Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 926

Chapter 926: Exit Interview

He smiled at Yuna the way he’d smiled through three years of quarterly reviews. "My office is one floor up. Twenty minutes, and then she’s all yours for the paperwork."

Ms. Rook did not look up from her tablet.

"The exit clause in Miss Park’s contract requires her attendance before guild leadership prior to transfer clearance. It does not require privacy. It does not specify a location. Miss Park is in attendance. As far as Eclipse is concerned, the interview began when she sat down."

"We find consolidation efficient," Doug added pleasantly.

Mercer held his smile. "It’s meant to be a private conversation between a guild leader and a departing member. Three years with this organization deserves better than lawyers in the room."

"Then speak to her personally," Ms. Rook said. "Pretend we’re not here."

Yuna sat with her hands pressed flat against her thighs and felt an entire car ride’s rehearsal quietly die. The office upstairs, the drawn blinds, the twenty minutes alone.

She had run that room in her head since yesterday, every version of it, and it had just been cancelled by a woman reading one sentence off a tablet without raising her voice.

Nobody in the building could make her go up those stairs. The realization arrived with weight, like the click of a lock she’d been leaning on for two years finally turning from her side of the door.

Mercer looked at the three of them for a moment, recalculated, and reached for the binders stacked at his elbow.

"Then let’s talk numbers." He slid a copy across the table, thick as a phone book, tabbed in Skyline blue.

"The development ledger. Training, certifications, gear allowances, gate insurance, medical. The total is at the bottom, and I’ll save you the suspense: it has nine digits. On top of which the board expects a premium. We’re losing our only S-tier abruptly with zero prior signs of dissatisfaction from Miss Park. Our campaign was built around her, and continuity like that has a price. Call it a brand adjustment. Eclipse, of all guilds, understands the value of a brand."

"We’ve read the ledger," Doug said.

"Closely," Ms. Rook said, and turned her tablet around. "It’s a well-built document. Every line is defensible on its own, which is why we will be discussing the lines it doesn’t have. The contract never states whether development costs amortize across years of service, and Miss Park has served three of the five. It books every commercial gate she cleared as her training expense, while the revenue those same clears earned Skyline appears nowhere as an offset. A court could read this ledger and conclude that Miss Park was never a cost center at all, but this building’s most profitable department, billed for the privilege."

"None of which makes your ledger improper per se," Doug added, agreeable. "But it sure makes it arguable. And as we both know, arguable is expensive."

The man in the gray suit leaned toward Mercer’s ear. Mercer waved him off without looking.

"Creative accounting theories are lovely," he said, "but the contract says what it says. She signed the ledger terms as a grown adult. We’ve paid her very handsomely. Isn’t that true, Yuna? Remember the luxury car you bought for your father even before you killed a single monster?"

He pushed back his chair and stood, buttoning his jacket. "You rolled in here with a kaiju on your letterhead, expecting arithmetic to stop applying to you. It doesn’t. The committee convenes in the next quarter. Skyline thanks Eclipse for its interest."

The man in the gray suit began gathering his legal pad, visibly relieved to be done.

Ms. Rook closed her tablet.

It made a small sound, a magnet clicking home, and Doug took his hands off the table and sat back, clearing the stage. The choreography of it registered in her skin before her mind caught up.

"Then we are finished with the part of this meeting I hoped would be enough," Ms. Rook said, in the same level voice with nothing warm left in it. "Miss Ashborn read Miss Park’s file this morning. All of it. The ledger. The call log from last night. Three years of feedback sessions scheduled through your own calendar system, after close of business, blinds drawn. When she finished, she asked us a single question."

The gray suit’s pen stopped moving.

"’Is there any chance he’s another Maximilian?’"

The room went ice cold.