Too Late to Hold Me Back novel Chapter 1106

James switched to heavily accented, broken Mavarian. "I promise this is the final play! Just help me out! I have an eighty-year-old mother to support, and a wailing infant to feed! After this round, you can fly home, and I'll leave you alone forever!" He looked at her with huge, pleading eyes.

The room erupted in laughter.

"James, if you don't know the language, don't butcher it. A 'wailing infant'? You told us your kid is already in elementary school. Does that sound like an infant to you?" Wesley mocked through a laugh.

"Kids are expensive! I still have to feed him!"

"You're a multi-millionaire banker, James. Even if you lost everything, you wouldn't struggle to feed your family. Not to mention the fortune you just raked in. You're a long way from rock bottom," Hank laughed.

Master Ellis studied the man intently. "It seems Mr. Barlow is addicted to the thrill of a payday and desperately wants to ride my apprentice's coattails."

"Master Ellis, go easy on him. Take pity on poor James," Owen teased.

"Didn't you mention your parents passed away years ago?" Ethan, usually the quiet one, asked dryly.

Exasperated by the interrogation, James shot back, "Isn't that the standard Mavarian guilt-trip line? Don't you guys even understand your own culture?"

His comeback sent the room into another fit of laughter.

"He's definitely a sly one," Harvey chuckled.

"He's an international finance titan. You think his brain doesn't move a mile a minute? That whole sob story was probably just to entertain us," Owen added.

Mira reflected on her time in the Balkan Underworld. James had pulled some major strings for her back then. Even when his bank helped smuggle her massive vault of valuables, he had only charged a fraction of the standard transit fees.

Looking around the room, she noticed that despite their teasing, no one was actually willing to walk away from another guaranteed payday.

"The risk profile on this next run is massive. I highly recommend no one commits more than twenty percent of their available capital," Mira stated firmly.

The implication was clear: only gamble what they could afford to lose.

In her past life, the syndicates' second offensive on Southeast Asia had succeeded, but it was a dangerously narrow victory. If the butterfly effect of her actions shifted the timeline, the outcome was entirely unpredictable.

As for the economic stability of those foreign nations, Mira couldn't care less. The financial markets were a warzone of capital and strategy. It wasn't her homeland, so why should their collapsing economy be her burden to bear?

Even if she pulled her team out completely, those nations were doomed the second the mega-syndicates locked onto them. When those financial titans joined forces, bleeding a small country dry was painfully easy.

Within their inner circle, Mira's word was absolute law. Once she made a decision, not a single person in the room would dare dispute it.