MARCUS
People could be so ungrateful.
After everything I’d done for Reynard Tech., after devoting my entire life to making that company a success and building good relationships with every single employee, they still turned around and stabbed me in the back as soon as they found out how bad things had gotten.
Damn fucking traitors.
I sat in my study and stared at the dozens of resignation emails from workers in every department. Our factories in Texas, Shanghai and Washington had to be temporarily shut down, because there just weren’t enough workers to keep them running anymore. Qualcomm were also Increasing their charges per chip, and it just didn’t seem possible to weather this storm anymore.
“Fuck!” I groaned, shoving my computer aside and staring up at the ceiling. I’d done everything I could to keep us alive, but it just wasn’t working. After sacking 50% of our employees, another 20% decided to resign voluntarily. That would have been a good thing, except for the fact that everything ground to a halt because of this. Already, the disgruntled employees were talking to the press, telling them just how bad things were getting. Sooner or later, the whole ship was going to sink.
And I was going to be the captain who drove us into the iceberg.
קנר
I stood and made my way to the window, a mixture of shame and anger coursing through my veins. How could this happen? How could I have been so stupid? I thought I was being careful, covering my tracks and making sure that everything went smoothly. I never took money out of the company unless I knew that it wasn’t going to affect the balance sheet. I didn’t live an extravagant lifestyle, nor was I stupid enough to pay for anything I didn’t need.
And then, suddenly, it hit me like a ton of bricks.
“For fucks sake!” I groaned, realising just how badly I screwed up. I should have seen this coming from a mile away. Maybe if I wasn’t so focused on revenge, I wouldn’t have ended up in this situation. In the last ten years of being the CEO of Reynard Tech, I had only ever used company funds for my own personal interests three times.
And now they were coming back to haunt me.
The first was when I decided I was going to marry Olivia, so I took out fifty million dollars to pay for everything I could use to woo her, including buying a Ferrari for her which cost over five million dollars, and taking very expensive trips which Reynard Tech, was unknowingly paying for.
And then for the wedding, I took out another fifty million dollars to rent out a private island for two weeks so the wedding could take place, and another month afterwards for our honeymoon. And with all the expensive gifts I had to buy for my wife, the money was soon gone. It was a dent in the finances of the company, but no one seemed to notice. When you’re worth over six billion dollars, a hundred million dollars in losses was nothing. You could easily write that off without even blinking. After all, nobody would care about the company losing less than 2% of its assets in over six months.
But then, with Emily, I decided I needed to do something even bigger. Something that could easily dwarf my previous wedding and make Olivia burn with jealousy when she saw it. The odds were stacked against us from the start, and I knew that it would take a lot of work to have the public accept Emily and made her shine as the new Mrs Reynard. And what better way to do that than by paying for the most expensive wedding in the history of mankind? I knew it was to leave a dent, but making Olivia jealous was so worth it. And when signed the cheque, I actually felt it in my chest.
Six hundred million dollars was taken out of Reynard Tech that day. Not even a royal wedding cost that much. And
+25 BONUS
Chapter Twenty–Thier
a large chunk of that went to renting an even bigger private island, and building the glass palace that Emily always dreamed of getting married in. Entertainment cost around 120 million dollars, with private performances by all. the A–list celebrities that she wanted. Her wedding dress cost over 30 million, the wedding ring and jewelry cost over 80 million, and the guest experience was another 100 million. After paying for food and drinks, security, and another 130 million in gifts for my new wife (including a private yacht named after her which cost 50 million dollars, a one–of–a–kind supercar which cost over 30 million dollars and a luxury apartment in the south of France which cost 50 million dollars), the expenses were enormous. And the worst part was that I didn’t get the satisfaction of knowing whether Liv had seen it or not.
The result of that extravagant wedding was that Reynard Tech went into a downward spiral, crippling the company and causing stocks to crash. At the time, I thought it would be worth it. But now, looking back on everything, marrying Emily might just have killed the company.
