I know that too. So, what's your plan for the moment she finds out? Damian looked at the dark monitors at the reflection of himself in the nearest screen. Faint approximate the outline of a man in a room that nobody else could see into. I was going to walk in, he said, and introduce myself directly, respectfully.
Give her the information about Adrien before the board meeting so she had time to process it privately. He paused. That was the plan. And if it doesn't go that way, he thought about Marcus Hill standing at his station near the door. About the young receptionist who'd asked him to wait, about the elevator that went 42 floors up through the center of a building he now owned.
Then I'll adjust, he said. The acquisition team worked in 14-hour shifts for 19 days. His attorney handled three jurisdiction simultaneously. His financial team managed the share purchases through four separate broker networks to avoid triggering the reporting thresholds that would alert Adrien Cole's monitoring systems because by this point Damian was operating on the assumption that Adrien was watching for exactly this kind of movement. At 9:47 on the morning of the acquisition's closing date, the final transfer was confirmed.
Damian was in his car in the parking garage two blocks from Caldwell Horizon Corporation eating a sandwich that Maya had packed for him that morning. She'd put a note in the bag that said, "Remember kind. That's the part you can control." He read the confirmation on his phone. He ate the rest of the sandwich. He picked up his leather folder.
He walked two blocks and pushed through the glass doors of the lobby and told the receptionist his name and said he had a 2:00 with the legal team. And the receptionist said with the tone people use when they're not sure how to categorize you. Someone will be right with you. And he said, "Thank you." And he meant it. And he waited.
What he hadn't calculated or rather what he had calculated as a possibility and waited at perhaps 30% was Victoria herself he had read the profiles the business journals the Harvard Business Review piece from four years ago about her leadership philosophy the board presentations the internal memos his team had obtained through legal discovery he had built a picture of a woman who was brilliant demanding occasionally ruthless and possessed of a particular kind of arrogance that came not from cruelty but from the absolute conviction that her judgment was correct. He had thought she might be difficult. He had not quite anticipated the money on the floor. Not because it was worse than he'd imagined. He had imagined worse things had experienced worse things in rooms that would never make a business journal.
But because of the specificity of it, the performance of it, the way she had reached into her own blazer and produced those bills with the practiced ease of someone who had deployed this gesture before, or had at minimum imagined deploying it, and had decided that it was an appropriate response to a person she had decided was beneath her. That was the thing that settled in him afterward, not the act. The ease of it. The ease told him more about the depth of the problem than any financial report. 3 Days after the acquisition, his phone rang at 11 in the evening.
He was reading, "Maya was asleep." The number was Victoria Caldwell's direct line. He answered, "Mr. Brooks." Her voice was different than it had been in the lobby. Not broken. Victoria Caldwell was not a woman who broke, or at least not where people could see, but careful.
The particular careful of someone who is measuring every word against what it will cost them. Miss Caldwell, I've spent the last three days going through the report your team provided. A pause and several others that my own team pulled after reading it. And another pause, longer. It's worse than what you showed me, she said.