He slowly raised his head, his cold, piercing eyes locking onto the young woman standing in front of him in a stained diner apron. The arrogance had been entirely stripped from his face, replaced by a profound, chilling shock. The blood drained from his cheeks, leaving him looking like a man who had just seen a ghost.
Because, in a way, he had.
Hayes swallowed hard, his throat dry. "Who are you?" he demanded, his voice devoid of its previous thunder, reduced to a hollow, cautious rasp.
Khloe reached up and slowly unpinned the plastic nametag from her shirt. She tossed it onto the table; it landed with a soft clatter right next to the datapad.
"My name is Khloe Bennett," she said, her voice echoing with the weight of three years of grief, anger, and silent preparation. "Daughter of Thomas Bennett, the man who actually built Project Icarus before you buried him in legal fees and stole his life's work."
Hayes froze. The name hit him like a physical blow: Thomas Bennett, the obscure, brilliant engineer they had crushed in a hostile IP takeover years ago. He stared at Khloe, the realization dawning on him that this was no random encounter. This was a trap years in the making, and he had just walked willingly into the center of it.
"Now," Khloe said, leaning slightly over the table, her eyes burning with an intense, icy fire. "About that $100 million."
The color completely drained from Richard Hayes's face, leaving him looking like a wax sculpture of a billionaire. He stared at the nametag resting next to the datapad, the engraved plastic suddenly looking more dangerous than a loaded weapon.
For a long, agonizing moment, the only sound in the diner was the faint hiss of the espresso machine and the rapid, panicked breathing of David Reynolds, the head of legal.
Then Hayes laughed. It wasn't his usual booming, authoritative bark; it was a thin, reedy sound, dripping with desperation.
"You think you're very clever, don't you, Miss Bennett?" Hayes said, leaning back and desperately trying to rebuild the fortress of his arrogance. "A very dramatic performance. But this is the real world. A verbal exaggeration made in a diner isn't a binding contract. You aren't getting a dime." He gestured sharply. "David, take the napkin. Take the datapad. We have the patch. Let's go."
David reached out with a trembling hand to grab the napkin, but Arthur Pendleton snatched it away first, holding it to his chest like a shield.