Security came rushing over and immediately closed in around me, bristling with aggression.
Sara let out a cold laugh, arms folded across her chest. "Sharon Fox, is it? I'd suggest you behave yourself."
"The State Commerce Bureau just set up a new Investment Review Board, and they sent a team down to Riverside City today. My father pulled some strings to personally invite the team leader to this banquet."
"We're talking about someone with real power. Cross them, and you won't walk out of here in one piece."
Barret's eyes lit up at that. His spine straightened instantly.
"You hear that? The team leader of the Review Board."
He looked at me, dripping with smugness.
"Fox Technologies is a key enterprise backed by the city government. You want to cause a scene here? I'll make sure you spend the rest of your life behind bars."
I looked at the guards circling me, then at Barret and Sara standing there like they'd already won. I couldn't help it. I laughed.
"Oh? The team leader of the Review Board?"
I glanced at him, unhurried.
"Well, since you're both so eager for this team leader to arrive, I think I'll stay after all."
"Let's see who ends up not walking out of here in one piece."
My composure clearly rattled Sara. She scoffed, the contempt in her eyes deepening.
"Keep pretending! Go ahead!"
"Looking the way you do, I bet you don't even know what the Review Board is. And you're putting on airs?"
Her eyes rolled so far back they nearly disappeared.
Barret sneered again and again. He waved the security guards off, his gaze turning venomous.
"You really want to make a scene? Fine."
His stare grew colder. "I'll show you, with my own hands, exactly where I stand now. I'll make you understand that you couldn't measure up to my little toe if you had a hundred lifetimes."
My father nodded immediately.
"Once the team leader gets here," he said with a sneer, "we'll ask them to serve as a witness. Then we can have this deranged liar locked up on the spot."
My mother glared at me with the same clenched-jaw hatred.
"That's right. We'll make her see just how stupid she was to run away all those years ago."
"A worthless girl thinking she can turn the world upside down? Barret is worth hundreds of millions now. What gives you the right to say a word against him?"
She looked at me like I was her mortal enemy. And yet I was her own flesh and blood.
I narrowed my eyes.
They really hadn't disappointed me. They were exactly as I'd imagined, down to the last detail.
"Then let's wait and see."
I poured myself a cup of tea, unbothered.
The truth was, I'd uncovered everything within my first year back in the country.
The one who drugged my food was my biological mother.
The one who contacted the human traffickers and used forged documents to sell me onto a labor ship was my biological father.
And Barret, the parasite who'd hidden behind them the whole time, reaping every benefit while they did the dirty work, was the mastermind behind all of it.
They used that two million three hundred thousand dollars to buy out my entire life. And they used it to pave a golden road for Barret Fox.
So after I clawed my way back from the sea, half-dead and barely breathing, I buried my identity. I survived on recycling scraps to pay for school.
I studied like a woman possessed. I passed the civil service exams. I climbed, rung by rung, all the way up.
Countless nights I lay awake, rehearsing this exact day in my mind.
What I wanted wasn't just an apology.
What I wanted was to destroy the lives they'd built on the ashes of mine.
"Sharon, it's too late for regret."
Barret walked toward me, his voice low.
"Surviving the ocean was sheer luck. But since you made it out alive, you should've stayed hidden in the gutter like a rat. Instead, you have the nerve to show your face in front of me?"
His gaze grew more vicious by the second.
