Chapter 225:

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The humiliation was more than Dayna could bear. She stood abruptly, her face pale and twisted with shame. “Blake… I’m not feeling well. I’m going back to the hotel.”

She fled the suite without looking back. Alistair Kensington’s scathing dissection of her outdated knowledge had exposed the hollowness of the public image Carlisle Media had spent millions building. And when Corinne walked in, composed and elegant, holding the complex predictive risk files, Alistair’s immediate, warm welcome proved beyond any doubt who his true star pupil was. I sat back in my chair, realizing that in my rush to dominate the society chessboard, I had thrown away the most brilliant partner I would ever meet.

Corinne’s POV

Dayna Nixon fled the Four Seasons dining suite, and the door clicked shut behind her in the heavy silence. I kept my composure completely, opening my leather folder and spreading the technical architecture charts across the table as if nothing unusual had happened.

Blake stood, his face dark with suppressed tension. He turned to Dr. Kensington, his tone clipped. “Excuse me for a moment, Alistair. I need to handle a media coordination issue.”

Dr. Kensington waved a hand without looking up from my charts. “Of course, Blake. Take your time.”

Blake stepped out of the suite, presumably to manage Dayna’s public meltdown and head off any press leaks.

Left alone at the table with my mentor, I asked quietly, “Professor… did my arrival interrupt an important discussion?”

Dr. Kensington looked up from the files, a knowing, amused smile in his clear eyes. “You arrived at exactly the right moment, Corinne. You spared me from sitting through a tedious elementary lecture.”

He took a slow sip of sparkling water, assessing the situation with the dry objectivity of a senior scholar. “Miss Nixon is like a textbook full of standardized answers: neatly presented, but with no original soul. She can recite existing formulas, but she has no capacity whatsoever to innovate.”

It was the most direct criticism I had ever heard my mentor deliver about anyone in the industry. I didn’t feel any satisfaction; that would have meant thinking of Dayna as a worthy opponent. I felt only a quiet confirmation of what I had long suspected: the gap between real expertise and polished performance is rarely as narrow as people like to believe.

𝗦𝘢𝘃e y𝗼ur f𝖺v𝘰𝗿i𝘁e 𝗇𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗅𝗌 𝗈𝗇 gа𝘭𝗇о𝗏𝘦𝗹ѕ.𝗰𝗈𝗺

He looked at me with deep, genuine pride. “You, on the other hand, were born to build new frameworks, Corinne. I insisted on bringing the Carlisle Group into this venture specifically so you could use their infrastructure to turn your predictive models into an industry-defining platform.”

A warm, grounding sense of fulfillment spread through my chest. Hearing my mentor’s unshakable faith in my intellect made every sleepless night I had given to my career worthwhile. “Thank you, Professor. I’ll make sure our architecture sets a new benchmark.”

A few minutes later, Casey Ferguson arrived after finishing some institutional filings with our legal team. He sat down beside me, sensing the quiet, victorious energy in the room.

He leaned over and whispered dryly, “Where did Miss Nixon disappear to?”

“She excused herself early,” I replied with a subtle, serene smile.

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