He was supposed to start on 41, but the service elevator had taken him two floors too high and by the time he realized it, he figured he might as well begin at the top and work his way down. It was on the 42nd floor that he heard two voices coming from behind the door of conference room C. The door was cracked open just enough for the sound to slip through, and Darius would have kept walking if his cart hadn’t caught on the corner of the doorframe at exactly the wrong moment. He freed it quickly, quietly, but the few seconds it took were enough for him to hear what was being said inside.
One voice belonged to a man he recognized as Gerald Pratt, the chief operations officer. The other was lower, more measured, the voice of someone used to being listened to. Darius didn’t know the name that went with that voice, not yet. What he heard was this Gerald saying something about a timeline, about the board being ready, about Victoria being distracted.
And the other voice replying calm as a man reading weather reports, “Good. Keep her distracted. We just need a few more weeks.” Darius didn’t understand what he was hearing. It didn’t connect to anything in his world.
So, he let it go, pulled his cart free, and moved on. He would not think about those words again for a very long time. The gala downstairs was for Hayes Corp’s 25th anniversary. Victoria Hayes had stood at the podium for exactly eleven minutes, said everything that needed to be said, and shaken every hand that needed to be shaken.
She had smiled the right number of times. She had laughed at exactly two jokes, both of them her Uncle Richard’s, because Richard Hayes controlled enough board votes that his jokes were professionally worth laughing at even when they weren’t funny. Especially then. Victoria was 38 years old and had run Hayes Corp for the past six years, turning a mid-tier consulting firm into one of the largest private investment companies on the East Coast.
She had done this through a combination of ruthlessness, precision, and a total unwillingness to let anyone see her sweat. The industry respected her. Her competitors feared her. Her family, on the other hand, simply waited.
Richard Hayes was her father’s younger brother, and he had been waiting since the day Victoria was named CEO, waiting for her to stumble to show weakness, to make the kind of mistake that would justify what he had been quietly building for years. Earlier that evening, he had casually suggested in front of four board members that the company’s public image might benefit from a more traditional leadership structure, his elegant way of saying she should get married and become easier to manage. Victoria had smiled and said nothing because that was the game, and she had been playing it long enough to know the rules by heart. What she was less prepared for was how much that comment would stay with her.