Chapter 10

“A nobody who spends all day sunning herself on a mountaintop?”

I finished her sentence for her, then stood and looked down at her.

“Xiao, you studied abroad. You should understand the importance of due diligence before investing.”

“You looked into Han’s Tea’s accounts. You looked into my uncle’s weaknesses. So why didn’t you investigate who the largest limited partner was when Dingxin Venture Capital was founded?”

I looked into her frightened eyes, my voice still calm.

“My mother left me more than just eleven tea mountains.”

Han Xu completely broke.

He suddenly lunged at me, desperate to grab my wrist.

But he didn’t dare use force. He only begged in a low, desperate voice.

“A Chi, I was wrong. Greed blinded me for a moment.”

His eyes were red, his gentle façade utterly torn away. Only naked fear remained.

“For your uncle’s sake, for the more than ten years I gave my life to the tea estate, please give me a way out.”

“I don’t need the new company. I’ll return all the money. Let me stay—even as an ordinary manager.”

“Return it?”

I looked at Han Xu’s tear-streaked face. I didn’t step back or look away.

“What could you possibly return?”

I took another file from Liu Zhengming and flipped straight to the last page.

“To cover the holes in the foreign shell companies you registered, you drained the tea estate’s working capital and mortgaged the old-house renovation project to borrow fifty million from private lenders.”

My voice echoed down the hallway, each word sharp as a knife.

“Now that Dingxin has withdrawn its investment, your entire cash flow has collapsed.”

“The fifty million is accruing interest on top of interest. You couldn’t repay it even if you sold yourself.”

Han Xu went rigid.

Every hidden account he’d thought he’d concealed so carefully had been dug up from the roots.

At last, Xiao couldn’t maintain her elegance any longer.

She shoved Han Xu away and pointed at me, her voice shrill and nearly breaking.

“Shen Zhi! You planned this all along, didn’t you?”

“You pretended not to know, let us take your profit distributions, and watched us pour money into the company!”

“You wanted to drive us into a corner!”

Watching her scream out of control, I shook my head.

“I didn’t scheme against you.”

“Your own greed put the noose around your neck.”

I looked into her bloodshot eyes.

“If you’d been content to collect your management fees, I wouldn’t even have cared whether you took most of the profits.”

“But you should never have touched the legacy my mother left behind.”

Just then, the elevator chimed and opened.

My uncle, Shen Peifeng, stumbled out, supported by Chen Lan.

He’d clearly rushed over as soon as he heard the news. Even his shirt buttons were done up wrong.

“A Chi! Han Xu!”

Seeing the hallway taut with tension, my uncle’s eyes filled with tears.

“What happened? Chen Lan said you were going to seal the company and have the police arrest Han Xu?”

He pulled away from Chen Lan and hurried to me, gripping my arm.

“A Chi, you’re family. Can’t we sit down and talk this out properly?”

“Han Xu must have his reasons. Don’t drive him to his death!”

My heart pricked at the wrinkles on my uncle’s face.

This was the classic favoritism found in every angst-filled story.