Ruin My IPO? I'll Pull Your Funding

"Yvette said I could take anything I wanted because she paid for everything in your office. A fan from my streaming channel told me this stone has a retro look to it, and I was planning to use it as a lucky draw prize for my stream tonight," he said as he made a show of slamming the emerald pendant onto the table to crack it.

"Don't you dare!" I no longer held back as I lunged at Henry to grab him by the collar and dragged him out of the chair. The pendant fell from his hand. I managed to catch it midair, holding it tightly against my chest.

Henry squealed out loud like a pig when I dragged him to the ground. "Help! He's trying to beat me up! Murder!"

The office door was pushed open, and Yvette entered with several members of top management. When Yvette saw Henry on the ground, the look on her face changed, and she dashed toward me in her heels to push me off Henry.

"Henry! Are you alright?" Yvette helped Henry up with a worried look on her face before she turned to glare viciously at me. "Are you crazy, Callum?! How dare you hit Henry?!"

I looked at her coldly while holding my pendant protectively. "He touched the emerald pendant my mother left for me."

Yvette was taken aback, but quickly sneered with indifference. "I thought it was some sort of treasure, but that's just a worthless piece of stone. You should feel honored that Henry has eyes for anything you own. You're a big man, aren't you? Why are you acting so pettily?"

She pointed at my nose and said in a charitable tone, "Apologize to Henry right now. I'll let this go if you kneel and apologize to him, and you can return to my side at the celebration party tonight."

"Apologize?" I kept repeating those words as I looked at the confident look on Yvette's face, and I laughed in anger.

"Did you inhale that ointment and let it mess with your brain, Yvette? He was the one who poured that ointment down my pants and took my bespoke suit, and you want me to kneel and apologize to him? He was also the one who wanted my mother's emerald pendant as a lucky draw prize for his streaming audience!"

Yvette turned red from my retort as she felt she had been humiliated and disrespected in front of her top management. "You should know what's good for you, Callum! That thing with the ointment was just a harmless prank. That suit and the pendant are collecting dust here anyway. What's wrong with using them?"

She took a deep breath as a malicious look flashed in her eye. "If you insist on doing this the hard way, don't blame me for what I'm about to do next!

"Security! Throw this madman into the basement storage room! No one is allowed to let him out without my permission in case he causes a scene at the party tonight and embarrasses me!"

The security guards came toward me, but I did not fight back. While everything had been going on, I had quietly grabbed the USB with the core code from under the table. Now that I had taken everything that belonged to me, I no longer cared what these people were saying because they would be ruined very soon.

It was dark and damp in the basement, and it smelled heavily of mold. When the storage room's heavy metal door closed behind me, the sound of the door being locked echoed in the empty corridor.

I leaned against a heap of abandoned cardboard boxes and carefully hid the emerald pendant on me. After that, I took out my phone to check the countdown timer on the screen. Less than three hours were left before the funding for Yvette's company was pulled. It coincided with the peak of tonight's celebration party.

Footsteps were heard outside the metal door about 30 minutes later. The lock turned, and the door creaked as it opened.