Translate This—My Salary’s Yours!” CEO Mocked — Single Dad Janitor Replied, Stunned All
“You.”
The word cut through the heavy, stagnant air of the boardroom like an icicle.
Nathaniel froze.
He turned his head slowly.
Genevieve Holloway was staring directly at him.
Her eyes, dark and stormy with exhaustion and rage, were locked onto his face.
She had heard him.
In the dead silence of the boardroom, where twelve senior executives sat paralyzed by fear, the soft scoff of a janitor had sounded like a shout.
“Did you just laugh?” Genevieve asked, taking two slow, deliberate steps toward the doorway.
The room fell so quiet that the humming of the projector sounded like a jet engine.
“No, ma’am,” Nathaniel said evenly, keeping his voice flat, respectful, and entirely devoid of emotion.
He lowered his head slightly, playing the part he had perfected for four years.
“Just clearing the receptacles. My apologies for the interruption.”
“Look at me,” she commanded.
Nathaniel raised his chin slightly, meeting her gaze.
He didn’t shrink back.
He didn’t tremble like the junior analysts did when she raised her voice.
His gray eyes held a steady, calm neutrality that instantly caught her off guard—though she was far too stressed to analyze why a janitor looked at her with the unyielding composure of a four-star general.
“You scoffed,” Genevieve said, her voice rising in pitch, fueled by fourteen hours of sleepless anxiety and the terrifying prospect of losing her company.
She pointed a trembling, manicured finger at the complex Georgian script on the screen.
“You stood there with a garbage bag in your hand and you scoffed at us. Do you find our failure amusing? Do you think it’s funny that a twelve-billion-dollar company is about to go under because not a single Ivy League lawyer in this room can read three sentences of script?”
“I don’t think anything about your company is funny, Ms. Holloway,” Nathaniel said softly.
“I’m just doing my job.”
Bradley Kincaid stood up from the table, slamming his pen down.
“Throw him out, Genevieve! Jesus Christ, we have seventy minutes left before the Swiss banks close the escrow window! Why are you talking to the cleaning crew?!”
Genevieve ignored Kincaid.
Her frustration had found a focal point, a lightning rod for the crushing pressure threatening to destroy her sanity.
She walked right up to Nathaniel, her posture rigid, her tone dripping with biting, desperate sarcasm.
“You think our legal team is a joke?” Genevieve mocked, her voice echoing off the glass walls so loudly that even the paralegals in the outer cubicles looked up.
She gestured wildly toward the giant monitor displaying the Svan-Georgian dialect.
“Go ahead then! If it’s so amusing to you, read it! Translate this—my salary’s yours!”
A few nervous, uncomfortable chuckles rippled through the boardroom from the executives.
They were laughing to defuse the tension, grateful that the CEO’s wrath had temporarily shifted away from their own incompetence and onto an ignorant maintenance man who happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Genevieve, sit down,” Kincaid muttered, rubbing his temples.
“Stop playing games with the janitor.”
Nathaniel stood completely still.
He looked at Genevieve Holloway.
Beneath her aggressive posture and biting arrogance, he saw the exhaustion.
He saw the faint tremor in her right hand.
He saw a woman fighting a desperate battle against shadowy international vultures who were trying to destroy her life’s work.
He glanced up at the clock on the wall: 10:42 PM.
If he let her sign that contract, Holloway Global would file for bankruptcy within a year.
Thousands of people would lose their jobs.
The union health insurance fund that kept Maya’s experimental treatments paid for would collapse.
If Holloway Global went under, Nathaniel would lose Maya’s lifelines.
He looked back at Genevieve.
The arrogant mocking challenge hung in the air between them: *Translate this—my salary’s yours.*