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Chapter 858:
June turned her head slowly. Her eyes found his face. Her expression was completely dead — not a frown, not a glare, but the absolute, chilling indifference of someone examining something already beneath their notice. Arthur’s smile faltered under the weight of it.
The head auctioneer stepped to the mahogany podium and struck his gavel twice. The cracks echoed through the silent hall.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the bidding for the core neural-blocker patents of Apex Bio. The opening bid is set at five hundred million dollars p>
A paddle went up in the third row almost immediately. “Five hundred and fifty million p>
“Six hundred million,” came a voice from the left aisle.
Before the natural escalation could continue, Arthur’s assistant thrust a white numbered paddle into the air.
“One billion dollars p>
𝖳𝘩𝖾 𝗯𝘦𝘀𝘁 re𝗏𝗂𝗲𝗐𝘀 𝘰n
A collective gasp swept the room. Several representatives from mid-tier investment firms set their paddles down without a word. Arthur’s brute-force opening had kicked them out of the game in a single stroke.
June’s jaw tightened. Her fingernails pressed into the fabric of her trousers. She turned to signal Vera to raise their paddle.
Easton’s hand closed firmly around her wrist, stopping her.
“Let the bullets fly first,” he murmured, his voice a low, steadying rumble.
He stood, buttoned his jacket, and picked up the heavy legal document. He walked around the row and stopped directly in front of Arthur Pendleton. The hall watched in stunned silence.
Easton raised the document and brought it down onto Arthur’s writing table with a crack that made him flinch.
“This is a preliminary injunction draft backed by the top antitrust litigators in the state,” Easton said, his voice carrying just far enough for the surrounding rows to hear. He leaned in close. “If NovaTech attempts a hostile acquisition of this patent, we will bury you in federal antitrust litigation for the next ten years. I will secure injunction after injunction until this technology rots in a courtroom and your sovereign backers bleed out from legal fees p>
Arthur looked down at the document. The multi-billion-dollar penalty clauses on the first page were highlighted in sharp yellow. The color drained from his face. A bead of sweat appeared at his temple.
He opened his mouth to respond.
The encrypted burner phone in his breast pocket buzzed violently, the sound obnoxiously loud in the tense silence. Arthur pulled it out and pressed it to his ear.
“Pendleton,” he snapped.
A heavily distorted mechanical voice came through the speaker — Crawford Love, behind a voice scrambler. “Three seconds,” the voice hissed. “Put the paddle down. If you don’t, every major financial network in America receives the footage of what you did on that yacht in Monaco last summer p>
Arthur stopped breathing. His knuckles turned white around the phone. His head snapped up toward the back of the hall.
In the elevated media gallery, three journalists wearing Love Media press badges had risen from their seats. They held telephoto lenses trained directly at his face, fingers resting on the shutter buttons, waiting.
Arthur’s heart hammered against his ribs. The dual threat — Easton’s legal guillotine and Crawford’s media execution — was collapsing his nerve from two directions at once.