty armed Rourke operators, was Damian.
He wore an immaculate black suit, his posture tall, broad, and unyielding.
And walking directly beside his right shoulder, wearing a custom emerald silk gown designed to celebrate every soft, gorgeous curve of her figure, her dark hair falling in glossy waves over her shoulders, holding her head like a queen, was me.
Claire Hollis sat near the head table beside her father. Her jaw dropped in total, speech-bound horror as her bloodshot eyes locked onto the plus-size event coordinator she had humiliated twelve hours earlier, now wearing a ten-carat flawless emerald-cut diamond ring on her left hand.
Harrison Hollis jumped out of his chair, his face red with sudden, furious outrage. "Rourke! Have you lost your mind?! You brought this... this common event worker into a national energy council meeting?!"
Damian didn't hurry. He guided me smoothly to the head table, pulling out the central executive chair, holding it open for me with an absolute, royal grace.
I sat down calmly, crossing my hands over my five-month pregnant belly, looking straight at Claire with zero fear in my hazel eyes.
Damian walked up to Harrison Hollis, stopping two inches from his face.
"Hollis," Damian spoke.
His thunderous baritone echoed through the high-ceilinged room like a rolling wave of thunder, freezing the blood in every man's veins.
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"Damian...!" Hollis stammered, taking a fast step back. "Listen to me! The sixty-million-dollar energy lease—"
"The energy lease is terminated, Harrison," Damian interrupted deadpan. "And as of nine o'clock this morning... the Rourke Trust acquired fifty-two percent of the primary debt mortgages on your shipping terminals in Brooklyn."
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