Chapter 153: Payback Comes Due

As for why he was willing to leave Vivian a path to redemption while showing absolutely no mercy to the manager who mistreated his sister, the reason was simple.

Vivian’s cruelty had only been directed at him. She was arrogant, vicious, and unbearable, but eventually, after making her taste enough suffering herself, he could still find it in him to forgive her.

The manager was different.

Vivian had only made his own life difficult, but the manager had crossed a line by targeting his sister. And the moment his sister became involved, forgiveness was no longer something Stan was capable of giving.

With that, he switched to his official Star Entertainment shareholder profile, the one entirely separate from his personal Snapchat, the one that carried the weight of his thirty-percent stake and the authority that came with it, and accessed the Velaris City branch files.

The records loaded cleanly. His access level was complete.

He scrolled through the branch activity log. He knew what he was looking for and exactly where to find it. Personnel updates. Operations reports. Administrative filings. Talent development entries.

He found Vivian’s management log and checked the last update timestamp.

Three days ago.

Stan stared at it for a moment and let out an exasperated sigh.

’Three days huh?’

She had barely kept her position, had spent an entire day crying, pleading, bowing, promising, and within seventy-two hours of being reinstated, her management records were already stale.

He set the phone down on the table and pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose.

’This girl.’ He shook his head slowly. ’She’s slacking. Three days back in the chair and she’s already slacking. It has not even been that long... She hasn’t learned a single thing.’

He picked the phone back up, navigated to the direct message function on the official profile, and opened a conversation with Vivian’s executive account.

He typed without particular emotion, the flat, precise language of a man communicating a professional decision rather than a personal one.

[Official — Star Entertainment Shareholder Office]: Manager Reeves. Your branch activity log was last updated three days ago. For a position you were barely permitted to keep, this level of negligence is unacceptable. You’ve had ample time to demonstrate that the second chance was warranted. You haven’t. Effective immediately, you are relieved of your position as Manager of Star Entertainment’s Velaris City Branch. HR will be in contact shortly.

He sent it.

Then he made a single call to the Star Entertainment head office’s HR division, identified himself, stated the instruction, and ended the call in under ninety seconds.

He set the phone face-down on the table and went back to what he’d been doing before.

Vivian’s phone buzzed on her desk at the Velaris branch office.

She picked it up expecting the standard administrative notifications that moved through the company’s systems on a typical afternoon.

What she found instead was a formal termination notice from Star Entertainment’s Head HR Department, timestamped two minutes ago, citing shareholder-level administrative review, effective immediately.

The world tilted.

She read it a second time. Then a third.

The words didn’t rearrange themselves into something more manageable on the third reading. They remained exactly what they were.

She had lost the job. The position she had spent six hours crying over. The position she’d thought she’d barely salvaged through humiliation and persistence and the gutting experience of watching a man she’d once demanded kneel before her use that exact dynamic as leverage.

The position her family’s connections had secured for her and that she’d been certain, certain, she was finally rebuilding properly.

Gone. In a message that had taken approximately forty-five seconds to compose.

Her hands were shaking when she found Stan’s official profile and opened the message thread.

[Vivian]: Sir, I’m so sorry. I know I’ve been neglecting my duties. I promise it won’t happen again. Please, please give me another chance. I’ll do better. I’ll be better. I swear it.

She hit send and waited.

The message showed as delivered.

Then read.

No reply.

She typed again.

[Vivian]: Sir, please. I understand I’ve disappointed you. I know I have no right to ask for this. But please don’t take this from me. I’ll do whatever you need. I’ll fix everything. Please just tell me what you want me to do.

Read. No reply.

Another message. Another. The thread filled with her words while his side of the conversation remained a single original statement, sitting above the cascade of her pleading like a verdict that had already been rendered and had no interest in the defense.

The hours passed.

Vivian sat in her office, in the office that was technically no longer hers, and stared at her phone and cried in a way she hadn’t cried since she was a child. Not the performative, controlled tears of someone managing an emotional situation. Real tears. The kind that came from genuinely not knowing what to do next.

She thought about her family. The connections they’d leveraged to get her this position. The phone call she was going to have to make explaining that she’d lost it, twice now, in the same week. The questions that call was going to generate. The look on her father’s face.

She thought about Stan Harrison, this man who had appeared in her life as a nobody on a rainy afternoon and had become, with the completeness and speed of a verdict, the person who held her professional future in one hand with the same effortless authority that he held everything else.

She thought about the fact that just days ago she had been telling him to kneel.

She pressed her face into her hands and stayed that way for a long time.

She didn’t expect him to be this cruel even after what had happened between them, at this point she knew she shouldn’t have messed with him... She regretted everything...

Six hours after the termination notice, her phone buzzed with a new message.

She grabbed it so fast she nearly dropped it.

[Official — Star Entertainment Shareholder Office]: I’ll be visiting the Velaris branch tomorrow. Kneel. Bow. Ask for your position back properly. If the request is genuine, I’ll consider reinstating you. If you slack again, and I will know immediately, don’t bother contacting this profile. There won’t be a third conversation.

Vivian read the message.

She read it again.

Kneel.

The word sat in the center of the instruction with the specific, weighted irony of something placed there deliberately. She remembered the playground. The ring of bodyguards. Her own voice carrying across the crowd with the absolute confidence of someone who had never once been denied anything she demanded.

’Kneel down. Apologize. Then maybe I’ll forgive you.’

She had said those words. To him. While surrounded by people who enforced her every whim.

And now, She exhaled slowly. Wiped her face with the back of her hand. Straightened in her chair.

[Vivian]: Understood, Sir. Thank you for giving me another chance. I’ll be ready. I won’t disappoint you again.

She set the phone down and looked at the office around her, the desk, the shelves, the view of Velaris City through the window that she’d once considered simply the backdrop to her own importance.

It had all looked very different before Stan Harrison had walked into it.

She folded her hands on the desk, took a slow breath, and began, for the first time since she’d taken this position, making a genuine list of everything she needed to fix.

If she was getting this back, she was going to deserve it.

She owed herself that much, at least.