Transmigration; Married to My Ex-Fiancé's Uncle-Chapter 191; Executive meeting 8

"We’ll discuss your judgment later," Lu Cheng said quietly, his voice cold enough to freeze water. "Your spectacular failure to properly assess who and what Lin Shuyin had become. Right now, we need to figure out how to contain this situation before she realizes just how much leverage she actually has. Before she understands she could probably take over the entire company if she pushed hard enough."

But in the hallway outside, walking back toward her corner office with her team surrounding her like a protective detail around a head of state, Shuyin smiled.

She knew exactly how much leverage she had.

She understood her power completely.

And she was just getting started.

This was only the opening move in a much longer game, and she intended to win every single round. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

The board meeting had just concluded, and the door barely closed behind Lin Shuyin and her enforcers before the carefully maintained facade of corporate professionalism shattered completely.

Director Chen was the first to explode, his chair scraping violently against the floor as he stood with such force that it nearly tipped backward. His face had gone from pale to flushed red, rage and fear warring for dominance.

"What the hell was that?" he demanded, his voice rising to nearly a shout. "What did we just witness? That woman just walked in here and threatened every single one of us, threatened the Chief himself, and we just... we just let her?"

"Are we going to sit here and be trampled upon by this outsider?"

"We didn’t have a choice, do we?" Director Liu said weakly, still looking slightly ill. Her hands trembled as she reached for the water glass in front of her, taking several long sips to settle her nerves.

"There’s always a choice!" Director Chen snapped, though his voice lacked conviction. "We’re the board of Lu South Group. We control one of the largest branches in the country. We don’t bow to threats from.... from....."

"From someone who apparently knows every illegal thing we’ve ever done?" Director Wang finished bitterly, finally finding his voice though it came out hoarse. "Someone who has documentation, account numbers, specific dates, and amounts? Someone who could send half of us to prison with a single phone call?"

The room fell silent again, the reality of their situation settling over them like a suffocating blanket.

Lu Cheng remained seated at the head of the table, his expression unreadable, his fingers steepled in front of him. But his eyes had shifted to his son, and the look he gave Lu Zeyan carried the weight of profound disappointment mixed with barely suppressed fury.

Executive VP Huang, who had been notably quiet since his affair and embezzlement had been exposed so casually, finally spoke up. His voice was tight with confusion and something approaching panic.

"I don’t understand," he said, looking directly at Lu Zeyan. "That woman was your secretary for six years. Your secretary. You were engaged to her. You controlled every aspect of her life, her schedule, her work, her social interactions. You’ve told us countless times how compliant she was, how easily managed, how she never questioned anything you told her to do."

He leaned forward, his expression desperate for answers that would make sense of what had just happened.

"So how?" Huang continued. "How did we not know she was capable of this? How did you not know? You were sleeping with her, for God’s sake! You were planning to marry her! And in all that time, you never noticed that she had the capability to systematically blackmail an entire corporate board? That she could waltz in here and threaten the Chief himself without breaking a sweat?"

All eyes turned to Lu Zeyan, who had been sitting frozen in his chair, staring at nothing. The weight of their collective attention seemed to physically press down on him.

"I..." he started, then stopped. His throat worked as he swallowed hard. "She wasn’t like this before. She was never like this. I’m as shocked as you all are..."

"Obviously she was," Director Chen said acidly. "She just hid it from you. Or you were too blind to see it."

"No," Lu Zeyan insisted, his voice gaining strength as he tried to defend himself. "You don’t understand. Lin Shuyin was... she was compliant. Obedient. She never questioned my decisions, never pushed back on anything I asked her to do. She was perfect for what I needed, someone competent enough to handle my schedule and correspondence, but not ambitious enough to be a threat. Someone who knew her place."

"Clearly, she knew her place," Director Liu said with heavy irony. "She knew exactly where she was in the hierarchy and exactly how to climb out of it by stepping on all of us. Or are you blind?"

Lu Zeyan shook his head, his hands clenching into fists on the table. "That’s what I’m trying to tell you, this isn’t the same person. Something changed. The woman I knew would never have had the confidence to do what we just saw. She would never have had the knowledge. She barely spoke up in meetings when she was my secretary. She always deferred to my judgment, always, and waited for my approval before making even minor decisions."

"Then what changed?" Lu Cheng’s voice cut through the discussion like a knife, quiet but carrying absolute authority. "What happened between the time you discarded her and now that she had transformed from a timid secretary into someone who can threaten us all with complete impunity?"

Lu Zeyan struggled to find an answer. "I don’t know. Everything was... Truly cleaned up.... I didn’t expect her to be free..." How could he have known that she would be out in no time and found them off guard?

"Well, she is," Director Wang muttered.

Director Zhou, the marketing director who’d been exposed for accepting bribes, spoke up for the first time. His voice was thoughtful, analytical, falling into the strategic thinking that had made him successful before his ethics had become flexible.