The Shareholder Vote
The travel from Confrontation ground — Sterling Media boardroom to Climax arena — Rutherford Studios shareholder auditorium consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
# Chapter 6: The Shareholder Vote
The boardroom screen glowed with the image of Jace—small, backpack slung over one shoulder, being led through the garden gate by a man whose face Sebastian recognized from his own security rotation. Not Dorian’s handpicked team. A hire from the second tier. A man whose background check had apparently been as fabricated as Flynn Sterling’s concern.
Sebastian’s eyes tracked the timestamp in the corner of the feed. Nine minutes old. Jace was nine minutes older into whatever trap the Sterlings had laid, and he was standing in a boardroom that felt like it was shrinking around him.
“You’re bluffing.” Sebastian kept his voice level, though his peripheral vision was already cataloging exits. Two doors. One window wall. Four Sterling associates positioned near the far end of the table. “You wouldn’t be stupid enough to touch a child on camera.”
Flynn Sterling smiled like a man who had been waiting years for this exact moment. “We’re not touching him. We’re *relocating* him. There’s a difference.” He tapped the screen again, and the image switched to a split-view: the auditorium across the lot, already filling with shareholders, and a second feed showing a black SUV pulling into a private garage three blocks away. “Your boy’s going to wait somewhere comfortable until the vote is concluded. Once you’ve stepped down, he’ll be returned to his mother, unharmed. You have my word.”
“Your word means nothing.” Sebastian stepped closer to the table, letting the weight of his presence do the talking. “If anything happens to him—”
“Then you’ll be too busy being deposed to do anything about it.” Cole Sterling rose from his chair, straightening his cufflinks with theatrical calm. “The vote is in forty minutes. Your board has already seen the projections. Rutherford Studios is bleeding value, and the rumors about your abandoned son have made you a liability in every market that matters.”
Sebastian’s jaw did not tighten. Instead, he counted the seconds of silence tick by on the wall clock behind them—measured breaths, calculated beats—and let the room hang in the tension Cole had created. Then he turned to Dorian, who had positioned himself silently by the door.
“Security breach at the garden gate. Third tier.” Sebastian didn’t need to say more.
Dorian’s hand went to the comm in his ear, and his eyes flickered with something dangerous. “I’ll find him.”
The last word was still settling when Dorian slipped out the side door, and Sebastian knew—with a certainty that settled cold in his chest—that he was walking into whatever distraction the Sterlings had prepared. Dorian was the best, but the best could still be led astray when the bait was a child.
But Dorian had something the Sterlings didn’t know about. And neither did they know about Jace’s shoes.
—
The Rutherford Studios auditorium held four hundred seats, and every one of them was filled. Institutional investors, independent shareholders, entertainment press, and enough security personnel to manage a state visit. Isabella sat in the third row, wedged between Helena and a retired cinematographer who kept muttering about the stock price, and she hadn’t looked at her phone once. Because looking at her phone would mean looking for texts from Sebastian, and he’d promised her—*promised* her—that he would handle this.
The call from Dorian, thirty minutes ago, had been brief.
“Track the shoes,” he’d said. “The silver pair with the blue accents. Sebastian had them specially made.”
And then the line had gone dead, and Isabella had tried very hard not to think about what that meant while the shareholders shuffled into their seats and the murmuring began.
“Look at him.” Helena nodded toward the stage, where Sebastian was walking to the podium in a charcoal suit that had probably been pressed an hour ago. He looked composed. He looked like a man who had slept eight hours and had all his pieces on the board. Isabella knew better. She could see the tell in the way he adjusted his cufflink—an absent gesture he only made when he was computing variables.
She also saw Cole Sterling rise from his assigned seat near the front, and she forgot how to breathe for a moment.
The meeting began with formalities. Reading of minutes. Approval of previous actions. Routine votes that passed with mechanical efficiency. Isabella watched the shareholders shift restlessly, waiting for the show they’d been promised. The press pool in the back row had their cameras trained on the stage, waiting for blood.
It came when Cole Sterling took the floor.
“Chairman Rutherford,” Cole said, his voice carrying through the auditorium’s perfect acoustics, “I move that this board initiate a vote of no confidence in the current CEO, based on gross mismanagement of company assets and a pattern of personal conduct that has materially harmed shareholder value.”
The room erupted. Reporters’ hands shot up. Shareholders twisted in their seats to see who was speaking. Only Sebastian remained motionless at the podium, both hands resting flat on the mahogany surface.
“Seconded,” called a voice from the back—one of Flynn’s associates, strategically placed.
“The motion is on the floor,” Sebastian said, and his voice cut through the chaos like a blade. “But before we proceed, I’d like to remind the shareholders of certain facts.” He tapped the podium, and the screen behind him flickered to life, displaying the growth charts of Rutherford Studios over the past five years. “Forty-two percent revenue growth. Three consecutive years of record profits. A nine-point increase in market share against our primary competitors.”
“None of which matters when the public perceives you as a man who abandoned his own flesh and blood.” Cole’s voice was smooth, practiced. “The tabloids are running daily stories. Our brand partners are threatening to pull their sponsorships. This company cannot afford a CEO with a scandal he refuses to address.”
Isabella watched Sebastian’s face. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t blink. Instead, he did something that made the room go silent—he removed his jacket, loosened his tie, and looked directly at Cole Sterling with an expression that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with verdict.
“You want transparency, Cole?” Sebastian said, and the name was a verdict in itself. “Fine. Let’s have transparency.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small device—a digital recorder, sleek and black. The same device Isabella had seen him carry for the past two weeks, tucked into his breast pocket like a talisman.
“Let’s talk about the dossier the Sterlings have been compiling,” Sebastian continued. “Let’s talk about the private investigator they hired to dig into my personal history. Let’s talk about the blackmail they attempted.”
“This is a shareholder meeting, not a theatrical performance,” Flynn called from his seat, but Sebastian ignored him.
He pressed play.
The audio came through the auditorium’s surround sound speakers with crystalline clarity—the unmistakable voice of Cole Sterling, captured in a recording so clean it might have been engineered.
*”—the boy is the leverage. Sebastian’s abandonment makes him toxic. Once we control the narrative, the board will have no choice but to…”*
The voice crackled through three more seconds of damning confidences before Sebastian stopped the recording. At the front of the room, Cole Sterling’s face had drained of color. His father, however, had turned a strange, placid shade of calm—the dangerous calm of a man who had already planned for this contingency.
“That recording was obtained illegally,” Flynn said. “It’s inadmissible in any court of law, and it has no bearing on this vote.”
“The vote,” Sebastian said, “is about whether this company trusts me to lead it. The recording establishes that the men calling for my removal are motivated by personal vendetta, not shareholder interest.” His eyes swept the room, meeting the gazes of the board members one by one. “But if you want more, I can give you more.”
The screen behind him flickered again, and this time it displayed a different kind of evidence. Wire transfers. Shell companies. Financial documents showing the Sterlings had been quietly acquiring Rutherford shares through a network of proxies, building toward this exact moment.
“Flynn Sterling has acquired 12% of this company’s shares under hidden ownership. Cole Sterling, an additional 6%. Combined with their public holdings, they control 23% of the voting power in this room.” Sebastian paused, letting the number sink in. “Their proxies were submitted in violation of SEC disclosure requirements. If the board chooses to invalidate them, the Sterling family has no vote at all.”
“You can’t prove that,” Flynn said, but his voice had lost its earlier confidence.
“Howell, the Sterling family’s nominee for the board, filed the proxy statements through a shell corporation registered in the Cayman Islands under the name Lombard Holdings.” Sebastian read the details without a script, every word precise. “I have bank records. I have incorporation documents. I’ve already forwarded everything to the SEC, who have opened a preliminary investigation.”
Panic flickered across Cole’s face. He looked at his father, then at the exits, then at the shareholders who were watching him with naked hostility.
“You can’t do this,” Cole said.
“I can do anything I have evidence for,” Sebastian replied. And then, because he was a man who understood the value of a story, he left the podium and walked to the center of the stage. “But none of that matters as much as this.”
He tapped the microphone at his lapel, adjusting it even though it was already perfectly placed. Then, with the entire auditorium watching, he did something no one expected.
He took a breath.
And then he told them the truth.
“The boy in those tabloid photos is my son,” Sebastian said. “His name is Jace. He is seven years old, and he is the most important person in my life. I didn’t abandon him—I didn’t know he existed until two months ago. His mother, the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with, chose to raise him alone rather than trap me in a life I hadn’t chosen.”
He paused, and his eyes found Isabella in the third row. The distance between them was thirty feet, but it felt like the length of every road he’d walked to get to this moment.
“Rutherford Studios is not just a company to me,” Sebastian continued, his voice steady. “It’s the legacy I built when I had nothing else. It’s the family I made when I didn’t know how to make one. But I’ll tell you the truth about what I am now: I am the man who stood in front of the world and acknowledged his son. I am the man who will protect that boy with everything I have. And I am the man who will not be blackmailed by cowards who hide behind proxies and lawyers.”
The line hit like a hammer. Sebastian finished with: “You have a choice today. You can place your trust in a family that tried to steal this company through lies, or you can stand with a man who just stood before his child and told the world the truth.”
Isabella’s throat tightened. She hadn’t asked for this. A declaration of love, public and absolute, was the last thing she’d expected. But Sebastian was already walking back to the podium, and Dorian had just appeared at the side of the stage, his hand wrapped around the shoulder of a small boy in a blue jacket.
The auditorium’s side door opened, and Dorian walked in, his hand resting firmly on Jace’s shoulder. The boy’s cheeks were flushed, his dark hair wind-tangled, but he was unharmed—and terribly, almost comically dignified.
If the room had been alive before, it went silent then.
“Jace.” The word left Isabella’s mouth in a whisper, nearly inaudible. Her son scanned the crowd—not the cameras, not the sea of strange faces—until his eyes found hers. He offered a small, uncertain wave.
Onstage, the board called the vote. The show of hands came in swift and decisive. The Sterling family’s proxy votes were invalidated. Sebastian Rutherford would remain chairman and CEO of Rutherford Studios.
But Sebastian barely heard the rest. He was already moving toward the podium, unbuttoning his suit jacket, and—in full view of the company, the shareholders, and the press—lowering himself to one knee.
Isabella froze.
He pulled the ring box from his pocket—the silver band he’d bought her when they were twenty-two, a simple thing with a single diamond that had cost him two months’s wages but had felt like the key to the world in his hands. He had kept it for seven years, through everything, and now, as he held it out to her, the whole auditorium held its breath.
“I didn’t know if I’d ever get the chance to ask you this,” he said, his voice carrying through the microphone he hadn’t removed. “But I knew I’d never forgive myself if I let it go untouched.”
Jace slipped free of Dorian’s hand. He scampered toward the stage, and Isabella followed without thinking, stepping into the aisle and walking forward as if the world had narrowed to the man and the boy waiting for her.
Sebastian opened the silver ring box and said, “Isabella, I’ve spent seven years rebuilding a fortune, but the only thing I want to own is the right to call you and Jace mine. Will you marry me?”