Forty-five minutes earlier.
Henry had successfully called the board members into the conference fifteen minutes later. Samuel had already been inside the conference room when all six of them started filing in.
The board members, five men and one woman ranging from a hundred sixty five to thirty years of age. A mix of humans and Vampires. Each taking their seats.
He dismissed Henry with a neutral tone.
“Thank you Henry, you can go back to your desk.”
Henry all too quickly did so and closed the door behind him.
The room fell into silence that held the air of anticipation and the faint tell tale scent of tension and fear.
Although the members of the board were greatly disproportionate in gender, they human to vampire ratio was also greatly disproportionate. There were four vampires and two humans.
The president, Steve Parmt, was also a Vampire.
The hundred and forty or something year old vampiress, Clarice Syno, looked in her early thirties, her blonde hair left to fall freely down her back. Her pale skin making the eyeliner and her red lipstick pop out.
The perfume she was wearing intended to seduce would have worked like a charm on a human but to a werewolf or anyone with a sensitive sense of smell, it smelled like what it was. A bunch of chemicals. At least it covered the sickingly sweet scent that clung to all vampires.
Thanks to the worldwide legislation six years ago there were a lot of things non-human members of the globe could not do.
Every vampire over one hundred and seventy could not work. They were classified as senior citizens. Which meant Clarice had roughly thirty years to stay in the buisness and Steve had less than half a decade.
There were several words that could describe Vampires. Beautiful, gorgeous, relics, ethereal. He preferred something along the lines of leech and walking corpse.
Fitting since her brown eyes looked dead. The red tinge very evident.
“Why have we been called here Mr Princeton? Is anything else wrong?” She asked, her hands on the table, fingers intertwined.
There was no sign of apprehension from any of them. Good.
“Nothing is wrong, actually for the first time this week things are going well.” He said calmly leaning into his chair.
“We take it that you are done with your culling then?”
The question came from Steve looking skeptical. The white peppered hair on his head and face did nothing to tell of his age. To a human anyway. To shifters like him, they could get an clear estimate. A hundred and sixty five.
The earpiece he was wearing beeped.
“Excuse me.” Samuel said, his finger going to answer the call.
“Yes Paul. Ok send them in please.”
He returned his hand to its original position and his attention back to them.
“To your question, Mr Parmt, yes. Hopefully, as of today, I will be done. I’d like to congratulate all of you here. You kept my great uncle and the company afloat even with all the rats and moles.
It must have taken a lot of hardwork.”
Some of them had small unsure smiles on their faces.
Only Steve did not have a smile, his face infact looked grim but he had a spark in his eyes. “It should not have been allowed to happen in the first place. If we had gotten a little hint of such things we would have snipped it from the bud.”
Samuel was fuming before but now he was waiting to pounce, the nonchalant charade his body was playing to cover it like a tarp stayed intact.
He had to wait for the right moment, there was no where for them to run anyway but he did not want to laugh before the game was predetermined.
“I’m sure you would have and so would my great uncle if he had seen it.”
The silence was filled with small nods.
“But thankfully I am here to remedy that.” Samuel said.
One of the men, Tim Yealz, a human with dirty blonde hair and a beard to match, very slightly gritted his teeth. He hid it with a smile.
“Yes, thankfully.”
“Yes indeed. But I must congratulate you all on how hard and simply tactful way you hid it all.” Samuel said.
That got their attention. The ones his words were aimed at accused.
The other human, Gregory Hortz, sitting just across Clarice was puzzled.
“What do you mean Mr Princeton?”
Those that were innocent were asking the same question but then again so were the guilty ones and it did not seem like they would drop the act anytime soon.
In that case, there was only one way to weed out these kind wolves in sheep’s clothing. And that was to destroy the whole herd.
And who was more perfect for the job than the Alpha himself even if the wolves here were only the proverbial ones.
He smiled inwardly, the wolf in him giving an evil wide toothed grin. The kind that most certainly did not belong on a human face let alone a wolf.
“I’m talking about how you all are stealing from this company. Well, more appropriately, you were.”
The herd tried one last attempt at pleading their innocence. It would not work.
“Mr Princeton, we haven’t done any of that in the slightest. We all want what’s best for the company.
Stealing from it would not benefit us, the agreement we signed with late Mr Deleze doesn’t even give way for it even if we were thinking about it.”
This coming from Gregory. Who looked just as incredulous as the other poor innocent sheep.
Samuel leaned to rest his arms in the sleek black conference table his nonchalant façade still up and running.
“Except some of you still went ahead with it and found an illegal backdoor to do it.”
At that they all cried wolf. The irony of it all.
He was closing in on them.
His façade was still up, amazing for him since all he wanted to do was drop it. Then again patience was a virtue and he had practiced it for eleven years.
“Do you want to confess yourselves or should I air out your dirty laundry?”
Clarice stood up in a flash, hands on the table, knocking her chair back with excessive force such that the two humans in the room jerked.
“What you are accusing us of is just unacceptable? How exactly would anyone get a backdoor in the agreement? It’s impossible!”
Samuel did not even bother to get up, he just had his arms calmly on the table. Unfazed.
“Since none of you want to step forward, I’ll have to do the laundry.”
The tension in the air had grown, with it the smell of sweat, uncertainty and fear.
“Mr Parmt, Smith and you, Mrs Syno figured that since my great uncle was human and you were with the largest shares besides him you deserved more money. More assets. Power.
So you looked for a way out of the agreement but that would only happen after you all passed the age of no longer being able to work and at that the amount of money was too little for your greed to be contented.
You knew if you tried to get rid of my great uncle before you had your plans in place someone else would take his place and make your plan difficult or destroy it entirely.
So you schemed to get a backdoor made, just for you. Even though it may have had a boomerang effect on yourselves and the company as a whole.”
The other board members looking at their associates shocked. The three accused and guilty lost their masks, the sheep’s clothing falling off their fur.