He Lost Me to His Best Friend novel Chapter 542

"If I lose this opportunity with Thorne Industries, the shareholders will move to oust me. I'll lose my position as CEO, and Flynn Group will be on the brink of collapse."

"Oh. And?"

Scarlett couldn't have sounded less interested.

Yardley quickly scanned the room, dropping his voice to a hushed, urgent whisper.

"I'll be brutally honest with you. Most of the corporate loans keeping Flynn Group afloat right now were signed under my personal name during our marriage. If I go down, or if the company goes into liquidation, by law, that becomes our joint marital debt."

Scarlett's pupils contracted. Her heart lurched violently as if crushed by an invisible fist.

Moving methodically, she grabbed a mug, poured herself some hot coffee, and took a deliberate sip to force down the surge of panic rising in her chest.

"Exactly how much do you owe the banks?"

"Close to... two billion."

Slowly, Scarlett raised her eyes to meet his. Then, without a second of hesitation, she hurled the scalding coffee directly into his face.

Her expression was absolute zero.

In that split second, the blood in her veins turned to ice.

She had been with Yardley for years; she knew exactly what his net worth was.

Even with the recent avalanche of PR nightmares hitting the Flynn family, there was no way a billionaire like him had plummeted twenty billion into the red overnight. She wasn't an idiot.

The only logical explanation was that he had built a financial firewall around his assets long before they were even married.

And the moment she filed for divorce, he had undoubtedly pulled the trigger—using every dirty accounting trick in the book to flip his massive wealth into crippling debt on paper.

An uncontrollable, raging inferno tore through her chest.

To think she had once viewed their marriage as a safe harbor, while all along, Yardley had treated her as nothing more than a sacrificial human shield.

"As long as you don't sabotage this deal with Thorne Industries and let me stabilize things, I swear I can clear this debt in a year. Hell, making another two billion is child's play for me. You know what I'm capable of."

"Scarlett, I know you blame me for everything. But I've been doing everything in my power to fix this, and you haven't given me an inch. I want to love you. I want to build a real life with you. But you know exactly how ruthless you've been toward me lately."

His eyes were swimming with tortured, broken devotion. It was an Oscar-worthy performance, and it made Scarlett want to vomit.

She didn't want to waste another breath on him. She glared at him with lethal coldness.

"No matter how ruthless I get, it doesn't even come close to what you and your family have done."

"Yardley, if I had known that loving you would rot into something this disgusting, I would have never said yes."

"The biggest regret of my life is the day I met you."

With those final words, Scarlett turned and marched toward the exit.

Yardley instinctively moved to go after her, but a strong, unyielding hand clamped down on his chest. A towering wall of a man stepped directly into his path, completely cutting off his line of sight—