"I hurt a stranger to protect how I'd look to the people whose opinion I cared about. I'm no different than him." He pointed a shaking finger at Ethan. "I'm worse."
"He insulted you to a crowd. I betrayed you in a boardroom and let you find out in public." There it was, the twist that turned the whole afternoon on its head. The biker had come to teach a rich man about character, and the rich man's sin turned out to be the exact same sin festering at the top of the biker's own empire.
Vanity. The terror of how you look. The willingness to grind a stranger to dust to protect your own reflection. It ran through Ethan, and it ran through Howard Lassiter, and the only difference was the size of the office where it lived.
Travis understood all of this in the space of a few seconds. The crowd watched him understand it. "Daniel," Travis said. "Sir."
"Two things. First, Meridian. I want every confession-of-judgment loan they've written in the last four years on my desk by Monday. Every single one."
"I want to know how many other Whitmores are out there choking on an anchor my company sold them. We're going to unwind every one of them that we can, and we're going to eat the loss because it's a loss I should never have let happen." He paused. "And we're shutting down that lending product permanently."
"I don't care how profitable it is. We're done preying on drowning men." "Yes, sir." Daniel was writing fast.
"Second, the Whitmore acquisition." Travis turned to the leather folder. "We don't acquire it. Not the way it's drafted."
He looked at Ethan. "Because the loan we'd be acquiring it through is illegitimate. My own company set a trap, and I'm not going to profit off springing it. Here's what happens instead."
He took a breath. "Meridian forgives the bridge loan. The whole thing. We write it off as the mistake it was."
"Whitmore Holdings goes back to where it was 12 days before you signed those 40 pages, a company with a cash crunch and too much debt, but a company that's alive and a company that's yours." Ethan's mouth fell open. "You're... You're giving it back. You're not taking the company."
"I'm not taking your company," Travis said, "because I never had a clean right to take it in the first place. The leverage I was going to use was leverage my own people created by breaking my own rules. A man who lectures about character doesn't get to keep the win when he finds out the game was rigged in his favor."
He shook his head. "I'd be exactly what I accused you of being." The crowd murmured. Vanessa had both hands over her mouth, but Travis wasn't finished.
Ethan's flood of relief was about to hit a wall. "That doesn't mean you walk away clean," Travis said. "Forgiving the predatory loan doesn't fix the real problem, which is that you're still bleeding 62 people to pay for a Rolls-Royce and an image. So here's the second half."
"I'm not buying Whitmore Holdings, but Reed Capital is going to make an investment in it, a real one on fair terms, the kind we should have offered in the first place. Enough capital to stabilize payroll and get you through the downturn. In exchange, we take a minority stake and two board seats. You stay CEO."