"I think I've made myself perfectly clear."
The next second, Gladys slapped a stack of documents onto the table.
The moment I saw those reports, my pupils contracted. My fists clenched before I could stop them.
Gladys watched the color drain from my face, and a triumphant smile spread across hers.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm guessing none of you know this yet. Your fearless, all-powerful Mr. Barnes here? The man who seems so invincible?" She paused, savoring the moment. "He's actually completely impotent."
"That is the real reason I've been stalling. The real reason I refused to marry him."
She swept her gaze across the room, her voice dripping with equal parts pity and contempt.
"Let me ask you all something. If you were a woman, could you stand it? Sharing a bed every single night with a man who is, in every sense of the word, useless? Could you endure a lifetime of being married to a corpse?"
Silence swallowed the conference room whole.
Her words hit like a bolt of lightning. My entire body trembled. My stomach churned violently, nausea clawing its way up my throat.
I had principles. Before marriage, I would never lay a hand on the woman I loved.
A year ago, Gladys had attended a party. The crowd there was a cesspool of shady characters, the kind of people who'd resort to any filthy trick in the book.
She'd always resented me for keeping tabs on her and never let me tag along. But that time, she'd done a complete one-eighty, wheedling and coaxing until I agreed to go with her.
That night, I drank something that had been spiked.
Through the haze, I realized someone was undoing my buttons.
Three men. Stubble on their chins. Hands on my clothes.
My body was dead weight. I couldn't fight back.
At the very last second, the door was kicked open.
Gladys stormed in with a team of bodyguards and subdued the three men in moments.
She threw herself at my side, clutching me, sobbing so hard she could barely breathe.
"Asher! Asher, are you okay? I'm so sorry. This is all my fault. I did this to you!"
"We've been together three years and you've never once touched me. I kept wondering if maybe you had some kind of problem, or... or if you just didn't like women at all!"
"I lost my mind. I came up with this idiotic plan to have someone test you."
"But I never thought they'd actually go through with it..."
At the hospital, the doctor said the drugs had been too potent. There could be lasting consequences for the rest of my life.
Gladys knelt beside the hospital bed, gripping my hand, weeping until her voice broke. She swore to me over and over again.
"Asher, don't worry."
"No matter what the results say, I will never leave you."
"You're the only one for me. For the rest of my life."
In that moment, looking at her swollen, bloodshot eyes and tear-streaked face, even as my body screamed with pain and the humiliation threatened to crush me, I softened again.
I even convinced myself that what she'd done came from a place of insecurity. That she cared too much. That her love made her desperate.
After that, she did seem genuinely remorseful for a long time.
She stopped going out to parties. She was careful around me, attentive, always asking how I was feeling.
I even believed that the incident had brought us closer.
But before long, my test results came back.
Physically, there was nothing wrong. The damage was psychological.
If I couldn't overcome it, I might never be able to be intimate with anyone for the rest of my life.
Shortly after that, Gladys arranged for Derek Voss, a broke college graduate she'd been sponsoring, to be placed inside Barnes Group.
And now, today, the very thing she'd done to me had become her weapon. Her excuse not to marry me. Her ammunition to humiliate me in front of everyone.
Whispers erupted around the table. Every last one of them mocking me. Pitying her.
What none of them knew was that my psychological condition had already healed completely. It had resolved itself the day I set a wedding date with Ada.
I just hadn't told anyone. Especially not Gladys.
I looked at her, my gaze steady.
"Gladys, do you have any idea what the consequences are for spreading false claims in public?"
She jabbed a finger at the report on the table, her eyes brimming with arrogance and disgust.
"Whether it's false or not, you know the truth better than anyone."
"If it were me, I would never marry a man who's lost his most basic function. A waste of space."
"If you're going to force me into this marriage, at least give me an outlet. I don't want anything else. I just want Derek."
Then she looked at me, her tone dripping with condescension, as though she were doing me a favor.
"Don't worry. I won't completely disregard the years we've spent together. Let's put it this way: I'll show up to the wedding on time."
"After that, we each do our own thing. No interference."
With that, she took Derek's arm and walked out.
When the meeting ended, I drove straight back to the Barnes estate.
If Gladys had the nerve to humiliate me like that, then the Pruitt family could kiss their name goodbye.
