Chapter 100
Chapter 100:
“I can cut their clinical funding supply chain by tomorrow morning,” Cole said, his voice hard. “They are nothing p>
Declan leaned back in his chair. He looked at Cole’s arrogant face and quietly abandoned his last, faint impulse to offer the man a warning.
Julian leaned forward with a sloppy grin. “I think Declan just has his eye on one of the female employees over there,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows.
A barely perceptible muscle ticked in Cole’s jaw. For a fraction of a second, June’s cold, distant eyes flashed across his mind, followed by a sharp, irrational spike of jealousy deep in his stomach. He shoved it down immediately. June was a gold digger. She was irrelevant to high-level corporate warfare.
Declan raised his water glass and hid the predatory gleam in his eyes behind the rim. “I am only interested in hunting the most valuable prey,” he said smoothly.
Alycia pivoted loudly to the subject of the upcoming charity gala and her dress fittings. Declan ignored her entirely, his gaze dropping to his plate.
The remainder of the dinner passed in suffocating, brittle tension. Cole sensed a shift in Declan’s manner — something altered, something withheld — but his ego refused to look at it directly. Across the table, Declan cut his steak in unhurried silence, chewing slowly, quietly counting down the hours until Cole’s entire reality was burned to the ground.
The next morning.
Inside the sterile core laboratory of Apex Bio, the air hummed with the steady rhythm of the ventilation systems. June stood at her stainless-steel workstation in a pristine white cleanroom suit, her eyes fixed to the lens of a high-powered electron microscope.
Silas came through the decontamination airlock at a near-jog, a thick, gold-embossed envelope in his hand and his chest heaving slightly from the pace. He stopped beside her lab bench.
“We got it,” he said, his voice trembling with suppressed excitement.
𝘛𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘯
June lifted her eyes from the microscope and pulled off her latex gloves.
Silas held out the envelope. “The organizing committee just confirmed. Apex Bio has been granted a core VIP seat at the Global Bio-Tech Summit p>
June slid the heavy cardstock from the envelope. The venue was the Javits Center in New York. A wave of exhaustion moved through her — she hated corporate networking, hated the cameras and the rehearsed smiles. She opened her mouth to tell Silas to go in her place.
“Wait,” Silas said, lowering his voice. “The committee finalized the keynote speaker an hour ago p>
June looked at him.
“It is Dr. Zhang,” Silas said.
The name struck her chest like a physical blow. Her fingers clamped down hard on the edge of the gold invitation, the sharp cardstock biting into her skin. For two full seconds, she forgot to breathe.
Dr. Zhang was not simply a Nobel laureate. He was the medical titan who had broken every institutional rule to admit her into the Johns Hopkins medical program at the age of fifteen. He was her mentor.