Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 704

Chapter 704: Executive Meeting

The Ashbound guild hall’s command room smelled like cold coffee and expensive paper.

Maeve Ashbound sat behind a table covered in financial projections that had been printed, annotated, reprinted, and annotated again until the margins looked like they’d been attacked by a swarm of red-penned wasps.

Two men sat across from her. Henrik Ashbound, the guild’s chief financial officer, had the pale complexion of a man who hadn’t slept in forty hours and the posture of someone who knew the numbers weren’t going to improve no matter how many times he ran them. Gabriel Ashbound, head of sponsorship operations, kept adjusting his glasses because it gave his hands something to do other than shake.

The holographic display on the table showed Ashbound’s competition standings. Suspended. The word glowed in flat amber text next to the guild’s name like a bruise that refused to heal.

"Three sponsors have exercised their exit clauses," Henrik said, scrolling through a document only he could see behind his eyes. "Titan Gear, ArcLight Dynamics, and Verdant Solutions. Combined annual value of forty million Chronos. Two more have requested emergency review meetings, which in my experience is the polite version of the same thing."

"The polite version costs us more," Maeve said. "They’ll drag the review out for weeks before pulling the trigger, and their contracts require us to maintain campaign obligations during the review period. We’ll be spending money on partners who’ve already decided to leave."

"Yes."

Maeve’s jaw worked once, a controlled motion that she caught and stopped.

Her son had done this. Her idiot, temperamental, S-tier son had screamed threats on a live broadcast watched by over a million people, gotten himself arrested for attempted murder, and handed every competitor, critic, and ambulance-chasing journalist in the country a reason to bury the Ashbound name. The competition standing alone was survivable. The legal fees weren’t going to amount anything significant. Even the sponsor bleed, substantial as it was, could be absorbed by a guild with Ashbound’s reserves.

But all of it together, compounding, each crisis feeding the next while the public narrative spiraled further out of her control with every hour, that was the kind of damage that didn’t heal with money. That was reputational rot. The kind that made future sponsors hesitate, made recruitment targets look elsewhere, made the Association’s oversight board start asking questions about guild governance.

And the worst part was that she couldn’t fix it from here. She could manage the finances, control the messaging, and contain the legal exposure, but she couldn’t undo what the cameras had recorded. She couldn’t unscream what Ash had screamed. She couldn’t un-die the girl who’d died in that basin.

"Gabriel." She turned to the sponsorship lead. "Timeline on the replacement pitches."

"We have feelers out to six firms," Gabriel said, adjusting his glasses again. "Three domestic, three international. But I’ll be honest with you, Maeve. The pitch deck right now is toxic. Every prospective partner’s first question is going to be about the arrest, and their second question is going to be about when he’s cleared of his crimes. If we can’t give them a clearance date, we’re selling them a brand with a hole in it."

"Then we give them a clearance date."

"Do we have one?"

"We will." Maeve pulled a separate document toward her, a legal brief from the defense team. "The arbitration hearing is scheduled for next week. The Association’s case is thinner than they’d like it to be. Ash acted during an active combat deployment, and the target was an opposing combatant who’d already drawn weapons and killed his teammate. There’s enough ambiguity here to argue this down from attempted murder to excessive force, which carries a hefty fine and a suspension, not a criminal sentence."

Henrik and Gabriel exchanged a glance that they thought she didn’t catch.

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