I ended the call and turned to Jack, who was supporting my weight. His face was dark with suppressed rage.
"Jack," I said, my voice steady despite the pain radiating through me. "Pull the project you gave Rhys. Reassign it immediately. He doesn't deserve a scrap of your charity."
Jack nodded, jaw set. "Consider it done. I'm calling President Zhou right now."
He pulled out his phone, scoffing. "That ungrateful bastard. No car, no house, no savings. His father's practically a corpse kept alive by our money. If you hadn't been bankrolling him for years, he'd have been finished long ago. And he still has the audacity to bite the hand that feeds him?"
Jack wasn't exaggerating.
Two years into our relationship, Rhys's father had collapsed in the street—a stroke leaving him comatose. The Abbott family liquidated everything just to scrape together the surgery fees.
But surgery was only the down payment. ICU costs, imported nutritional fluids, endless rehabilitation—a financial black hole. Rhys hadn't even graduated; he was hauling bricks at construction sites just to earn pennies.