Chapter 10

Grace

We walked to the door. He flipped through the report he’d grabbed and showed it to me.

“This is the report from the last month. As far as I can tell, it’s the earliest one with the kind of changes that could be detrimental to Wolfe Medical’s reputation.”

I blinked. “How could you know that? You’ve only looked at a few reports.”

He chuckled. “I looked at every report on your desk, monthly and quarterly while I put them all in the right order.”

I frowned. “I really don’t know what to think anymore. I’ve always been told that lycans are…”

“Less intelligent by comparison?” He asked. “More prone to violence?”

Barbaric, primitive: there had been a lot of unkind words to describe the lycan race. They still had a king when nearly every other race had moved on to elected officials. Pack alphas ran their own cities, but we all answered to the Alpha President in one way or another.

My face heated. “Closer to their instincts.”

He laughed, and I scowled at him. “I was trying to be… politically correct.”

“You failed,” he said. “I know what people, werewolves and beyond, say about Lycans. I know how much werewolves and other races rely on our strength too. It doesn’t bother me.”

“Well, Charles…” I shook my head. “I really don’t know what to say.”

“For the most part, most races know that those that don’t have the brawn to ensure survival have to have the brains to. What most races don’t understand is that business strategy isn’t much different from games of survival.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Know your enemy, and you will win a few battles. Know yourself, and you will lose fewer battles. Know your enemy and yourself, and you will win every battle,” he said and grinned at me. “Which business owner can be trusted, how much you can give, how much you want to invest, and what you expect to get out of it: these are the elements of business, but all that’s secondary. That’s more about managing your relationships in business than actually making decisions.”

“What’s primary?”

“Knowing when to go for the jugular.” He flipped to a page and handed it to me. “What do you see?”

I frowned and looked at the page, taking it from him as we walked down the hallway to the board room. My heart was pounding. He seemed so serious, and I couldn't help but feel a mix of confusion and worry about what I was supposed to find.

We were bleeding money. Still, all of it seemed to be coming from materials and other expenses, but our sales were so low that it didn’t make sense. I kept looking, trying to understand what he saw that would endanger Wolfe Medical’s reputation. Producing less might make people nervous about not having the medicines they needed, but better no medicine than low quality.

“I don’t see it… Am I missing something?”

“Why would a company that’s producing half of what it’s used to have such an uptick in expenses?”

“Equipment?” I asked. “The lab equipment might have needed maintenance…”

Which would explain why production was so low, but that wasn’t where the bulk of the money was going. It didn’t seem like any maintenance had been done on anything. There was an uptick in “donations” from the clinics, but there was something about the numbers that weren’t right.

Then, my eyes fell on the section about manufacturing. There hadn’t been an increase in the company’s stock. I stopped.

“Where… are all the materials going?”

They weren’t in the materials accounts or in the finished product accounts either. They seemed to just vanish. I scanned the lines, hoping I had missed something, but I hadn’t. There was no trace of them anywhere.

“Usually when things go missing like that, and in that quantity, it’s a matter of theft that’s being covered up or embezzlement.”

My heart wanted to say that Devin wouldn’t let someone take money from the company, but at this point, it felt like anything was possible, and the worst possible things were the most likely. I had to accept that Devin had done everything for his own good and not cared what happened. One day, that would be my first assumption, but it wasn’t today.

“What do we do?” I asked. “If the Board sees this then what can they do?”

He shook his head. “The Board does see this. That’s the entire point of a board of directors. If they see it and haven’t done a damn thing about it, like they haven’t done a damn thing about all the other issues, then it’s time to get rid of them.”

My eyes widened. “You just fire them?”

“That’s step one. Step two is to sue them for criminal negligence and embezzlement.”

I winced. “We don’t have the money for a stream of lawsuits.”

He chuckled. “Have you forgotten already?”

I blinked and scoffed. Of course. Only 50% of that billion was allocated to the medical sector. The rest of it was for other operational costs. Would that be enough for all the lawsuits?

“If you go through the Inter-Species Bureau and press for sabotage of national health, the Bureau will cover the cost of it.”

I blinked at him. “What?”

“Wolfe Medical is the only manufacturer of the Silver Flu vaccine,” he said. “After that outbreak three years ago, the President isn’t going to chance Wolfe Medical tanking or stand for it to be threatened.”

I blinked, trying to take it in. I knew Wolfe Medical was the leader, but I hadn’t been keeping up with the news. I would have thought that other packs with pharmaceutical companies would have been developing the vaccine by now too.

“Okay… so fire the board and sue them.”

He grinned. “That’s the long route, but with a little squeezing, I think we can make out better than whatever money the Bureau will squeeze out of them.”

I blinked. “I feel like you’re moving a mile a minute.”

“Second rule of business? Strike while the iron is hot.” He shook his head. “Preferably before disaster strikes.”

“So… stop production and fire people? What good will that do for our reputation if we’re not producing then the little bit of cash we have coming in will vanish.”

He stopped and smiled at me. “Flip the page and tell me if you think continuing production is a good idea.”

I frowned and flipped the page. It was a list of major vendors and purchases. I skimmed over most of them until I found the one that made my heart pound and my blood boil.

There was no fucking way that we were ordering from a place known for bad ingredients and cheap glassware barely fit for high school kids!

Wolfe Medical always used the best because of our quality standard. No matter the price, our customers expected anything bearing our seal to work as intended the first time. In the wake of everything, our reputation was all we had left.

I stomped past Charles, taking the lead into the board room.

My anger was like a boiling volcano, and I was about to blow my top on whatever schmucks had the nerve to endanger everything my father and his father and his father all the way back to the start of Wolfe Medical had built for a few dollars.

I shoved the board room door open so hard it slammed into the wall and shook the air. The sound of laughter broke off as they all turned to look at me. Some of them I didn’t recognize, but the few that I did only made me angrier. I knew some of them were colleagues of my father, but Zach had been one of my father’s closest friends, and her was sipping from a champagne flute seated around a table covered in food when my assistant was eating her lunch in the stairwell, most of the building was empty, the front door was broken, and the elevator was practically a death trap.

It was too much. The shame of knowing that this was my fault because I had trust the wrong person went up in smoke. Anger like I had never known raged in me. It felt like it was boiling through my whole body.

“Glad you all look comfortable,” I snarled and marched to the front of the room where ach was sitting. I shoved his chair out of my spot and slammed the report down on the table. They al jumped as Charles came gliding in. The board members looked shocked, unprepared for the storm that was about to hit them. They exchanged uneasy glances before one of them spoke up.

“Wh-Who is he?”

"Meet the newest board member. He owns 15% of the company and has a lot of fucking questions about what the hell you’ve all been doing.” I glared at them all. “But before that, one of you is going to explain to me why the hell we're buying ingredients from Classic Medical.”