The heavy mahogany doors slammed shut behind the last board member, leaving the room dead quiet. The silence pressed in like a physical weight, broken only by the faint hum of the air conditioning and the distant murmur of traffic far below. Not one of them had looked him in the eye on the way out.
Adrian stood alone at the end of the long glass table, staring at the empty leather chairs like a man marooned on a desert island. Sweating profusely into his crumpled collar, his hair sticking to his forehead in damp strands, he took two shallow, desperate breaths.
His mind was spinning like a broken roulette wheel, landing on nothing but ruin no matter how many times it turned. Every face from the meeting flashed behind his eyes… the pity, the poorly hidden satisfaction, the men who had spent years smiling at him while waiting for exactly this moment.
Forty-eight hours. No… forty-seven hours and forty minutes now.
