Enraptured

Chapter 40

"Mr. Nikolaos, the board is ready for you in conference room 1."

I nodded as I handed Lukas a folder of private paperwork and grabbed my phone. "Did my father decide to intrude on today's meeting as I expected?"

"Yes, he just messaged me an hour ago and told me to bring him a dark roast coffee with 1 creamer and 2 sugars."

Of course, he did.

"That's fine. Just tell the baristas downstairs to bring one up for him and to leave it outside if we are in the middle of the meeting." I closed my laptop and handed it to Lukas. "Join me in the meeting room after you finish making a copy of those papers and leaving the original copy in my office."

He raised an eyebrow in confusion but nodded in agreement anyway.

After he left my office, I started to make my way to conference room 1 on the other side of the floor from my office.

I planned to reorganize the hierarchy of the outer families at today's board meeting as I had announced at the gala, and it seems that my father had found out about my plan as expected. I knew that it would be seen as a major decision that many members of families would not look forward to, including my father, who tended to be more traditional, but I had no reason to support a bunch of old geezers who couldn't teach their successors well enough to know not to insult their head's fiancée. 

As I neared the conference room, several voices floated out of the ajar door.

"Julius, is your son actually going to cut off our families today? I thought he might've said it out of anger last Friday, but then he suddenly called for a board meeting and so soon after what happened."

"Is he even allowed to overturn a centuries-old alliance unilaterally?"

"You can talk to him for us, right, Julius? We've been friends for ages."

My father let out a heavy sigh. It was obvious that he didn't know how to handle the situation. "I... I guess I could try to talk to him... but you know how my son—"

I opened the door before my father could finish his sentence. Arching an eyebrow, I asked, "How I am what?"

The entire room of old geezers immediately fell silent at my entrance, not wanting to get in between a father and his son.

I closed the door before me with an echoing click and stalked toward the head of the table. Without giving much of a glance to my father, I continued, "I don't see why you insisted on attending today's meeting, but your interference isn't going to change anything."

He sighed, "Demetrius, please think about it again. You're talking about ending a friendship that's lasted for more than a century."

"I have no need for 'friends' that will soon rot away anyway." I motioned for Lukas to enter and took the stack of copies of paperwork from him. I continued, "Most of you sitting here today at already in your 50s and 60s. If you were lucky like my father, you would've been able to step down 10 years ago, but I've seen your successors, and I can see why you can't."

The line of old geezers sitting along the sides of their tables clenched their jaws and looked away in shame, well aware that my words were right on the dot even if they didn't want to agree with it.

"After all the unnecessary commotions that your offsprings caused at my event, I've come to the decision that maintaining relationships with the families will only cause more harm than good in the future. As such, I plan to cease all friendly relations with all families to purely business relations. I will also cut off the investments in the Chancellor and Whinselor families as I want nothing to do with these two families from now on."